One misty moisty morning back in the Old Neighborhood, my true love and I slithered out of bed, mainlined caffeine, hopped a bus downtown in the rain, and scouted the jewelry stores on Nicollet Mall for a diamond that spoke to us. More like screamed bloody murder. Mission fulfilled, we grabbed a bottle of champagne and hopped a bus back home, to the old subdivided mansion where we both had apartments, and where we toasted our Grand Passion and began planning the engagement party.
In keeping with our shared obsession to retain our independence, we maintained separate living quarters. Our ultimate dream was to buy two houses next door to one another, one for each of us. Maybe we'd erect a skyway between them, if things went well. After being together for awhile, we threw caution to the wind and considered buying a duplex with its respective individual units. Eventually, we settled into the more financially-sound pattern of buying a series of single houses large enough to contain both our egos, an MO which has seen us through two decades of wedded bliss. Though this arrangement sometimes requires an in-house GPS unit to enable us to locate one another.
Maybe we first got the Big House idea when we lived in the Old Mansion. Which served as the perfect venue for our All Soul's Eve Engagement Bash (*Costumes Required!), remembered by many (it was a wonder anybody could remember anything from that night) as the Social Event of the Season. Possibly the decade. I mean, Everybody who was Anybody, and a few who weren't. In addition to dozens of our closest and dearest acquaintances, our fellow tenants were also invited, all of them female (my fiance being the token resident male), including a stewardess (we still called them that); a costume designer; two teachers; an actress; a psychologist; an artist/astrologer/Liz-Taylor-doppelganger; and the entrepreneur in the basement, who trafficked in stained glass, Mary Kay and various controlled substances.
The rafters and walls, hallways and staircases were hung with spider webs (some of them manmade). We put red lightbulbs in the chandeliers, positioned faux people in unexpected places, pumped Quasimodo organ music full throttle out into the night. There was beer in the bathtubs, cocktails in the kitchens, hors d'oeuvres on the tables, candles to light the way. My husband-to-be and I were the zombie bride and groom hosts. In a twelve-hour marathon of Dracu-speak ghoulishness, we entertained cat burglars, gypsies, vampires, mummies, mad scientists, nuns, cadavers, cross-dressers, gangsters, goblins, serial killers, werewolves, a half dozen faux people, two invisible men and a priest. Which pretty much describes our extended family, with the exception of the priest.
It was our Coming Out Party. We came out of hiding to find each other. We came out of the Seventies into the Eighties into the Nineties. We came out of the City up to the Woods. Where ghosts abound and spirits slink among the tree trunks and things...happen. So, throw on another log, gather round, and listen up. (What IS that out in the yard? an owl? a wolf?) In celebration of Halloween, and the 20th Anniversary of the Lowry Hill All Soul's Eve Engagement Bash, I offer these two...true...stories.
ONE
After a lifetime of charm, salesmanship and romantic treachery, my mother's father, my Grandpa Carl, lay dying. He'd sold cars for many years, and, some might say, my grandmother a bill of goods. At the end of his life, in his hospital bed in the town where he'd lived most of his years, he was still at it. Pitching woo, sweet-talking the nurses. Or trying to. But it was all catching up to him.
One afternoon, a certain nurse he was partial to politely declined to help him shave. In an angry outburst, Carl grabbed his Norelco off the bedside table and hurled it across the room. It missed the nurse by inches, hitting the wall and clattering to the floor. You could hear a pin drop.
Later that same day, he died.
(At the funeral, his four blue-eyed, black-haired daughters in the first pew were joined by a fifth much younger version at the back of the church...but that's a whole other story.)
A few weeks after his funeral, my mother and sister are alone in our three-bedroom rambler in the town referred to. They're in the living room, watching television. It's dark outside. A commercial comes on, and my mother starts to say something about her father, some memory recalled, some thought come to mind.
Suddenly, there's a loud crash in the hallway. My mother gets up, crosses the room, turns on the hall light. Her father's shaver is lying there on the rug, just below the full-length mirror on the far wall. Unwilling to part with it, she'd tucked the Norelco onto the top shelf in our bathroom. It would have had to fall off the shelf, do a 360 out the bathroom door, a 180 around the corner, then launch itself six feet down the hallway to hit the mirror with enough momentum to make the sound they'd heard.
My mother and sister stared at each other. You could hear a pin drop. Or a shaver hit the wall.
Thirty years later, my mother died.
TWO
My mother was a spooky kid, who grew into a spooky adult. She read tea leaves, interpreted signs, dispersed clouds, saw ghosts. She called them angels; I called it semantics. She'd dream of black roses, someone would die. A white bird would fly past her sheets on the line, someone would visit. She played Table Up and the floor shook. She gave me The Look and my knees shook. I found it near impossible to lie to her, but I gave it the Old College Try. When I finally went away to college, we saved on long-distance calls, because my mother Just Knew. How I was doing. What I was doing. Where I was doing it.
Besides being a spook, my mother was also an artist. When she was younger, she'd painted. Later in life, she turned to writing. Just before she died, she'd been working on a childhood memoir, which she asked me to edit. Grateful for my help, she presented me with a lamp, one of those glassy, gold-etched, touch-activated jobs popular in the Nineties. It wasn't my style, but she was my mother. I tucked it into a far corner of the living room beneath the piano window and forgot about it.
On a sunny October afternoon in 1999, my mother died. Unexpectedly, in her sleep. Nothing disturbed, nothing in disarray, a perfect death. If there is such a thing. She lay down for a nap and didn't wake up. Needless to say, life as I knew it changed. One of those changes being that my father came to live with us.
That Christmas my father had been with us in our Big House Up North for several months. On Christmas Eve we opened gifts by the fire, raised a glass to my mother, and then my father went up to bed. My husband and I went to the kitchen for more wine, and on my way back along the hallway, something caught my attention: a light was pulsing through the living room archway, dim then bright, dim then bright. I assumed it was firelight, but when I reached the room, I stopped dead (as they say) in my tracks.
The lamp my mother had given me, and which had sat unused and forgotten in a corner for almost a year, was turning itself off and on at warp speed. Like a strobe. Like a lighthouse on steroids. Like...a sign. I could barely get the words out to summon my husband, who sauntered up, glass in hand, and stopped dead beside me. We stood there, the two of us, dumbstruck, unable to move, staring at The Light for many minutes, for a lifetime, like a couple of...zombies. The Light strobed on and off, over and over, again and again. And I Just Knew.
"Merry Christmas, Mommy," I whispered, and raised my glass.
