| When my first husband died, my whole life seemed to fall apart around me and I moved into my mother's house for awhile. Things weren't going well at all. I had been looking for a job for months and I was beginning to think that I'd never find one. My mother had a third shift job. On this particular night, I simply could not go to sleep after my mother left for work. It was winter, and we were going through a particularly awful cold snap. We had been enduring dramatic, sub-zero temperatures for several days running and we had been keeping the furnace turned up a little more than ususual. On this night, I simply could not get warm. I kept turning the heat up more and more, until finally, I had it cranked as high as it would go. My feet, in particular, were like two blocks of ice, and I kept putting on more and more socks. My teeth were chattering. I wrapped myself in half a dozen blankets and at long last, in the middle of the night, I finally fell asleep. Once I fell asleep, I had one of the most disturbing dreams that I've ever had in my life. In this dream, I was in a sewer. I was crawling along, dragging the lower half of my body, which didn't seem to be working. My feet seemed like they weren't even there. I felt weary to the bone, something that went beyond the moment. I could see an end to the sewer up ahead, like a pipe emptying into a field. I kept thinking, "I've just gotta make it to the outside of this sewer, then I'll be fine." It took every bit of strength that I had but I made it to the end, and once I did, I woke up immediately. When I woke up, I was sweating underneath the numerous blankets that I was wrapped in. The house was sweltering. I turned down the heat and put on a pot of coffee. I had a morning ritual of pouring over the "help wanted" ads while I had my morning coffee. I'd high-lite the possibilities and start making phone calls later in the morning. This particular morning, one thing was different. I started reading the paper from the beginning. I am not a person who reads the paper unless something big is happening in the world that captures my attention. Instead of going straight to the want ads, I started reading, and it wasn't long before I found what I was obviously "meant" to see. On the second or third page was a small local story, and when I read its little headline, I nearly fell out of my chair. The headline read, "Feet Frozen, Man Crawls for Help." The story covered the ordeal of a Mr. James Schmitt. He was a homeless man who was living in a sewer pipe behind a large shopping center in Hamden, Connecticut. During those cold nights, his feet actually froze, during the day, they would thaw out. He had developed severe frostbite which, untreated, had turned gangrenous. At the time that the story went to press, he was being treated in a nearby hospital. When my mom came home from work I told her this whole story and asked if there was any possible way that we could be connected to this man. She assured me that he was of no relation, and that she had never heard of him. Spiritual friends urged me to go to the hospital and visit him, to see if I could figure out the connection or why this had happened. And to see if he had any awareness. I couldn't do it. I feared being looked at as a kook. Anyway, as time passed, the memory faded and I forgot all about it until I started doing my family history. I kept quizzing my mom for info to help with my genealogical research. One day, I asked her if there were any juicy family stories that I didn't know about. Turns out that my uncle Ray--who was my mother's brother, got a girl pregnant the year after he graduated from high school. He and the girl placed the baby in a Catholic Orphanage in Hartford called "The Home of the Good Shepard." They discussed getting married and keeping the baby, but of course that never happened. They signed away their rights to the baby when he was two years old. The baby had his mother's surname, which, as you've probably guessed by now, was Schmitt. |