My brother is a strange bird. A sort-of-psychic, believer/skeptic.

Well, not exactly a little birdie, and not a ghostly apparition either, but a prompting of sorts. He gets these feelings that suggest things to him. For instance, he might "feel" that he should go over to a specific casino. (This particular kind of  prompting only started when he moved to Las Vegas.) Once he obeys the prompting and goes to the casino, he knows what to do. Sometimes it’s play a certain machine, other times it’s play a certain game. The last time this happened he went to the casino, moseyed up to a keno machine, a rarity for him, chose 7 numbers, bet a quarter, that’s .25 cents, and hit 6 numbers for a winning pot of $100.00.

Fortunately for him, my brother is not a "gambler". He takes his money and goes home. Of course, he does play a few dollars at the machines when he doesn’t have these promptings. He usually losses.

Then there was the time when he was out on his driveway cutting some wood for a bookcase he was building. He "decided" to go into the house for some sandpaper. When he gets back out side, he is stopped cold by what he sees. Splashed all over the area, actually in the exact spot he had been standing, were the aerial droppings of a flock of migrating ducks. He knows they were ducks because, as he said, "they were still winging their way by." After the initial shock wore off, he had to laugh and shake his head in amazement.

After he told me this story, I suggested that he had a guardian angel. He just chuckled. He didn’t argue or deny it, or even agree; he just laughed.

Anyway, the promptings are the easy part. The hard part is the forebodings. You will notice I am not calling these feelings "good" or "bad", because in a sense, at least for the forebodings, they are both.

He has had a least 3 major forebodings that I know of. The first one occurred when he was working as a printer. Basically, he stood in front of this big machine all day, making it carry out his wishes. One Sunday night he started feeling this overwhelming sense of, well, foreboding. By Monday morning he was so overwhelmed with this suffocating feeling, that he stayed home from work. He couldn’t eat, he couldn’t sleep, he couldn’t do anything except feel the feeling. Monday passed, Monday night he lay in bed sweating, heart pounding, unable to sleep. Tuesday morning he was a wreck. Something terrible was going to happen. Tuesday turned into Wednesday, and the feelings persisted. His wife called the doctor. The doctor suggested his wife take him to, as my brother so eloquently puts it, "to the nut house." Needless to say, he refused the invitation. Wednesday afternoon he felt better, the overwhelming foreboding feeling had left him. Of course, it also left him a bit drained, but he was able to eat; that night he was able to sleep. Thursday morning he felt well enough to go to work.

When he walked into the shop that morning, his co-workers gathered excitedly around him, congratulating him on his good fortune. It seems that Wednesday morning, the printing machine across the room from his erupted in flames, that shot all the way over to his machine. They all agreed that if he had been standing there he surely would have been seriously burned.

"Wow." I told him, "If you could learn to control this phenomenon, you wouldn’t have to spend days feeling sick, you would have known about the fire and stayed home that day, or asked to have the machine checked out, or something." "Well," he said, "it probably won’t happen again."

"Ahem." It did happen again. The feeling that is, not the fire. Although, with the second incident, the time between the foreboding feeling and the event was seconds. He and his wife were traveling through Minnesota on vacation. It was late at night and his wife was driving. They were on a four-lane highway, traveling about 55 mph. Suddenly, he knew they had to stop.

In no uncertain terms, he told his wife to stop the car. Dumbfounded, she glanced at him and said what most of us would have said, "Huh?"

"Stop the #*&% car." She slammed on the brakes. When they finally came to a stop they could see that they were within inches of a truck that was sitting in the middle of their lane. Actually, it was a pick-up truck towing a lawn maintenance vehicle that had a mesh grill with no reflectors, or light of any kind on it. That set the adrenaline pumping. His wife couldn’t drive any further; he took over the wheel.

I have another brother with a similar story, but whereas brother Number 1 will listen, and maybe laugh a little, when I tell him he has a guardian angel, brother Number 2, just tsk, tsks, and shrugs it off.

He, like brother Number 1 was driving with his wife on a dark two lane highway while on vacation. He was doing 70 mph. He heard a humming sound. It was rhythmical and constant. Suddenly, he knew to stop. He slammed on the brakes, and when the car stopped he could see that lying a few feet in front of them was the edge of a cliff. The humming was a motor boat on the river below. He wasn’t off the road, the road continued on to the edge of the cliff. Backtracking, he stopped at the first sign of civilization and mentioned the incident. "Oh," he was told, "there used to be a bridge there, but it rotted away some time ago."

"Wonderful."

Back to brother Number 2. He calls me one night and tells me he has this terrible feeling that something is going to happen. If it is a terrible feeling, you know that what is going to happen is not going to be good, but you don’t know what terrible thing is going to happen. After I hear this latest foreboding, I get a terrible feeling too. It is the sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. I ask him if he has any clue as to what it could be about. He doesn’t. The only thing to do is wait. The wait lasted a couple of weeks.

I need to back up a little on this story. A few weeks previous to this latest foreboding his bank account, and those of several other depositors, had been emptied by some unknown party. The Feds were working on it and eventually captured the culprit. Meanwhile, they decided to audit all of the bank’s accounts.

It was shortly before the auditing that the latest foreboding erupted. Those in the know figured they would only check the books back two or three years. Well, they found that my brother had overpaid his taxes one-year by $100.00. Because of this discrepancy they decided to go back a few more years.

Suddenly, the oppressive foreboding feeling ended and I assumed that this latest episode was over. My brother didn’t think so.

Another week or so went by and I get a call from my brother. It seems, seven years earlier he had sold his house, and intending to buy another within two years, didn’t pay any taxes on the sale. I’m sure the reader is ahead of me on this one.

Well, the Feds caught the oversight, and came up with a figure that they expected him to pay Uncle Sam. This was more money than he had. Remember, the money in his bank account was stolen. Although, he did have some money that was loaned to him to tide him over. The Feds and my brother’s lawyer had a few quick lawyerly words, and the Feds agreed to take only the money my brother had, and let the rest of the amount go. IRS agents with a heart.

My brother protested that the money in his new bank account wasn’t really his. "It’s in your name, isn’t it?" Technically, my brother was right; it wasn’t his money, it was now the Feds’.

Just think. If he had some control over these forebodings, if he could find a way to tune in on them and learn what they are all about, he could have at least avoided losing his borrowed money.

After this incident I started to rethink the guardian angel theory. But, I decided that it could still be true. My thinking is that they don’t interfere with our free will and protect us from our own stupid actions.