Dr. Mary Rides Again

I thought of another improbable Dr. Mary story which makes me think are their any probable Dr. Mary stories? On our living room wall is a water ladle used to scoop water for drinking purposes-what? you mean you don't have a ladle hanging from your living room wall?

Anyway, the story as I remember it. My mother had an unusual patient(The usual patients went to other doctors) named Alvin. He was quite old--I'm guessing somewhere in his eighties. He knocked on her door one day and introduced himself saying that for the longest time his car would slow down almost to a stop when he drove by her house which was right next to Green Acre Baha'i School, a conference center that is more than a hundred years old. For my friends who are not Baha'is, this inn on a hill overlooking the Piscataqua river in Eliot, Me. was a gathering place for transcendentalists, poets, artists, writers such as John Greenleaf Whittier, who gave it the name of Green Acre. It is also the acknowledge birthplace of yoga in the United States and is revered by Hindus because Swami Vivakandanda came here around the turn of the century. There are photographs with him surrounded by his folowers. Hindu groups conference here and show up enexpectedly just to walk the grounds. It has since became a Baha'i Con. Center because its founder, Sarah Farmer, became a Baha'i. Abdu'l-Baha, the son of the founder of the Baha'i Faith, Baha'u'llah, came to the United States after being set free when the Ottoman empire collapsed in 1908. He had been a prisoner since the age of nine--a total of 55 years. A promise to his father was the impetus behind his year long journey that took him to Europe and then 239 days in the U.S.

So much for the history lesson. You will be emailed a pop quiz later.

Back to Alvin who proceeds to tell my mother the strange tale of his car that clearly wanted to make a visit. Alvin told my mother that he was a water boy at the time of Abdu'l-Baha and the early days of Green Acre when the flat fields of Green Acre would be filled in the summertime with tents of thirsty visitors. Alvin and other boys would take water from a well on what later would become my mother's property and bring it to to the people. My mother found this story of the car and Alvin's childhood at Green Acre entirely normal(I'm smiling as I write this) Alvin became a patient of my mother which Alvin found to be a completely normal turn of events. The story gets even stranger because when Alvin was on the adjusting table he would go into a trance and channel a long dead doctor who would instruct my mother in what was explained to her as techniques to facilitate lymphatic drainage. My mother became even more renown and never stopped in her desire to be a better healer. The only part of her life that stayed the same was her voluminous dresses, her love of ginger snaps with Tetley tea served in her "Mary" cup. That explains why I have a water ladle on our living room wall. Everything else I can't explain.