Author writes about lifetime of ‘Extraordinary Experiences’
Emily Rodavich signs a copy of “Mystical Interludes: An Ordinary Person’s Extraordinary Experiences” during a meet-the-author event in Cecil Township.
Emily Rodavich speaks about her new book, “Mystical Interludes: An Ordinary Person’s Extraordinary Experiences,” during a meet-the-author event in Cecil Township.
Everyone experiences so-called coincidences here and there, but reviewing a lifetime of such occasions can lead to considering them as something different.
When Cecil Township resident Emily Rodavich started working on writing an autobiography, the septuagenarian recalled a series of what she terms “amazing events.”
“As I relived each one, I wept,” she said. ” After completing many narratives, I found myself still crying, but I was crying not out of the intensity of the emotion. I was crying out of joy and deep gratitude that those extraordinary events had crossed my life.”
The result of such recollections is her newly published book, “Mystical Interludes: An Ordinary Person’s Extraordinary Experiences,” which was the subject of a recent meet-the-author event organized by a former colleague, retired Bethel Park School District Superintendent Nancy Aloi.
“I had pushed them to the back burner of my mind, because it wasn’t ‘cool’ to talk about ‘lulu’ things as I grew up,” Rodavich told the room full of family members, friends, fellow writers and other well-wishers.
“The more I wrote, the more I realized their significance,” she said. “I regretted that I had kept them for so long hidden, secreted, for fear of being ridiculed. They should have been displayed like pearls and diamonds, for the way that they enriched my life.”
In an animated manner that was often humorous and often tear-inducing, the retired McGuffey School District English teacher read several passages from the book, including one that tells an interesting story involving her late mother, Veronica Rodavich.
In 1971, Emily and her young children were driving on Interstate 79 toward her parents’ house in Waynesburg.
“We knew my folks wouldn’t be there when they arrived,” she recalled, “because they were in Uniontown at a friend’s birthday party.”
On the way, her car started smoking. She pulled off the Ruff Creek exit and into the parking lot of an old gas station, and got the children out in the nick of time before the engine caught fire.
Two men with fire extinguishers put it out, and then, “proud of their victory, sat back and waited to see what I would do.”
Even though she knew her parents were away, Rodavich decided to call their house, anyway.
“After only one short ring, my mother’s anxious voice blurted, ‘Where are you’?”
Hearing her daughter’s story, Veronica promptly drove to Ruff Creek.
“After she rescued us and we were on the road to their house, I asked her about the party. Did she and Dad know? Had they come early? Why did she answer the phone by asking where I was? She wasn’t forthcoming in the details. Her answers came in nods, shrugs and diversions to other topics of conversation.
“Later, I learned that in the midst of partying with old friends 20 miles from where they lived, Mom had suddenly turned to Dad, saying she needed to return home immediately. She was troubled by a gnawing premonition that I would be calling for help. Over my skeptical father’s objections, she insisted on getting home to receive my call.
“By comparing the time it had been when smoke spewed from our engine to the time it had been when Mom left the party, I realized that she knew we would need to be rescued at least a full hour before the smoke appeared.”
Wrapping up the reading, Rodavich asked her audience:
“That changes your view of reality. Doesn’t it?”
She plans to write a sequel.
“I’m dedicated to collecting and writing about mystical interludes of others,” she said. “My conviction is that sharing our mystical interludes gives us an opportunity to expand human potential, to enrich and enlarge our lives in this world.”
For more information about sharing experiences, visit www.emilyrodavich.com.