HAPPY BIRTHDAY, Ethel!

the memorial box I made for my mother at an art workshop in Oaxaca in 2017
and the birthday cake that was a craft project at one of my daughter's birthday parties....ages ago

The doors to the memorial box are usually closed as it sits on its shelf in my living room, but in recognition of my mom's birthday week, I opened them a couple of days ago.

Yesterday began with the faint scent of cigarette smoke in the air. This is not a smoke-free building, but I've never smelled cigarettes before... still, there it was, wafting in from somewhere. My mom is such a talented and persistent ghost. Then a phone call came in that resulted in a small financial windfall--much appreciated, given all the moving expenses that will take months to recover from.

Later in the evening there were tickets to a play that I'd made plans for last week not quite realizing that the performance was on my mother's birthday. The action of the play opens just as all the characters have died in a tragic accident so....welcome to the afterlife and the struggles and the dramas that ensue there.

One of my daughters had reminded me in the morning that she celebrates her grandmother's birthday by buying a lottery ticket and having a martini. Schedules did not allow us to get together for drinks, so I had my martini before the theatre.

In my theatre seat, checking my email one last time before I turning off my phone, I received a thumbs up from the literary magazine that was considering  an essay of mine...that is in large part about death, the afterlife, and my mother.

Some days are surprisingly seamless. Thanks, Mom. 

Wednesday Morning Beach Report: Found Art, Summer in Paradise, and News from the Wizard of Many, Many Jobs

the minotaur

The Getty's is below.

It is summer here in paradise. There  are 33 people in the cluster of beach-goers pictured below. But I think it might be that some people are getting an early start on 4th of July weekend and the "crowds" will be gone next week. 

Report from the Wizard of Many Many Jobs: (currently wearing Ministry of Death hat):

I received this message from my brother's wife in Iowa yesterday--

.....in the mail today we got mom's death certificate . Came from XXXXX (the credit union) of Baltimore. No check. No note enclosed.

I sent the credit union the death certificate. It was required in order to close her account. I sent two other copies of the death certificate to Baltimore as well. I forget why, but I could remember if you insisted. I'm just not in the mood right now. It seems that it should be easier to wrap all of this up that it has been. The dead get mail, they haunt our dreams, the possessions of the dead fall out of closets and onto our toes. Sometimes we almost forget that the dead are dead. I can walk the beach for hours now if other obligations permit, but instead of feeling the pull of the waves out to sea, I sometimes feel the tether of my mother here in my house, sitting in her room or at the dining room table, reeling me back inland.

Hotel de Pillville: a retrospective

First read this.  The flow chart still makes me laugh hysterically.

Traveling with my mom is easier now that she doesn't smoke. Last night we stayed at an Embassy Suites. I chose the couch in the living room and let my mom have the bedroom to herself. There was some pretty terrifying shouting at the dead around midnight. She was yelling at her twin sister Millie. If I'd already been asleep, I'm sure the noise would have awakened me, heart pounding. As it was, I just got a case of the goosebumps and resolved to fling open the door to the hallway and run if a ghost came through the bedroom door.

Last evening as she was wheeled off the plane with the aid of an aisle-sized wheel chair and three attendants, the logistics of it all blocked the incoming crew from boarding. The end of the jetway was lined with people in navy blue as she was transferred to her own wheelchair. This is my last flight, she told them. I'm coming home. I'm not sure if she actually spoke the words to die. But it was in the air. Not a single person tapped a toe or sighed impatiently. They waited, almost at attention, thanking us for flying Delta, telling her to have a good time, a good night, to rest.

My mom is exhausted. She's still asleep. I have her toast and coffee ready. I'll have to wake her soon. Then Pillville will be hitting the road.

Report from Pillville: How my hair stood up

I wish I still had the Christmas lights on my bed.

I am listening in the dark. My mother is quiet at the moment. If I listen a little harder I can hear the click and hiss of her oxygen machine.

Earlier this evening as my friend Ellen and I sat on the couch, my mom was talking in her sleep. Not just a mumbled word, not just a line or two, but a monologue. Excuse me, I said to Ellen. I have to check out what's going on in there. I stood to the side of her partially open door and listened.

"And now they roam the house at night. Two of them. And they're not really fond of each other." My mom was speaking in a dramatic voice like she was telling a ghost story. The hair on my arms and the back of my neck stood up. I can't even watch TV because the commercials for scary movies terrify me. Now I'm imagining Thing One and Thing Two roaming through my house, stalking one another--stalking me.

If there ever was a night to have a friend staying over, this is it. A few months back, Ellen and I both leapt from our beds and nearly collided at the top of the stairs after my mother yelled at the top of her lungs. For a moment it sounded like my mom was arguing with someone and we thought there might be an intruder in the house.

I may have to sleep with the light on. But then again, that might make it easier for Thing One and Thing Two to find me.

the wind whipping the waves into weird shapes

The Santa Ana winds had already kicked up by the time I woke this morning. The water in the marina was blowing backwards, and I felt twitchy and weird. A couple of hours later, I had literally developed a twitch in my left eye. The twitch abated from time to time, but always returned. What am I not seeing, I asked myself. What don't I want to see?

Tonight after dinner, walking in the dark, the twitching lessened and almost stopped. Relief. And then two streetlights blinked out just as I passed them. Stopping, I turned around and watched as they flickered for a few seconds, then sputtered into black.

Is the left eye different from the right? I googled. Then I searched for eye twitching superstitions. Suffice it to say that there are many. All I've determined for sure is that my right eye is my dominant one.

courtyard at the Ventura County Museum on Sunday afternoon

The winds have mostly died down, but the twitching is back. A half-hearted gust rattles the dried palm fronds from time to time. They clatter like bones as if perhaps a few dead souls have forgotten to return to their world and are still walking about in ours.

a detail of one of the altars at the Dia De Los Muertos exhibit at the Ventura County Museum--the "sugar" skulls are actually eggs

At dinner on Sunday night, the man who loves me, M, and I told my mother about the Day of the Dead. The skeletons are happy, I told her. There are parties and food and drinks in the cemeteries. She said that sounded marvelous. But tonight I feel as if there are ghosts lurking just beyond the edges of my peripheral vision, and when I try to spot them they disappear.

Fall

There were many herons in the dark last night.

I'm not fond of the fading light. I think I may have done better with the autumnal devouring darkness in a previous life. Sleeping in a one-room cave with other hairy people. Gnawing giant hunks of meat around a blazing fire. Popping the cap on that firewater we've been fermenting all summer.

In this current life I turn on extra lights and grumble silently about my electric bill. I fight the urge to hibernate. I wonder what it would be like to run into the marine version of sasquatch (Replace hair with scale and fins--see it? Yeah) or an ax-murderer on my evening walk. I find myself in a Day-of-the-Dead mood at night. Honestly, with the natural death and decay and darkness that visits us this time of year, I so wish everyone did an all out Dia de Los Muertos. We should set up those altars on our patios and porches and light them with hundreds of candles and make a pilgrimage every night to visit one another's dead.

I find myself driving by the pumpkin fields near my house every chance I get. Orange is good this time of year.

But those dead lost ones are still with us. Even when they're not.

Here's a Jack Gilbert poem for you.

MAYBE SHE IS HERE

She might be here secretly.
On her hands and knees
with her head down a bit
tilted to peer around the doorjamb
in the morning, watching me
before I wake up.
Only her face showing
and her shoulders. In a slip,
her skin honey against the simple
white of two thin straps
and the worked edge of the bodice.
With her right hand a little visible.

Happy Father's Day

I'm not afraid of ghosts. It's an honor--a sort of miracle--those visits from the other side. Call them what you want. Visitations, hallucinations, hauntings. If I could call them up at will, I would. I've often tried to dream of the dead, but with little success.

When my older daughter was a few days old, and I was woozy from lack of sleep, I saw my father, fifteen years dead,  in our kitchen. I was getting some orange juice out of the refrigerator. When I turned to reach for a glass from the cupboard above the sink, my father was sitting at the table. I stood there with the empty glass, "Never saw your son," he said. “I wanted to see your daughter.” He got up, looked down into C’s cradle, and then, with the smell of his Chesterfield’s lingering in the air, he was gone.

Ghost Blogging

First a definition from Blogossary.com. I'm going for the first example. Which is to say that I am available to do this for your business.

In fact, I am an experienced ghost blogger. It's not enough that I have three blogs of my own (see my side bar if this is news to you) and that I also wrote a 4th blog on Open Salon for awhile. (I loved my title and my log line there--but never mind.) I blogged too, as myself, at Smartly. But for some months now I have also been blogging as someone else. Don't ask. If I told you, I'd have to kill you, right?

No, it's not a celebrity. It's for a business, and I am not pretending to be this businessperson, per say. I am posting businessy-type stuff that requires some research and gathering and synthesizing of information. Gosh. Even my plumber has a blog. Many business people feel they need a blog these days. Blogging gives them more visibility on the Internet and makes them seem a little more personable. Except that most small businesspeople are already working their fingers to the bone, and it's hard to blog in that condition. And not everyone likes to write. That's why you need me if you have a business that is in need of more visibility. Leave a comment if you are interested, and we'll figure out how to get in touch.

And hey, I have plenty of experience writing about ghosts, too. Heck, I could ghost blog for you about ghosts if you want.

http://hisbigfatindianwedding.blogspot.com/2009/03/more-about-ghostsand-biscuits.html
http://hisbigfatindianwedding.blogspot.com/2010/05/ghosts.html
http://hisbigfatindianwedding.blogspot.com/2009/02/ghosts.html
http://hisbigfatindianwedding.blogspot.com/2010/05/theater-tonight.html

Ghosts

"Oh, Heaven, it is mysterious, it is awful to consider that we not only carry a future Ghost within us; but are, in very deed, Ghosts! ~Thomas Carlyle."


Someone left the above quote as a comment on my prior blog post about the play, Bengal Tiger at the Bagdad Zoo. 
It says a lot about how I feel about Mr. Ex and what it's like to carry the fallout of a 32-year relationship around with me. He's gone. As good as dead, really. Except he keeps zombie-ing through my life slamming doors and rattling the tea-cups.
I spent a couple of hours today working on the  most recent bit of creepiness. Mr. Ex and I, almost 3 years since we split, are still the co-owners of at least 3 credit card accounts. I used those credit cards for everything from bread and booze to a brand new caramel colored leather sofa in the first 15 months after he left. I had no income of my own, and he was doing some really impressive foot-dragging over the alimony. I didn't go crazy--though with our credit limit I suppose I could have charged a beach house in Belize. But I didn't. When the alimony started, I opened my own checking account, applied for my own credit card, and threw my former plastic lifelines in the red heart-shaped leather box where I also store my postage stamps. He'll take my name off those accounts, pronto, I thought. 
He didn't.
So, legally, I am still liable for the impressive amount of debt he has been racking up and unable to pay off every month. That's a fucking hell of a lot of baby Polo and Christian What's His Name shoes for the little missus. I mean did her feet grow a couple of sizes after the baby or what?
Now he hasn't tried to stick me with said debt or anything. But I worry. What if he becomes a real ghost? What if he's been charging cameras, computers and cashmere with abandon while refusing to sign off on our financial settlement just so he can, with some talented flick of his lawyer wrist, makes me go halfsies on these joint accounts?
My calls to the credit card companies did not go especially well.
Company #1 requires a form which we both must sign. They insisted they must sent the form to the address of record--his address where it will languish in the towering stack of mail I no longer attend to. No, it couldn't be sent to my address, the woman said. Finally, I got her to fax it to my attorney.
Company # 2 requires that the account be closed and a new account in  his name only be applied for. It would have been glorious to pull the plug right then and there, but daughter #2 is in Mexico with that card in her jeans pocket. I will cancel it on the way home from the airport after picking her up.
Company # 3 has a room full of overly suspicious customer service agents who toil at phones made from soup cans situated in a rock quarry in India. Trucks full of gravel rattle by incessantly, and I think the gentleman I spoke to didn't believe a word I said and told me he was sending someone to arrest me. Or a form to attest to what I do. Or a swan from the zoo.
So here I am. Still the joint owner of three slices of shiny plastic--with a ghost.
I could go charge stuff I suppose. Yards and yards of heavy chain that I will wind around his house while he sleeps. When he wakes, he'll have to charge a bolt-cutters, have it delivered through a window, and cut through the heavy links that hold him prisoner. There he'll be in new silk monogrammed pajamas dragging those heavy chains behind him, round and round as he unwinds his house.

Theater Tonight

Bengal Tiger at the Bagdad Zoo is a play populated by ghosts. Fraught with the tensions of war, the first
killing occurs within moments of the play's opening. Kev kills the tiger he and his fellow soldier
Tommy have been charged with guarding when the tiger (played by a human actor wearing tattered
clothes) bites off Tommy's hand. Tommy lies in a pool of blood, and the Tiger dies center stage but continues to speak as a human, and lets us know that though dead, he is still here. Welcome to the spirit world created by playwright Rajiv Joseph--and a stage where the unseen becomes seen and the dead still suffer in a place that--to a former Catholic--seems like purgatory.

Nearly every scene produces a ghost. Kev is haunted by the tiger and the war, and kills himself by trying
to saw off his own hand. He comes back to haunt Tommy who has returned to Bagdad with a Robo-cop
prosthetic hand, pissed off that he didn't even get a purple heart. The translator with Tommy and Kev's unit is haunted too. Once a talented gardener who specialized in topiary, he created a fantastical garden at the palace of the Hussein boys. He is visited by two ghosts--his young sister who was tortured and killed by Uday Hussein--and by Uday himself. Uday appears carrying the head of his brother in a plastic bag--a sort of double haunting. Already dead himself, he looked for the body of his brother everywhere, he tells us, but all that turned up was the head. Now he is a ghost carting around the head of a dead man.

In this realm of death  and war the tiger is the play's philosopher, and he ponders all the big questions. Where is God? Why do so many horrific things happen? How can a tiger be expected to rise above his murderous nature when God created him as a tiger in the first place? There's nothing new in the questioning, but the very presence of a  talking tiger from Bengal out of his element in  wartime Bagdad, dead but still sentient, puts a fresh context around the questions. 

Pretty much everyone suffers from a sense of dislocation in the play. The soldiers are in a foreign land longing for pussy and cheeseburgers. The translator can no longer practice his art. The tiger's camouflaging stripes meant for the jungle are worthless in the desert. The Iraqi characters we meet are lost too. Their once familiar world has been rendered unrecognizable. Even the beautiful beasts sculpted by the gardner at the behest of Uday don't belong. Green vines left untended in a desert are certain to perish.

The gardener/translator, who survives the various doses of Bagdad mayhem that unfold in the course of this play, seemed to me to be the character I cared about the most. Practically everyone hurts someone in this play (whether the hurting was intentional or not) and is haunted because of it. Even in peacetime, it's impossible to get through this life without wreaking some havoc, but when we hurt someone we love, the suffering can be worse than death. It was the gardener himself who brought his dear sister into the Uday's sadist realm and lost her although her brutal demise was never his intention. He is so tortured that he can't see his way clear to pulling the trigger on Uday's looted golden revolver that has passed from Tommy's hands, to Kev's, and finally to his own. 

The idea that fascinated me most in this play is that death need not halt our personal development. The tiger strives to be less violent and even dabbles in vegetarianism. Boneheaded Kev learns to appreciate the depth of Middle Eastern culture and becomes fluent in its languages. Tommy clutches his golden spoils of war as he lays dying, but sees they won't do him much good after he's dead. It's only the evil Uday who doesn't change. With his brother's bloody head in his hands, he seems forever destined to walk the afterlife as the most heinous of villains.

The play did not have a satisfying ending in my opinion, nor did its various dynamic scenes hang together as a whole, but there was plenty of good writing nonetheless.

Rising

A day bursting with Spring things. Colored eggs (real--not plastic) on a green lawn. Tiny lizards no bigger than my pinkie.                                                                                                        

                                                                                                                    A riot of blooms. 

Add to this the joys of good company, beer golden in the sunshine
and....





art.

This is Rubens' The Women at the Sepulcher. Critics do not agree on the identities of the women present at the door of Christ's tomb. Which one is Mary Magdalene, which is Mary Jesus's mother. Who is the woman in red? I don't really care, but the painting captures me. The rendering of divine light, the range of emotions on the faces. I see disbelief, the lingering numbness of grief, joyful anticipation. These feelings come into play as we persevere through the long darkness of winter and find the earth finally awakening to spring. The wealth of what the California landscape has to offer amazes me every morning. I have a tree bursting with apricots (green now & the size of olives). I have blueberry bushes with so many blossoms I can't quite imagine how many bowls full they will fill.

But my new life hasn't come fully out of the tomb. The unfinished business I have with Mr. Ex holds me in darkness. More of his lies have recently been revealed, and I find the deceit chilling and eerie. The man I loved died a long, long time ago. I was living with a ghost and didn't know it.

More About Ghosts...and Biscuits

When I was a very young child, I saw a movie version of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol and it scared me to death. It wasn't the ghost of Jacob Marley himself that terrified me--the old bearded man looked a bit like Santa and there wasn't anything visually gory or graphic in this black and white classic--it was the idea of dragging your past around like a set of chains. "I forged these chains in life," Marley says.  I don't know if I understood what that meant when I saw this movie as a five-year-old, but I was beginning to figure out that everyone had a past. Previously, I'd thought that God made people in sizes--small, medium & large--and baked us in some celestial oven like biscuits. When my grandmother came to stay with me as my baby brother was being born, she mentioned something about my mother having been a little girl and I got it then. We are all born little--and we all have pasts--and if something goes wrong, that past is going to be heavy and cumbersome and we're going to drag it with us through this life and into the next.

Is it too late to avoid this?  Really?

I want to wrap things up with Mr. Ex and it's not happening. My stomach is in a perpetual state of revolt. (Current fave food that goes down well: wine.) And even worse, I'm beginning to understand that even when (if?) we settle our finances, I will be dragging my past with the man I once considered my one true love around FOREVER.

I forged those chains.