Ep. 42: Psi Friday with Mason: "Three Ships to Troy"

Psi-Friday with Mason returns this week with a more personal and spiritual turn.

In this episode, Mason reflects on his friendship with the late Lydia Fish, a beloved folklore professor whose stories and presence left a lasting mark on everyone she encountered. He shares a story she once told just for him—Three Ships to Troy—and explores how that moment has stayed with him over the years.

What unfolds is part memory, part tribute, and part spiritual download. Mason connects Lydia’s life and influence to deeper themes of storytelling, legacy, and the unseen threads that bind people across time.

Woven into the episode is a journey back to ancient Greece, touching on the world of The Iliad by Homer—a story over 3,000 years old that still echoes today. Through it all, Mason brings together folklore, history, and something more intangible… the feeling that certain stories are meant to find us.

A thoughtful, reflective episode for anyone interested in the deeper meaning behind the stories we carry—and the people who give them to us.

#PsiFriday #MasonWinfield #LydiaFish #Folklore #Storytelling #SpiritualJourney #AncientGreece #TheIliad #BuffaloNY #Paranormal #SpiritWay

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:05

Hi everyone, Mason Winfield again with another installment of Cy Friday with Mason. We're on the last Friday in April 2026, and our discussion this week is going to be not quite so much paranormal as perhaps a little spiritual. If you believe there's anything beyond us, and a point in tributing an old friend who has left us, then that's sort of what we're going to be about. This week's episode is entitled Three Ships to Troy. It's a celebration of my dear late friend Lydia Fish, the longtime folklore professor at SUNY Buffalo State. That was her career. And she was more than just a folklorist and an anthropologist. She was a very spiritual person, really alternative in a lot of ways. And most of my interaction with Lydia was the occasional dinner out. Lydia, eccentric as hell, lovely person, precious, exasperating, precious, but just a handful, you know. And she never drove a car. And uh she wanted to go out to dinner six nights a week, and had a rotating crew of friends, and they would always pick her up, take her there, and it'd take forever. And you know, she'd walk real slow and lovely, just lovely friend. She was also a storyteller, and she never made a big deal out of it, didn't pose, didn't pretend to be a storyteller. Oh, she passed away in January. I was standing in line at a bank on like a Tuesday afternoon in January, probably around 12:30 in the morning, afternoon, and call came in from a friend who told me about it, and I almost stepped out of line. It was tough. Dear friend, you can only take her so much, but special. And one of the stories she told me was uh see, Lydia, when she gave you a story, it wasn't the story she tell everybody. It was your story. It was something you were gonna get. And Lydia knew of my interest in the Greco-Roman culture, she knew of my classics background, and she knew that the story, Three Ships to Troy, would really resonate with me. And it it, you know, Greece preserves its history quite well. The United States, I mean, we have kids who graduate high school and don't know what the Civil War was. That's gonna come back and bite us if we in the United States don't do something about that. It's gonna bite us in ways that are gonna be hard to explain to people who don't get it anyway, but so there's this conference in Greece, and um, it's on one of the islands, and there's a bunch of really important people hanging around at this conference. And one thing I need to tell you before we begin this tale is that in the epic poem, The Iliad, by Homer, written maybe 3,000 years ago, nobody knows for sure, there's this one baffling chapter that's a list of things. All epics do that. There's this catalog chapter, and it bores everybody. Why do they do it? I don't know. But this one is a list of the Greek cities that sent ships to Troy. It's 3,000 years old. And there's a catalog of the ships, and Athens sent this many, and Messini sent this many, and Sparta sent this many, so whatever. So there's this conference. American businessman representing the United States falls into conversation in this Greek, tiny Greek island, with a little Greek guy who doesn't look like a famous person. And the Texan happens to ask him, What are you doing here? And the little Greek guy goes, Well, I'm the mayor of this town. Texan goes, Well, what's the town? You know, and he goes, Well, it's a little town called Symey. And the American goes, never heard of it. And the little Greek guy goes, We sent three ships to Troy. And the fact that that this history, that this legend, this pre-history, was remembered and treasured by this little village, memorialized in one of the greatest works of human literature, the Iliad of Homer. It just made a deep impact on me. And I realized that my friend Lydia made that kind of an impact in a lot of people, preserving history, preserving spirituality. You know, I uh I don't usually keep the phone by my bed, but for some reason, a day or two after Lydia passed away, my cell phone ended up next to my bed. And I woke up in the morning to a text from Kevin Cunningham, uh martial artist, Orchard Park, New York, a great teacher. And Kevin had known Lydia, and he recalled her gift as a storyteller. And it really reminded me that this was a significant feature of her. And you know, when Jan Hammer, the superb experimental keyboardist, who used to partner with the guitarist Jeff Beck, when Jan Hammer was told that Jeff Beck had passed away, his remark was simply, you know, that he was just so sad that the magic of their partnership would would be over for this life. And I remember those dinners with Lydia. And I'm I'm I'm sad that uh that that magic is gone from my life. But uh thank you, Lydia. Three ships to Troy. See you next week on May Eve.