Guardian Angels, Fairies and Phenomena

By Bud Focht

Hi, my name is Bud and while staying up late to watch the ball game from the West Coast I just saw 12:34 on the clock. That is something I have been doing way too much of lately, and I believe it is some sort of phenomenon. What kind of phenomenon, however, I am not sure.

Like in the movie, Phenomenon, the science fiction theory is always more interesting than the scientific one.

In the movie, John Travolta’s character, George Malley, thought he saw a bright light coming from the sky and soon afterward his mind began to expand. He was able to read and comprehend at a super-human rate and even began to possess telekinetic abilities. The towns people thought he was subject to an alien encounter but in reality, it was a brain tumor that had “awoken” parts of his brain that most humans don’t use. The movie plays on the myth about people only using 10 percent of their brain.

Back to my phenomenon.

In the late 1990s I went through a period of a few years when I would see 11:11 on the clock ALL the time. I mean like seven or eight times a week.

At first I thought it was just muscle memory, getting into a subconscious habit of looking at the clock at the same time every day and night.

But with my cell phone, the clock in my car, the clock on my computer, the clock on my desk phone, the clock on the microwave, the clock on the VCR, the bedroom clock, and the clock on my office wall being about as synchronized as John Blutarsky’s (Bluto) when the Delta Tau Chi frat boys were planning their revenge at the Faber College homecoming parade, there were days when I saw 11:11 three different times on three different clocks.

I had a feeling this meant something, but what, I had no idea. I never told anyone, fearing they would think I was full of it or give me some reasonable explanation. But it happened SO often that I knew there was no reasonable explanation.

Something was up.

Then one day my oldest daughter was talking to her younger sister and she said that her friend claims she sees 11:11 on the clock all the time.

I was shocked! Are there others out there? Were we going to start sculpting the Devil’s Tower in our mashed potatoes?

I didn’t see it but I read where they even made a movie a few years ago about seeing 11:11 all the time, called I Origins.

When I heard my daughter’s friend was seeing it, I did something that, 17 years later, I would have done right away. I looked it up on the Internet. Apparently, it is some form of phenomenon with many opinions on what it means.

Some say it was my “guardian angel” looking after me. Some say it is fairies or some other sort of “spirit guides” who are just letting me know they are there to help me.

Regardless of what it does or does not mean, once I looked it up, saw some of the explanations, and found out that this happens to many people, it stopped happening to me. Boom, just like that, it stopped.

However, a few years ago, before my wife Terry was diagnosed with Early Onset Alzheimer’s Disease, I began seeing 12:34 and 1:23 on the clock. A lot. Like, way more than I should. It was the 11:11 phenomenon all over again.

I read that seeing 11:11 is the universe’s way of urging us to pay attention to our heart, our soul and our inner intuition. It’s serving as a wake-up call to us so that opportunities are not missed in this lifetime.

But what the level-headed, practical person inside of me thinks is that it is a different kind of phenomenon, called the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon. The “BM” phenomenon, which I like to call it, (sorry, immature humor is still humor to me), basically states that you look at the clock hundreds of times a day and if you see 12:57 or 9:04, it means little to you, (unless you were supposed to be somewhere at 1 o’clock or at 9 o’clock), but 12:34 is interesting because of the numbers being in order, so your mind remembers that. I could just as easily be seeing 9:04 just as often as 11:11 or 12:34 and just not realize it.

The scientific explanation is not as fun as the science fiction one, and I sorta wish it was a guardian angel or fairies looking after me. Lately, I could use their help.

Patience has never been one of my strong suits.  As a matter of fact, it is probably the weakest suit I have, almost as weak as the suit with the Nehru jacket I owned when I was in the seventh grade. (what was I thinking?)

I thought I began to learn patience when my wife Terry was first diagnosed and I became her caregiver. Her loss of cognitive skills caused me to be more patient as I had to learn to help her with everything she does.  But lately I have been losing my patience more frequently, getting frustrated when she can no longer take any direction at all.

I am not sure why. Whether it be her continued decline, my frustration with dealing with that, or my recent lack of self-medicating (not even on April 20).  But for whatever reason, I have been short with Terry lately, snapping at her when she cannot do what I instruct her to do (rinse the shampoo out of your hair, put your shoes on, laugh at my jokes).

When our kids were small and they would/could not follow directions, I would often get frustrated with them and yell at them. Terry would ask me to be more patient with them but my philosophy was that if I didn’t get terse with them they wouldn’t learn and the lack of following directions would continue longer.

But things are just the opposite with Terry. She is not going to learn from my snapping at her. She is not going to learn ANYTHING. She is forgetting. EVERYTHING. We can have a conversation with someone who Terry loves, and five minutes later she will not remember who we were talking to.

I need my guardian angel to look over my shoulder. I need the fairies to shut my mouth when I begin to get angry with Terry. Because it is not Terry I am getting angry with, it is her condition. Her god-damn disease. And dealing with it for almost four years now is beginning to get to me.

But when I see 11:11 or 12:34 or 1:23 on the clock, it does remind me that I need to take a step back. To realize that there is going to be a time in the not too distant future that things are going to be much worse than they are now. And that helps me handle the latest situation that had me frustrated.

Maybe it is my guardian angel after all.

Until next time, when you see 11:11 on 12:34 on the clock, think about what the fairies are trying to tell you.

Bud