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Word Gems 

exploring self-realization, sacred personhood, and full humanity

Soulmate, Myself:
The Perfect Mate

Vada and Thomas Jay

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Wikipedia: "My Girl is a 1991 American comedy-drama film directed by Howard Zieff, written by Laurice Elehwany, starring Dan Aykroyd, Jamie Lee Curtis, Macaulay Culkin, and Anna Chlumsky in her feature debut. It is a coming-of-age story of a young girl who faces many different emotional highs and lows during the summer of 1972 in suburban Pennsylvania."  

Kairissi. I’m not sure if I like this movie.

Elenchus. Why don’t you like it?

K. (sighing)

E. What is it, Kriss?

K. The truth is… I have a hard time seeing any kids that age, especially ones who might be special to each other.

E. (silence)

K. And I really hate it that they killed Thomas Jay at the end. I can’t forgive them for that.

E. It seems that many fans agree with you. “My Girl 2” bombed at the box office with less than half of the revenues of the first movie. It was a disaster. I think the sequel lost money.

K. What were the producers thinking? How can you have a “My Girl” sequel when the one who makes up the “my” is written out of the script? There was a certain magic between Vada and Thomas Jay. It shouldn’t have ended.

E. Krissi… I think you know what your feelings here are really about.

K. It’s hard for me to see kids at that age… In them I see what happened to us… and what a mess we made of things... (sighing) and so she lost him… as I lost you.

E. Krissi… as the poet instructs: “Look not mournfully to the past ... it comes not again.”

K. (sighing)

E. Tell me… are Vada and Thomas Jay Twins?

K. It’s too early to tell; at least, for an outsider to know. If they were just a little more aware and in touch with their feelings, they would know if what they shared was “once in a lifetime.”

E. It’s really hard to see that at age eleven. They had nothing to compare it to. They couldn’t realize how special it was.

K. That will come later – in the memory, each for the other, of what they had.

E. What’s your sense, Kriss? – were they acting like Twins?

K. Yes… I think so… they remind me of us… she’s flamboyant and expressive, and he’s reserved, a little on the modern-Neanderthal side.

E. I resent that. I was more like Cro-Magnon Man on a bad day.

K. Uh-huh. And they told each other that they were best friends, despite all their squabbling.

E. Looking back on those old days, I can’t say that I ever thought of you as my best friend.

K. Well, I concede that it’s hard to be “best friends” with a snark. But I believe in what people do more than what they say. You once told me you realized you’d spent more time with me growing up than any other kid outside your family.

E. mmm… I need to have an independent auditor verify those daily time-sheets.

K. I don’t think that will help.

E. But let’s return to a question we’ve discussed over the years: Is it possible for two young kids to experience true love?

K. Jim Croce sang about this in “Alabama Rain” – “We were only kids, but then, I never heard it said that kids can’t fall in love and feel the same.”

E. But then he says, “I just don’t know what happened.”

K. It often comes to that.

E. But tell me more – can kids fall in love?

K. Well, kids fall in love all the time, but 99% of it doesn’t mean anything. It’s just a coming-of-age instinctual response, something Tinbergen would study for his Nobel prize.

E. And yet, some of those falling in love, or noticing the first-stirrings of love, at 8 or 10 or 13, are in fact Twin Soul couples in the making.

K. Yes, some few are, but, as we said, at that young age, when you experience those over-the-top feelings with your destined one, you have nothing to compare it with. You don’t know what it means.

E. We talked about this in “Constructive Assent.”

K. The problem with kids is they won’t realize that the incredible feeling of happiness/delight/joy, which they sometimes share, will never, ever, in their whole lives, be replicated with just another pretty face. They have no idea how special and rare it is. And so they’ll cavalierly find a reason to drift apart, will become offended at some ego-illusion, they won’t cherish each other -- and they’ll find someone new.

E. (sighing) “I just don’t know what happened.”

K. There’s a lot of that going around.

E. Vada and Thomas Jay were the classic “boy and girl next door.” Does this mean anything?

K. Some might say, well, they grew up together, spent all that time together, and so proximity in the neighborhood accounts for their bond. And if another boy had lived next door, she would have fallen in love with him.

E. What do you think of this reasoning?

K. I’m not buying it. What I mean is, yes, of course, most kids who live near each other do so as a function of chance, but – while I can’t prove this – I see what happened to us, and I think the evidence suggests that Spirit Guides can and do arrange for destined lovers to sometimes, or often, grow up as the “boy and girl next door.” This doesn’t mean it’s going to be all peaches-and-cream for them; far from it. In fact, as I look at how the Guides operate to bring their charges to a higher level of consciousness, my sense is that Twins sometimes grow up “next door” for the express purpose of losing each other. In other words, they'll find that reason to become offended at each other, then, later, as the memory of what they had together begins to gather momentum, they begin to suffer and miss each other, and realize what they lost, with a degree of pain they never thought possible. And this pain, ready or not, is good for one thing: It will shoot them from a cannon of misery into a higher plane of awareness. And that’s what the Guides are after as prime objective.

E. As we’ve said, their motto is, “You’ll thank us later.”

K. We’ve heard that there are hospitals in Summerland for the new arrivals, but we don’t like to think of ourselves as requiring those services.

E. That’s because it’s just for the other people. But, it’s so ironic – the common wisdom says that the “boy and girl next door” want each other because they grew up together, however the truth may very well be that they grew up together, that is, their Guides arranged for this, because they were made for each other and, in potentia, already wanted each other.

K. I believe this is the case - and I believe this is what happened to us.

E. We must inform Jim Croce that we have the answer he was looking for.

K. I think he’s already figured it out, where he is now.

E. You said you didn’t like it that they killed Thomas Jay at the end.

K. I guess it was too much like losing you.

E. She was just eleven when Thomas had to leave. How should she live her life now?

K. Even if they are Twins, it’s asking too much of a pre-teen to wait for him.

E. And yet, there are cases – I’m thinking of those two missionary kids who pledged themselves to each other at age 8 – there are cases where kids do wait for each other.

K. It does happen but it takes an almost superhuman level of awareness at age 8 to do that. The missionary kids had the advantage of growing up in Africa with no distractions. They needed each other, were sensitized to each other in a special way. But the average “boy and girl next door” are led this-way-and-that by all manner of disturbance. However, to address your question – should Vada wait for him, all the way to the next life? If her maturity were perfect, yes, she should wait. How could she marry another knowing what they had together?

E. Some will say that she ought to marry because this is her Earth-life and she needs that experience.

K. But we know this is not true and not the full answer. This is not the only chance for love and marriage and family. The author’s article on the “holodeck worlds” makes this clear.

E. But, as Vada’s maturity is not complete, she will likely marry.

K. Yes, she will marry, and in so doing, especially later in life, as memory recreates what she had with Thomas Jay, she will forge and craft for herself new definitions of suffering.

E. For Thomas’s part, he will grow up in Summerland; they say, at a somewhat faster rate than kids on Earth. He will be instructed on the importance of growing in consciousness, and he will see clearly that he must wait for his true love, still on Earth. Amidst his studies and duties, much of his time will be spent in visiting Vada on Earth, to help her as he can, but also just to be near her.

K. It seems cruel, doesn’t it, that young Thomas should be taken from her. On the other side, they say it’s a short period of time for all of us to be on Earth, that it goes so quickly. I know that those who say such things mean well, but I also know that whoever invented that bit advice was not waiting for a lost beloved.

E. There’s something in the Bible about how a thousand years is but a day to God; and that might be true. But, it’s also true that, for the grieving lover, one who is missing “My Girl,” the lost sacred beloved, a single day will seem like a thousand years.