FIND YOURSELF BY LOOKING INSIDE

The Boston Globe

BEVERLY BECKHAM

I have it upstairs in a box somewhere, a piece of pink, lined paper filled with writing that's straight up and down. The penmanship struck me as exotic when I first saw it because it wasn't the Palmer Method. It was a combination of printing and art, the f's and g's and p's and q's big and bold and gaudy.

The words the letters made were bold, too, because they held up a mirror to my life. This is who you are, the lady who penned them said. I read them for the first time on the bus ride home that day. Then I read them over the phone to my best friend, Rose. And then I read them that night before I went to sleep, not once but many times because I wanted to believe in them.

I was 12 and in the eighth grade and desperate for someone to tell me who I was. I had no clue. I was a fish out of water, a commuter student new to a parish Catholic school. Every morning my parents drove me from Randolph to Dorchester. And every afternoon, I rode a transit bus back home.

I was inside Ashmont station under the concrete waiting for the bus when, who knows why, a stranger sat next to me and told me all I wanted to know. Not out loud, not in words that I could forget or misinterpret, but in writing on a paper that I would read again and again.

"You are a loyal friend. You have a great imagination. You can be moody. Your friends don't understand you. In love you are attracted to someone and you think that that someone is perfect. And that's all you see. And the person is flattered. But when that person likes you back, you lose interest and retreat and the person doesn't understand."

I memorized these words. Is this who I am, I asked Rosemary. Do you really think so?

In the fringes of memory, I can see me as I was at 12, awkward and self-conscious in my school uniform, a white short-sleeved blouse and a green jumper, shiny from wear. A woman my mother's age asks for a piece of paper so I open my notebook and tear out a page, then sit silently as she takes it from me and leans on my book bag and writes.

She writes about me.

She must have asked my birth date because it's at the top of the page, followed by the word "Amethyst," my birthstone, and "3" and "7," my "lucky numbers," she says. Why is she talking to me? And what else did I tell her? Who was she, this person I never saw again? A fortune-teller? An astrologer? Someone who was taking a course?

Or my own earthbound angel?

In the beginning, I questioned the truth of her words. I didn't think I was moody, I snapped at Rosemary. And I did not like someone and then not like them when they liked me back, did I?

And then over time, when I would come across this paper and read it again, I began to see its accuracy.

"When's your birthday?" a woman at the gym asked me last week. We were doing leg squats and I told her. And she told me she is studying numerology.

And then she told me what she deduced from my numbers. That I'm a hard worker. And intuitive. And that I like people. "But you need alone time, too. You need your own space."

And I thought, not what I used to think when I was young, and someone read my palm or my tea leaves, or sat beside me in a bus station and saw into my heart. Not, is she right? Is this really who I am?

I thought, I know who I am now. No one has to tell me anymore.

And I remembered Ashmont and the pink paper and the words that were a road map sometimes, and an enigma most times. And I realized that age has its benefits. That this isn't just some silver lining but the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. It's what everyone seeks: Knowing, after a lifetime of wondering, exactly who you are.