CNHI News Service

SALEM, Mass. -- I like to keep the future where it belongs. I always figured since I don't worry about the future, the future shouldn't worry about me.

But I was wrong. Salem is full of people who worry about the future, and for $30 they'll spend 15 minutes or so worrying about mine. Or yours.

Auntie Linda: Psychic Fair

I warned Auntie Linda (Linda Weinbaum) at the Psychic Fair in the Museum Place Mall that I just don't believe in this fortune-telling business. Then she hit a home run on the first pitch.

She "reads" through "crystal scrying" -- crystals tossed on the table. She told me to repeat my full name over and over again. I wasn't comfortable repeating my whole name over and over. Couldn't we settle on repeating it two or three times?

She looked amused. "The saying of your name is the source of the energy you emit," she said. The energy flows through the crystals and then to her. So I began mumbling my name, and she began soaking up my energy, such as it is.

"You're very interested in detail and mystery," she said. "It wouldn't surprise me if you really enjoyed a mystery. Going home and writing a mystery. Or watching an Alfred Hitchcock movie."

Holy cow, I'm thinking. I have written a mystery. In fact, three. And under that same full name I've been mumbling, Alan Dennis Burke.

Some male figure had come in and then out of my life, she said. But I couldn't think of one. She moved on, suggesting that I had trouble with my throat; she touched her own.

"Acid reflux," I suggested.

"Watch what you eat," she cautioned. See a doctor.

Linda wondered if I like being on the water.

"No."

"You probably drowned in a past life. That explains that."