When I was 12 I was talking with my mom at the dining table. Suddenly she looked up, stood up and said, “Mother?” She asked me, “Did you hear that?” I’d heard nothing. “I hear my mother calling my name!” she said. She walked around the house, upstairs, out front. My maternal grandparents lived about 300 miles away in Ohio. We didn’t think they were coming to see us. Mom called Ohio. There was no answer. A couple hours later we got a call: My grandmother had been in a car accident, knocked out but okay. When the ambulance came for her, she was whispering my mother’s name, over and over. Years later, I was studying martial arts, and we got a visit from a slender, slightly stooped Chinese man. He was 35 years old, but was introduced to us as a master. He was asked to demonstrate his skills and did three things. First, he asked a sword-wielding student to attack him, which the student did in a great leap. To me, it looked like the master just raised one hand; the student went flying straig...