Our
first house was a rental cottage in the town I live in now. It was an old place with a full walk-in attic
that my father dreamed of turning into a study someday if we were ever able to
buy the place. For the year that we lived there, before he got transferred to
Florida, it was a place for me and my sister, Melissa, to steal away to and do
whatever struck our fancy on any given day.
The house also had an unfinished basement that reminded us of the one in
our grandparents’ house. It was dank, dark
and musky so we didn’t go down there that much unless during winter months we
wanted to play with larger toys. My
sister, Stacia, had a pink cardboard kitchen down there. The thing I remember most
about that house was how much it creaked and moaned, and how the pipes would
wail. You would always hear strange noises
throughout the day and night. We would
say to our mother, “What was that?!” She wouldn’t even look up from her
crossword puzzle and reply, “The ghost.” Being impressionable, we would ask, “What
ghost?” She would answer, matter-of-factly, ”The house ghost. All houses have them. Ours is named Gus.”
We moved
a lot when I was young. We lived in
seven different places before I was thirteen. Sometimes they were far from
where we lived before and sometimes just across town. What I always found interesting was that wherever
we moved, Gus always came with us. My
mother told me when I was seven that ghosts attach themselves to families and
that’s why Gus was still in whatever house we lived in. As we got older it became a family goof that
whenever something unexplained happened, something got misplaced, or someone
didn’t want to own up to breaking the lamp, that it must’ve been Gus. I remember
one time when I was in college coming home very late after a couple of beers,
and telling my mother that I couldn’t help it. “Gus was driving and you know
how he is.”
One time
on Halloween, when I was in junior high, Stacia was sick and very afraid that
she wasn’t going to be able to go trick-or-treating. Melissa was off with her friends, so my mother
asked me if I would take Stacia to a couple of houses on the block while she
walked with my brother and his friends. I did and she didn’t get as much candy as she
wanted but enough that she was satisfied with the endeavor. I could tell she was fading. I took her home
and we went up to Melissa’s bed so that she could at least look out of the
front window and watch the kids in their costumes as they paraded by. In those days they did not have the
industrial street lights that we have today. Everyone had a lamppost on their
parkway or in their yard. That night as
Stacia and I stretched out together on Melissa’s bed, our lamppost started
blinking on and off. I said, “Look, Stacy, Gus has come to wish you a Happy
Halloween.” She became mesmerized
watching the light randomly go on and off.
“Do you really think it is a ghost, Tom?” she asked. I said, “I don’t know, let’s watch it for
awhile.” We did and then she started
getting scared. I said, “Honey, I don’t
really think it’s a ghost. Do you want
me to go check?” She nodded her feverish
head, so I went downstairs and outside to the yard. I went to the light and gave it a shake. As I did the light came on and off. I looked up at her in the window and she was
laughing. Nothing but a short.
I’m not
completely sure that I do or don’t believe in ghosts or spirits. The reason
that I am uncertain is because of a few things that happened in my life.
When my
wife, Karen, and I lived in the city we bought a house that was about 120 years
old. It creaked and moaned just like the
house we lived in when I was a kid. During those days my brother-in-law, Michael,
lived with us in the garden level apartment that many houses had from the days
of immigration. Every week we made it a
custom that we would all gather in the front room of the main house and watch
the show “Northern Exposure” together.
One night while we were there we heard very distinct footsteps upstairs
where the bedrooms were. Sound traveled
loudly through that house. Everyone looked up at the ceiling but no one said anything.
We went back to looking at the show and
then Michael subtly said, “OK, I’m here, Tom is here, and you’re here, Karen. So who the hell is upstairs?” I went to check and there was no one
there. I checked all of the windows and
then made sure all of the doors were locked.
All secure. Karen said, “Well,
apparently we have a ghost.” We decided
it was a friendly and protective ghost when one night I physically felt someone
shaking me in my sleep. I woke up and I
could smell smoke. I ran down to the
kitchen and saw that the cloth wiring in the wall above the sink had frayed and
started the drywall on fire. It was not
a big fire. I was able to put it out quickly and kill the power. When I went back to bed and told Karen about
what happened, she sleepily said, “At least our ghost likes us.”
After we
moved to the house we live in now, when I was still working on my master’s degree
in business, I got the crazy notion that I should combine it with a law degree
too. As such I had to take the
LSAT. I prepped for months and on the
morning when I went into the city to take the exam, Karen said to me, “You’re
going to do great on this thing. I am 100% confident.” I did do pretty well and later when I got
home I asked her why she was so emphatic about my chances of success; more so
even than you would expect from your wife.
“Your mom came to me last night.
She sat on the edge of the bed. I
could feel her rubbing my head. She told
me not to worry; you were going to be alright.” My mother died when I was
twenty-four, not six months after I got married. We were very close and for quite awhile it
disturbed me that if my mom was to make her ethereal presence known, it was to
my wife and not me. I was happy Karen had that experience but inside I was also angry.
Just
after I got diagnosed with Parkinson’s and was struggling with adapting to a
new normal, I built the garage studio that I now almost exclusively work in and
where people come to visit me. It is a
place of congeniality and peace. One
night I painted an old lamp shade to look like a Jackson Pollock painting. I was happy how it turned out so I turned off
the lights and took a photo of it with my cell phone. I did nothing special. The lamp was not on. When I looked at the picture this is what I
saw:
I showed this picture to a friend of mine who
is an engineer. He said, “It could be so
many things. It could have been the flash
in your phone’s camera. You use a lot of solvents and other things out
there. It could just be particulate
matter.” He may have been right. I
showed it to another person, a woman named Sherry, who is a bartender at the
local I go to. I told her what my friend
told me. She said, “I think you captured something. What do you want it to be?” I never was able to recreate that photograph.
Thinking
about ghosts tonight, maybe they are nothing other than memories. Ghosts might be nothing more than our mind
trying to make a connection to the past.
They might just be manifestations of what worries us, mistakes we made
at some point in our life, or special times when we most felt safe and happy. Good or bad, everyone because, we are cursed
with memory, is haunted to some degree.
I think for me, and most everyone, ghosts exist as a desire to maintain
a connection to the people we loved and lost throughout our lives. We want to believe they are still with us.
People
associate ghosts with being scary. I don’t. I think ghosts give me hope that maybe
someday in the far inevitable future we all face; I will still be around to
take care of the people that mean so much to me. Ghosts also give me comfort in thinking that
there is someone out there, who right now, is still watching over me. I accept the good ghosts and do my best to shoo
the bad ones out.
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