Pearl Will See and Raise You Too

Pearl Will See Yours and Raise You That the children were out of the house, while both Pearl and George worked long hours away from home, and Grandfather George had died or faded away, did not leave the Old Farm House cheerless and empty of life. George and his fellow drivers congregated much of the time at the dispatching office , where they passed the time playing cards. George’s buddies generally played for low stakes : friendly enough games that on weekends when Pearl was home, George would invite his buddies out to the Farmhouse for cards and Pearls food, and his buddies, some of them immigrants who had no family in this country and could barely cook for themselves, were always glad to accept. That didn’t happen EVERY weekend, and the more regular card games at the dispatchers office on pay days, with the temporary inflation of attitude the lump sum encouraged, sometimes caused the betting to get out of hand. One Friday George came home, having lost his whole week’s pay. Pearl was angry of course, but not incensed, and not at all without recourse. Shew didn’t batter her husband with a chair, or yell and stomp her feet. Pearl was was cool. She told George to invite his buddies for cards and treats again the next weekend; which he did, and of course the men came. Pearl had a simple plan: she would feed the men cake, but then sit in on the game. The Cuninghams of Tug Hill , had always played a lot of board and card games when at home together, and - when she wanted to - Pearl won. She claimed that she could see through cards, particularly blue-backed cards like the family used. Whether or not her children believed she could actually see through the cards, they certainly would not go up against her for real consequences, and none of them except - to some extent - Georgia, had any such ability. As it happened that evening, the taxi boys left without the money they had come with. During the nineteen seventies both the Russians and the U.S. investigated the possibilitiy of employing extra-sensory perceptors for the purpoase of remortely gathering nformation about each other. The US program was called the “Star Gate Project”, and it would continue into the nineties when it was abandoned and declassified, and then started up again. It’s all so messy: These paranormal matters are highly irregular, various, and - of course - exist in a general fog of fraud and delusion. I suppose it was through her secret-agent brother Greg that Georgia and her mother became known to the project development team. Pearl had no interest or time for that, but Georgia agreed to take part in the intial screening sessions meant to narrow down the field of possible, distant sensors.. The test was simpler than guessing - or sensing the many possibilites in a whole hand of cards: . The man who conducted the trial sat across the table from her and held up a card, to which her choice of response was bianary: heads or tails, yes or no. So the chances were that anybody at all would get fifty our of a hundred correctly. I don’t suppose they were blue backed, and anyway Georgia never claimed to see through cards; but she had a lot more than an inkling of the answer. Despite her inklings, Georgia failed the test. She failed it utterly. After she left the room, and before she left the building, the investigator caught up with her and said that oddly, she had not just failed the test but had gotten every single answer exactly wrong, opposite, heads for tails and tails for heads, and THAT was truly something, though it represented a sort of psychic dyslexia not useful intelligence service. So Georgia would never be a spy, though she would sometimes help people find misplaced possessions, claiming that it was only by means of attuned logic, which - to MY mind, is too tidy an explanation.