Justin Matott, the author of "My Garden Visits," is not a flake.
I spent an afternoon with him. I could tell.He is many other things, however. He's an MCI master salesman who retired young; a crackerjack gardener; a man who loves to vacation with his wife and kids. He's a religious soul schooled by nuns.
At heart, he's just a "Joe" - like us. The difference is Matott's mother comes to visit with him while he tends his flowers.
And she's been dead for several years.
"When I began telling people about her visits," he says, "they'd look at me like, `We're going down now!' The first time she came to me was the night she died. My wife was there and knew something was different. And the conversation I had with her was as real as the one you and I are having. Five years later, she began visiting me while I was doing my gardening."
On impulse, skeptical minds round up the usual suspicions: Anxiety, maybe. Anxiety takes more forms than Lucifer. Or hallucinations caused by mourning. Maybe a mild bout of psychosis.
But Matott won't have any of it.
"I've done `the bean count' on all those things," he says. "I've looked at the psychological explanations. It wasn't that. I'm an enlightened male who rides a Harley Davidson. I know when something real happens."
Then what about this: Matott, MCI super-salesman, made it up to make a buck.
Let's get back to that thought in a moment.
For now, Matott says when he finally got up the gumption to tell his brother-in-law about his mother's visits, he feared the guy might call the Hale-Bopp border patrol. He didn't, however. Instead, he urged Matott to write everything in a journal. He did. Then he collected the journal entries into a book and published it himself.
When the volume shot to the top of the Denver best-seller lists, Algonquin Books bought it, republished it and sent it into national distribution. Now, by October, it may not only begin to look a lot like Christmas at Algonquin, it may begin to look a lot like "The Christmas Box."
But where "The Christmas Box" was a lovely tale, "Garden Visits" is a witness from the congregation. A first-person testimony. Imagine Malachi as Mister Rogers, trowel in hand, and you get a sense for Matott's "Handbook of Revelation and Horticulture."
Can Oprah Winfrey possibly resist this stuff?
Stay tuned.
Yet in the end, there's that troublesome red flag, the one that reads: "Justin Matott, Master Salesman." Is America being suckered - once again - by concepts, promotion and marketing? Is Matott just one more slick huckster pitching his "product?"
"People must wonder," he says. "But I've been pleased at how many readers see the book for what it is. My father, a university English professor, is an atheist. He read the book and told me how much it moved him.
"I said, `But you're an atheist, Dad. And this is, well, it's a religious book about people returning from the dead. How do you deal with that?' "
"He said: `Easy. I believe you.' "
And after meeting the author and reading his book, I believe him, too.
I believe Justin Matott because I looked him in the eye for an afternoon.
I believe because the world is so lost these days that I'm willing to declare any and all "positive visitations" to be "real visitations."
But most of all, I believe him because if the ghost of Justin Matott's mother is willing to grace him with her visits, then who knows? One day the ghost of my mother may be willing to grace me with her own.