THE RIDE OF A LIFETIME
Mike Walsh
Does your job ever give you the creeps? Mine often does. Spiritually I fall into the ‘don’t know’ category. I do believe we have lived before and that souls survive mortal death.
I was more skeptical about something called ‘fate’. I blithely thought that whatever happened in life was my decision and never determined by outside influences. That belief has been shaken. There have been far too many baffling mysteries to my life. I cannot dismiss the likelihood that my life is pre-determined; I am just here for the ride of a lifetime.
As I write under a pen name there was no way a new author, living in Fuengirola, could have known that 40 years earlier I was his work colleague with whom he shared a Cheshire apartment. He insisted I re-write his book.
On another occasion an Irish writer insisted I re-write his story about an Irish Catholic children’s correction institution where abuse, physical and sexual was rife. Emotionally upset as I re-wrote it I preferred never to touch the subject again. The next two books to be ghosted recounted abuse by missionaries in the South Sea Islands and Central Africa.
I have studied World War 2 from a German perspective; I was also a seaman. The German gent who wanted me to re-write his biography was born in Hamburg in 1938; later he was a seaman in Britain’s Merchant Navy. I identified with both topics but he could not possibly have known that. Why did he choose me to ghost-write his book?
Equally strange one of the books I am currently working on is a true story of a man whose partner is a woman twenty-five years his junior. Although the marriage was untroubled, mutually affectionate and satisfying she decides the grass is greener elsewhere.
Unable to reveal her true feelings to her husband she lies and tells him she is to visit an ill friend in England. In fact she intends to leave him and to re-settle there. He is under the illusion that she will return. This happened in Fuengirola.
The account surrounding his wife’s departure was exactly what happened when my common law wife left me on November 27, 2011. Even their personalities are the same; theatrical and given to impulse.
My loss was also twenty-five years my junior. She said she was going to England to find temporary work but vowed that we would shortly work and live together where we had jobs and a home waiting. We lived in Fuengirola close to the apartment where the couple I am now writing about lived.
How can such coincidences as these be explained? I have no wish to dwell on it. It is mystifying but proves again that truth is stranger than I fiction.