The woman was the very Platonic Ideal of the Southern California New Ager. Her long, crinkly, sun-bleached hair spilled over her tanned shoulders, big gold earrings made in Ecuador or someplace like Ecuador flashed from her earlobes, and her body was wrapped in a loose, flowing dress of soothing (and no doubt aura-nourishing) autumnal hues. You could almost hear chimes tinkling around her as she moved.
She was talking to me about reincarnation of course, that being the subject of the books she was buying, and I was listening with polite interest and nodding as I totaled them up on the register. Then she asked me: "Are you aware of any of your past lives?"
I considered the question for a moment. "Actually," I said, "I've had this feeling lately that in a past life I was Lee Harvey Oswald."
Now, at this point you should know that I was being fairly sincere. For a while I'd felt a peculiar affinity for the skinny, awkward misfit who put so much lead into one of our Presidents back in the 1960s. Not so much that I was considering following suit, and it wasn't an obsession or anything, but whenever I saw pictures of Oswald or read about him I felt a certain empathy there. With no other explanation why, reincarnation seemed as valid a theory as any to me at the time.
The woman seemed confused, though. "Lee Harvey Oswald?"
I nodded. "The man who shot Kennedy," I offered helpfully, thinking maybe she'd misheard me. I explained how I had lately come to identify with Oswald on some deep emotional level, but -- looking a bit unsettled now -- she shook her head.
"No. You can't be him," she said.
"I don't see why not. He died several years before I was born." I wondered for a moment if she was going to tell me that she knew Oswald's current incarnation personally, and I for sure wasn't him.
"Because you only get reborn every five hundred years. And," she said, "you are reborn as a member of the opposite sex, and of the race you hated the most. Think about that."
I said that I was not aware of that very interesting law of the universe, and we parted smiling. I did indeed think about it later as she suggested and there are times when the question crosses my mind even today. What ofay-hating woman was I in the year 1467?