GHOSTORY

 This is strange.

Two years ago -- according to several entries in my journal -- I set to work on a project I called “Ghostory” (one word). I’d been eager to write it, the entries say, and it was going pretty well for a week or two. Then my life, which was chaotic, interrupted. And I never got back to it.

 

Now, it turns out I never started that story. Or so the evidence suggests. When I put down the journal this morning to check my online archive, where I keep everything, there’s no such piece. Not even a fragment.

And try as I might, my mental memory is just as blank. I’ve no clue, beyond that title, what the story was about. Can’t even pull back a phrase.

“Well,” I finally said, “I’ll start over. Maybe that’ll revive the dormant memory.”

 

So here I am.

No idea where to start.

How about this?

About fifteen years ago, not long after my mother died, I was sitting in a dentist’s office, waiting. At first, the receptionist would smile when she’d see me, and every now and then she’d reassure me it would be soon. Gradually, though, the reassurances stopped; and then so did the eye contact. Other people came and went. I began to feel invisible.

For some reason, I thought of my mother, who’d waited in her doctor’s office for a routine physical the day she was whisked into hospice.  What if she’d already been dead? But didn’t know it?

The idea made me smile, because although she was a quiet, fairly contained person, she was very gregarious. And did not take well to being ignored. I began to play with what she might think, as she found people responding as if she weren’t there. How long would it take her to catch on, and what would convince her? And then, what would she do?

As soon as I got home, I began sketching it as a one-person play.

 

Funny thing.

That play’s not there either. In my archive.

I remember pulling it out and working on it a few times over the years, including last summer when I was in Oregon, writing at the local library every morning.

But it’s gone.

 

Now ordinarily, I’d suspect my mother.

Her ghost. She’d be my first candidate for poltergeist.

But her computer skills … Let’s just say, she finally did learn to do e-mail before she died.

Ghosts, on the other hand, she had a knack for.

Not that she believed in them. But when they showed up in her life, she accepted them. And they kept coming.

 

The first was her father Gus (the only grandfather I ever knew). He’d been gone for 30 years.

My mother was living alone, teaching in Orange County. She had a condo right across from the pool in a large community. She liked to rise before dawn to enjoy “coffee and” (as her parents playfully called it), while watching the day begin. She’d usually leave the front door open and sit on the couch.

This particular morning, she looked down to break a shortbread cookie in half, and when she looked up, there he was.

“Just lounging in the doorway,” she said. “Not something I’d ever seen him do, but it was him. He even had his leather jacket on.” That jacket had gone to work every morning for thirty years as he walked across San Francisco to the main post office, and it had been on his shoulders every night as he walked home. (I’d inherited it, and worn it proudly in high school.)

Gus leaned against her door frame, looking out at the morning, then turned to face her.

“He smiled,” she said, “something else he didn’t often do. It was a big, easy smile. Just the slightest bit sheepish. Like a kind of admission that he’d let life’s fun parts slip away from him, but now he was glad to be enjoying them.

“So I said, ‘Hi, Daddy.’ ”

(Everyone in their family -- his wife and all three children -- called him Daddy.)

“He didn’t answer. He just nodded slowly, smiling even more warmly. Then he was gone.”

My mother waited all that morning for him to return, but he didn’t.

 

Then, a few months later, my mother was about to sit down on the couch when an indistinct figure appeared, moving toward the doorway. She set down her coffee (the “and” was a blueberry muffin this time), and walked toward the door.

“I said, ‘Yes? Can I help you?’ I thought it might be the mail carrier.”

But when the figure got to the doorway, it was her great-aunt Harriet. After World War II, Harriet had moved to Los Angeles to die and be buried near Aimee Semple McPherson, a famous radio evangelist of the time.

Now here she was, coming to visit.

“ ‘Aunt Harriet,’ I said, ‘what an unexpected pleasure!’ She smiled and said, ‘It’s good to see you, Eileen,’ then stopped.

“I pushed the screen door open, and she came in. ‘I was just having my coffee,’ I said, ‘can I get you some?’ ‘Do you have tea?’ she asked. ‘Of course,’ I said, ‘have a seat. I’ll get it ready.’

“While we waited for the water to boil, we talked. She wanted to talk family, to catch up on my brother and sister and their children, and me and my children. So I didn’t ask her much about what life -- or afterlife -- was like for her.

“We talked for a half hour or so, then she said, ‘I’ve got to be going. This has been lovely.’ ‘Can we do it again?’ I hurried to ask. ‘In a week?’ she suggested. ‘Is that good for you?’ ‘Perfect,’ I said. ‘I’ll look for you next Tuesday.’

“And every Tuesday we had tea, right here in the dining area, for that whole summer, and into the fall. We talked about family history -- I learned a lot -- but we still didn’t get into the how and why of her appearing, or where she was when she wasn’t here. I did ask her once if she had come with a particular message or purpose in mind, and she said no, she just wanted to make contact with me.

“Then she missed a week once or twice, and then she stopped coming. We didn’t say goodbye, actually, but it’s been quite a while now. I still set the table for tea, though, every Tuesday.”

 

If my mother ever had any more such visitors, she didn’t tell me about them. And I’m sure she would have. We were very close, and she’d made a point of ending some family traditions she didn’t appreciate -- such as keeping secrets, which her parents were very practiced at. And never hugging or saying “I love you” -- which, when she became a mother, were daily staples of family life.

 

Now that I think of it, both of my mother’s ghosts were very calm and beneficent, even delicate about not disturbing the person they were visiting. Quite unlike the stories I’d been used to -- ectoplasmic intruders popping up suddenly, shrieking and howling, tossing things and breaking them, desperate to discharge some unrequited tidal emotion like vengeance or grief or even lost love.

 

Nor did my mother’s ghosts come bearing messages for the living, another reliable motif in the stories I knew. Although one ghost visitor I’d heard about did bring an urgent message.

 

My wife’s grandmother, Kay, had three daughters. When the youngest was six years old, she was riding a bicycle and was struck by an automobile and killed. Her mother went into a deep depression, unable to get out of bed for three months.

 

“Then one morning,” Kay told me, “something woke me up. I looked around the room and didn’t see anything, So I was fluffing up my pillow to go back to sleep when I heard something, like a cough. I looked, and there was Billie, plain as day, at the foot of my bed, in her favorite nightgown.

 

“She looked worried. ‘Billie,’ I said, ‘is that you?’ ‘Yes, Mama,’ she said. ‘You look troubled, child,’ I said, ‘what’s wrong?’ ‘Mama,’ she said, coming up beside me, ‘I’m worried about you. I feel bad that I made you so sick.’ I started to answer, but she put her finger on my lips. ‘Don’t fret for me, Mama,’ she said, ‘everything’s wonderful where I am. I’m so happy!’ She stroked my forehead a few times, then she was gone.

 

“I just gaped a while, and cried. And then I said to myself, ‘I’ll be goddamned if I wreck my little girl’s happiness!’ And I got out of that bed, and went straight back to work. I even started painting again.”    

 

Kay was a painter, had been since her youth. Which reminds me of her other ghost visitation. One day, we were cleaning up the kitchen, she and I -- my wife had taken the children to school on her way to work -- and Kay put down a dish and called me over to the sink.

 

“I had this dream last night,” she confided. “I was asleep, and heard a noise; I opened my eyes and looked around and there was a shape in my window, something moving. ‘It’s alright,’ I thought, ‘I’m just dreaming.’ But when I sat up and turned on my lamp, there was somebody -- a man, crawling in my window. I jumped out of bed, and he disappeared.

 

“So I want to ask you. You know that pension money of Clyde’s they sent me?” I nodded. A week ago, almost a year after her husband’s death, she had finally received the check. “Do you think this means I should invest it in getting an alarm system for the house?”

 

“I’m not sure about that,” I said. “We’ve been thinking about selling, you know, and it’d be a shame to spend it on something you’d just leave behind. Just for protection from a dream.”

 

“Okay,” she said, with a chuckle. “I guess that would be silly.”

 

The next day, we were clearing up after breakfast again, and she pulled me aside.

 

“Well, it wasn’t a dream,” she said. “He came again last night, crawling through the window again. It shocked me wide awake, and I was about to call out for help when I recognized him. That mustache, and that beret -- it was my old painting teacher from Oklahoma City. ‘Anton,’ I said to him, ‘what are you doing here?’ ‘Hello, Kay,’ he said. And he came over to the bed. I thought I’d be scared, but I wasn’t. After a little while, he went away.”

 

With gentle questioning, Kay revealed, blushing, that during that “little while,” Anton had actually climbed onto bed with her and they’d embraced and kissed.

 

“Then he stood up and said, ‘Kay, I can’t stay. I came to tell you to pull back your curtains and open the windows. Let the light in,’ And he made that little bow of his, and left.”

 

“He climbed out the window?” I asked,

 

“Nope. Just disappeared. I’ve been thinking about what he said, and I wonder: Maybe I should use that money to get back into my painting, seriously. With Clyde sick for so long, I pretty well let it slip. But I’m thinking I could start up again.”

 

“Let in the light,” I said. She smiled. And she did return to painting full-time, joining a studio and having her work exhibited and sold, something she’d never been able to do as a housewife and part-time realtor who only painted on the side.

 

So, gentle ghosts with healing messages. Even if their appearing causes a momentary shock. Makes me wish more than ever that I’d have a visit from a ghost.