I woke up on Christmas eve morning to find the bowl of the bird bath had cracked and fallen to the ground. I then discovered the story I’d won a prize for was not being published in the newspaper that day as I had been told previously. The day ended with the discovery that my Neverwinter Nights disk was cracked.
Light bulbs are popping and going out all over the house this week: the front door in the Santa Fe sconce, the back door that keeps the mice away, my desk light, the one over the stove; every time I find a new darkness, I laugh.
Then James Brown passed away, and President Ford, and in-between, the ex of our ex-governor planned her Christmas, brought all her gifts and trimmings into her Aspen home, went to bed and didn’t wake up.
The veil is thin these days between the living and the dead—or the almost forgotten.
As the week continued I ran into or reconnected with all kinds of people I hadn’t been in contact with for years.
First, I watched an old Christopher Reeve’s movie, “Somewhere In Time” about a playwright who hypnotizes himself back in time to meet an actress he has become obsessed with. I became obsessed myself this summer with Reeve’s entire life, his fall and his self-recreation, fighting for nine years to grant rights to quadriplegics. Read: universal kryptonite.
In a scene less than a minute long, a face from my past appeared, a face I loved almost as much as my father’s: my first acting coach in Chicago, Ted Liss. The summer I was 19, I found his acting class in the most roach infested, stinking hole in Chicago on Wells street, across from the now infamous Second City. We worked on scenes in pairs and presented them every week, often breaking up at two or three in the morning. The night he graduated me, I played the teacher in “And Miss Reardon Drinks a Little.” The next week I left for New Mexico.
I grabbed the VHS box with the movie cover in it and pulled it out of the plastic to read the date: 1980. That was the year I began with Liss. Most likely, the movie had been filmed the year before. I stared at the frozen frame on the TV: Liss and Reeve, both dead men now, both shared the same air I shared. Two degrees of separation.Then an old printing friend found me on email, last time we spoke was three years ago. Old family friends contacted with us from Tennessee, last saw them at our Vista del Sur house. Could it have been ten years ago? I saw Carole and her mom at the bank—five years ago seems to be the last time we saw each other. That night I ran into Murrae, who worked with Carole and me. He said my name while I picked out ground beef at Trader Joe’s. He’d just cut his hair to donate it to cancer kids for a wig. I laughed to think of a kid with a long grey ponytail. I haven’t run into Murrae in at least six years.
My best friend in high school, Jimmy Granger, used to call these sightings “ghosts”; visions of the past in the present.
The week was summed up when my sister sent a disc with the photos she had taken from her Thanksgiving visit. On one she had printed “GHOST”. It was evening and we were walking up Canyon Road. I sat on a giant ant sculpture and she took the picture. In it you can see my gloved hand emerging from a bolt of yellow gold.
I didn't tell her, but I had twice that week prior to their visit stayed up late working into the wee hours of the morning and felt a very physical presence at my right elbow, like someone had walked up silently behind me and looked over my shoulder.~mel
