ghosts

Pulling into the driveway last week, I noticed the back gate of our neighbors house open. The house has been abandoned since she died last spring. I peered over the fence into the overgrown yard. The back door was wide open. Tentatively I decided to investigate.

"Hello? Is anyone in here?" The house was in total disarray. There was a pile of CD's and VHS tapes in the middle of the living room, the labels torn or missing. Most of the furnishings had been cleared out. I walked into the kitchen. "Hello?" Empty wine bottles lined the rack above the stove. I thought about my neighbor sitting on her front porch smoking her menthol slims and drinking a bud light. "Hello?" The noise of dripping water was coming from down the hall. The bathroom? From all apparent reports she had died in the bathroom. The investigation was over. I decided to leave and call the police.

D. took the news that I had ventured into the house very poorly. "You mean you went INSIDE?" Ever since she has developed a slight phobia of our hall bath.

Morning. Rosy fingered dawn was stretching the arthritis out of her joints.

"Hang on baby, I left my coffee inside."

D. looked from me to Laura's vacant house to the car. "I'm coming with you!" she said.

The forty-five minute drive to her swim meet was punctuated with long tired silences. "So, let me ask you a question." I said.

"Yeah?"
"Is it, you believe in ghosts, and they creep you out or do you just have a bad case of the willies?"
"Both."
"Yeah." I said, the fog of morning creeping over my brain. "So what do you think ghosts are?" I asked, probing gently.

"Souls."

"Hmmm. No wonder you're so jittery. That would creep me out too."

No response. "Do you want to know what I think ghosts are?"

Sigh. "I guess so." she complained.

"Impressions. Like footprints in the sand." She thought about this for a minute, but didn't seem eager to talk more about it. Finally I decided to add a parting thought. "Have you ever had a conversation with someone who was talking in their sleep?"

"Yeah."
"I'll bet it seemed to make sense at first and then got really strange."
"You want to know who I had a conversation with?"
"Do you want to tell me?"
"G." she said excitedly. "I asked her what she was doing, and she said 'popcorn' and fell back to sleep."
"That's funny."
"Yeah" she said smiling.
"My point is, ghosts are like that, impressions, like footprints, but footprints can't get up and walk around. And while a soul's impression is more... complex, ultimately it is just an impression, It might seem like it is interacting with you, but pretty soon it stops making sense,"
"I guess."

Silence. I thought about ghosts for a while, trying out my description with my own experience: walking into my grandparents apartment after my grandfather died, or my grandmother's body lying motionless on a hospital bed. The thoughts feel foreign, strange. What were these memories?

I looked at the clock and made a few mental calculations involving distance and driving time.

I thought about people I had known, people I might never see again, or have rediscovered on the internet, on face-book, or in blogs. Sometimes these re-encounters feel so familiar and other times not.

Descartes compared memory to impressions in wax. Its funny, the description seemed so medieval when I first read it that I immediately dismissed it out of hand. Memories seemed more fragile than plastic, at least at the time. Like wisps of smoke floating on the breeze before a strong wind came along and extinguished them forever.

Nowadays memories have more life in them. They can pop up unexpectedly, or dissolve before your very eyes. There is a kind of melancholy whimsey about them and a plasticity. I seem to be forever mooshing them into one form or another only to have them spring back to their old selves with startling longevity.

I stare forward through the windshield. "Ghosts." I mutter, turning off the highway.

"Daddy! Please, I am trying to sleep!"