Grandma’s Talent for Foretelling

My paternal grandmother, Bridget O’Brien Joyce, could foretell the immediate future using her dreams. I don’t mean she could predict the stock market or where to dig for buried treasure. She could see really important things like where you put the Christmas tablecloth or which train a kid would be coming home on for spring break.

She knew who was calling the instant the telephone rang. Or she would say, “I’ll hear from Dermot Cassidy today.” And sure enough, a letter would arrive from some distant cousin who had disappeared for years in the crags of the west of Ireland.

One day, she called my mother and said with obvious unrest, “John Givney is going to come downstairs and tell me something I don’t want to know.”

John Givney was a friend of her brother, Dennis O’Brien, and Dennis had brought him home for a few days from the logging woods where they both worked. I don’t remember this, but it is in the family lore and I no more doubt it than the rising of the moon. Grandma knew what was going to happen.

Now that every publication and pundit has examined Nancy Reagan’s interest in astrology, turning it carefully around like a chimpanzee examining a new feeding dish, I’m amazed at their preoccupation.

I spent a great deal of time with Nancy Reagan during the early part of Ronald Reagan’s first term as governor of California. I traveled with her as a press aide before a full-time staffer was hired. I would go out to the house on San Onofre Drive, enjoy fragrant coffee and tiny puffs of cinnamon rolls made and served by Anne, the housekeeper, and read the morning paper until it was time for us to leave for the day’s events.

Barney Barnett, who, I think, was a member of the California Highway Patrol, a burly, gentle man, drove us to children’s hospitals, older people’s centers and a dozen kinds of events that interested California’s First Lady. Her interest in getting lonesome kids and bored grandparents together is nothing new; she was working on the grandparents’ program then.

We never discussed astrology nor my grandmother’s dreams nor anything metaphysical on any of those many days.

Almost everyone has a secret hunger to peek around the corner into tomorrow, out of titillating curiosity or a desire to be prepared for whatever thunderbolt may be hurtling toward us. People read tea leaves, knock wood, read cards, wish on white horses or say “bread and butter” when they’re walking with a friend and have to separate to walk around a tree.

My father, a brilliant trial lawyer, would never start a new project on a Friday. And neither will I.

This is not an apologia for astrology. It’s just that when the winds are chill and the clouds lowering, it’s nice to think things will be better.

When I was in Houston last week, the evening newspaper, the Houston Chronicle, carried a story about a Los Angeles astrologer named Joyce Jillson, who was quoted as having chosen the just-after-midnight hour for Ronald Reagan’s first inauguration as governor. Since then, People magazine says that the late Carroll Righter, a longtime friend of the Reagans, chose the moment.

Whoever chose it caused me a great deal of nerve frazzling and exciting work in Sacramento. I set up the working press area in the corridor to the right of the rotunda while a squad of Capitol functionaries explained to me why it couldn’t be done.

It was a long night with the entire California political press corps hunkered over the tables and jumping up every few minutes to see what was happening. I had almost no idea of what I was doing, but I smiled a lot and kept moving, a good move when you’re in over your head and the tide is coming in.

Joyce Jillson, a pretty woman whom I once met at a dinner party, was also quoted in the Houston paper as saying she had suggested George Bush as the vice presidential nominee. Now that’s just silly. I did that. I was sitting with Mike Deaver in his office in Westwood and he asked me who I liked for the No. 2 spot. I said, “Oh, George Bush, of course. He has the moxie, the education and the track record and he’s fun to work with.”

I think Mike may have talked to 600 or 700 other people after he talked to me, but does that mean I didn’t name Bush?

The astrologer I know best is a treasured friend named Betty Collins, who is charming and the sanest person I know.

She says her phone has been ringing ceaselessly since the great astrological expose. She was asked to do the astrological charts of both Reagans by a national magazine and graciously declined. She felt it was exploitation and wanted no part of it.

Now that the starry furor has calmed down, there is just one more article I’m waiting for--a one-on-one and a photo opportunity for Nancy Reagan’s King Charles Spaniel in the Doggy Digest.

My grandmother’s dream? Oh, John Givney came downstairs and said, “Mrs. Joyce, I hate to tell you this, but there are bedbugs in that room.”

She almost took the next flight back to Enniskillen in County Fermanagh. Grandma’s foretelling may have been mundane, but it was a lot more useful than those people who bend forks.

Uhh, this is my kiss-and-tell column.