Insights from the spirit world not in the cards for skeptic
Reporter disappointed by psychic reading, photographer gets eye-opening experience
I’m skeptical about almost everything, so paying $130 for a psychic reading is about as likely as investing in a crystal ball and setting up shop myself.
But the Star wanted to send me to the swanky Four Seasons to indulge in a reading with Psychic Cyndi. Once every few months, she brings her tarot and fairy cards, her quartz and malachite crystals, to the Yorkville hotel’s spa, laying them out on a treatment table where a massage or facial would otherwise take place.
Cyndi Tryon, who lives in the Muskoka area, was booked solid the week in October when I had my session. She’s been seeing up to 10 clients a day since 2013 and appointments sell out immediately, according to the Four Seasons Hotel attendant. She must be good, I thought. The attendant said repeat customers are common.
Cyndi is petite and warm and shy at first. I arrive with Andrew Francis Wallace, a Toronto Star photographer, and she warns that her signals might get confused with two of us in the room. But right away, she launches into a kind of stream-of-consciousness as she communicates with spirit guides she senses around us, using the cards as prompts.
“When speaking with spirits, they show me symbols and signs,” she says. “It’s not like you and I talking.”
I like Cyndi, who calls me “my girl,” so I want to believe in her. She asks a lot of questions and my answers shake the small amount of faith I had: am I one of three siblings? No. Was my grandmother named Mary or Marie? Nope. She sees a vision of a man fishing by the side of a road with a long, weathered face and a cigarette hanging out his mouth. It doesn’t ring a bell.
She asks about my grandfathers, and kind of falters.
“I think I’m getting my wires crossed here,” she says.
She had some insights that might have applied to my upbringing, but they were muddled with messages that didn’t make sense to me.
“Watch for the dimes around you,” she says. “You might find dimes in the weirdest little spaces.” The coins are playful missives from the spirit world.
That sounds sweet, but it’s never happened to me.
Cyndi had messages about family, baseball, money and ocean vacations that meant nothing to me.
After the 45-minute reading, we pack up. Disappointed, I ask Wallace for his opinion outside as we wait for the elevator.
Wallace is shaken and appears on edge. The symbols and signs that missed their mark with me hit him directly. Including the fisherman. And Mary. And Marie — both. And the three kids.
When Wallace came in the room, Cyndi said she had seen a man with a hand on his shoulder, perhaps apolo- gizing for being distant in the past. She warned Wallace to watch his knee, to drive more carefully and be careful with sugar. “Bang on,” Wallace told me in the elevator. He had been estranged from his father, has a bad knee, drives too fast, commutes too far and has Type 2 diabetes.
Afew days later, Wallace sent me an email. At home that morning, he found a shining dime waiting for him in the hall.