The E.N.J.O.Y. program involved going to an older person’s home and helping them around the house and generally being a source of interaction with them. I was interested in the well-being of others, but I was too locked away within myself to take any initiative on it. Stosh was that catalyst that helped me move forward into it.

After school one day, Stosh and I went to our person’s home on Sherman Avenue. It was in a small retirement home that required us getting buzzed in. After knocking on the apartment door, a man in his sixties who was about 5’5” answered the door and let us in. He introduced himself as Ed. Ed lived in an apartment that was long but not wide. It had all the basic necessities and little room for anything else. He had a computer and bookshelves in his living room as well as a T.V.

Ed seemed like a simple man who was living a simple life. I didn’t realize it at first, but this wasn’t the first time I had ever seen Ed. I had actually seen him several times before and didn’t recognize him, but it wasn’t my fault. Ed was a professional actor, and he was still active at this time. He would do two productions a year or so at local theaters. When I was a lot younger as a student at Lincoln Elementary, there was a T.V. show we would watch once a month or so called Storylords.

In the story, a young boy travels to a fantasy world to help potential victims of the evil Thorzuul from being turned into statues. The boy uses a special motorcycle in his garage that disappears and reappears in Mojuste, the fantasy land. The boy is aided by a wizard named Lexor. I didn’t know it until he mentioned it, but Ed played Lexor, but he wore a costume, so it would’ve been impossible for me to recognize him.

Every Thursday, Stosh and I would go to Ed’s home after school and help him and stay and chat with him. I started to look at Ed’s various books on his bookshelves and noticed that a lot of them were about astrology and philosophical topics. The astrology ones interested me in particular. I had heard of astrology mostly because of the newspaper columns, but I didn’t know that anyone was publishing books on it, or that it was a study dating back to ancient times.

This subject interested me! Most of the stuff I read in school I read because I had no other choice, but this was the first time I had ever wanted to read something out of pure interest! Ed let me borrow a couple of his astrology books, and he made a horoscope for both Stosh and I that he printed out using astrology software on his computer. The more I learned about it, the more interested I became.

A lot of people dismiss astrology as unscientific, ungrounded, and delusional, yet for some reason, I never felt that way about it. I was drawn to it.

After Stosh and I spent some time with Ed, he told us about some of his past. He had spent an unspecified amount of time in a famous spiritual community in the U.K. called Findhorn. From what he described, it sounded like it was basically a hippie commune. They were into the mystical arts, and Ed had retained some of his enthusiasm for the subject that he had in those days. He was like a wise elder figure, both as a character he played in Storylords, and as a person, who I had “accidentally” stumbled into. He came at a very interesting point in my life.

Since I found the answers to everything in society to be very unsatisfactory (do what you’re told and don’t think for yourself), I began to look for my own answers. But where could I look other than what was in front of my face? It seemed like there was nowhere else to go. Then, the most important question I’ve ever asked came to me. It was inspired by the T.V. show Babylon 5 that aired in the 90’s.

Babylon 5 was about a space station five miles long where humans and aliens worked out their differences in order to avoid another galactic war. There were many aliens of different physical compositions. There was one particular alien species that interested me called the Vorlons. They wore encounter suits and were very mysterious. No one known had ever seen what they truly looked like. They often spoke very few words and spoke in riddles that mostly went over people’s heads, sometimes about future events that hadn’t happened yet.

During the second season of the show, the captain of the station, Captain John Sheridan, became the victim of an assassination attempt involving a bomb. Captain Sheridan saved himself by jumping out of his transport module, but jumping out high over the station’s garden meant delayed, but still certain death. As he fell to his death, Ambassador Kosh, a Vorlon, and another alien named Delenn stood on the ground and noticed him falling. Delenn persuaded Kosh to help him. Delenn had actually seen Kosh’s true form, so she knew who and what he really was — a legend. Kosh took off his encounter suit and appeared to everyone as a luminous being. All of the aliens in the garden who saw him described him differently, as a legendary being from their planet’s mythology. Kosh intercepted Sheridan in mid-air and gently brought him down to safety without saying a word. Somehow, Captain Sheridan knew he was Kosh, and he nodded when Sheridan asked him if that’s who he was.

Over time, it became clear that the Vorlon race in the story are what we call angels, who genetically manipulated all the alien species of the Babylon 5 world thousands of years ago to make them see the Vorlons as they wanted them to, as higher beings resembling their own race as angels are depicted on present-day earth and before, and they also were responsible for creating telepaths who had the ability to wander and communicate with their minds, and eventually, much more. There was another ancient race as well known simply as “The Shadows,” who were what humans know as demons.

The show had a very intricate storyline with a five-year story arc that was finished before production ever began. People asked questions about the universe, uncovered dark conspiracies, fought impossible space battles and still won, sacrificed their lives for the good of all, went through major character developments, and transformed the universe they lived in. It was easily my favorite show ever created, and it heavily inspired me.

So what was the question I asked? The question was — “What is really out there?” All my life, I’ve only lived on this small planet in a small galaxy in a very big universe. I wanted to know more. I wanted to know what was beyond earth’s atmosphere towards the stars and whatever else may dwell in the spaces between worlds. I wasn’t expecting to get an answer, and the answer came immediately.

I had an experience that night I asked that question, an experience I could never forget, and never doubt for a minute actually happened. It’s not the kind of experience that is easy to talk about in a room with many ears listening, but it’s definitely something I’m willing to talk to people about who I feel are ready to hear it. It’s not something bizarre that happens and you say, “Cool!” and move on with your life afterwards. It’s something that transforms your entire life from the ground up, inside to out. I didn’t know what exactly I was asking for, but I got it.

The thing about wishing for something is there are usually unintended consequences. There are some movies made by companies like Marvel where the star of the movie starts as an ordinary person who had an event of some kind. It could be a traumatic event, or it could just be puberty, which is sometimes the same thing. They suddenly discover they have some abilities they never knew about, and then they realize they have no control over them and it is a disaster until they find the right people to help guide them. Some people’s lives out there may not be too different than that. One person’s fantasy is another person’s reality. Our ideas come from somewhere. They, like everything else, do not appear suddenly from emptiness.