Last Call

Walking through the bumpout the other day, I had an overwhelming urge to call my mother. My feet actually turned in the direction of the phone. An understandable impulse, but for one detail: my mother is dead. She died in 1999, just shy of the Millenium. She laid down for a nap and woke up...well, that's the point. She didn't. She was 76.

For weeks following her death, I felt a presence in my house. As if the air had changed, shifted slightly. Like the nip of fall, the breath of spring. Basically she was haunting the place. And this coming from an old atheist such as myself. Until you experience this...er...phenomenon, you're clueless. Skeptical. But I can testify. It happened to me.

Then one day, it was over. One minute this "presence" was there, waiting in the hallway, turning the lights off and on, watching from the third floor window, and the next, it wasn't. As if the Great Barkeep in the Sky had called it a night, and the few remaining clientele had hightailed it before Lights Up! revealed all their well-kept secrets. And what is the ultimate secret if not the one my mother held?

And holds still.

I'm open to Energy being the explanation for the ghost. In the sense that Energy cannot be created or destroyed. A good description of my mother. The energy field that surrounded my mother in her earthly life was a vortex that pulled you in. Like a whirpool. Or a tornado. Ask anyone who knew her. No one was immune. After I left home, it took years to extricate myself from her life force and begin to identify my own. We're still getting to know each other. Myself and I, that is. I never really knew my mother.

Who does? We know our mothers as Mothers. Not as people. This is as it should be. Life is difficult enough without acquiring personal details about our mothers, for instance, that they are fundamentally ambivalent about being mothers. All you mothers out there, you know what I'm talking about. It's another one of those well-kept secrets, how radically your view of motherhood changes once you become one. You cannot possibly comprehend the distance between the New World and the Old Country until you get on the boat and make the crossing. By then it's too late. You've landed. There's no going back, and there's no map. That's why they call it the New World.

Last week, when I asked them to identify signs of spring, one of the Preschoolers hollered Garbage! I looked around and had to agree. We were out on the playground, the snow melting to reveal a winter's worth of trash. Maybe the urge to call my mother was another sign of spring. Rebirth, renewal, reawakening. Something about the cardinal in the feeder, the dog in the sun on the deck, the cloudless sky. A sky my mother would have called "periwinkle." One of those generational words you don't often hear anymore. Like copasetic. Hightail it. For the love of Mike! Barkeep.

Whenever my father, the resident barkeep, had a bump of whiskey, he called it snapping on the jar. My mother was pretty much a teetotaler, another of those words. Something I've never been. Not since discovering lime-vodka-and-Seven-Up when I was seventeen. Like the song says, it was a very good year. My mother wouldn't agree. I remember her waiting up for me after one particular escapade, sitting in the rocker in the living room in the dark, a shadow among shadows. Until she flipped the switch on the pole lamp and I was revealed, all my well-kept secrets laid bare.

When my mother lay dead in an emergency room in a hospital two hours away, my aunt called with the news. Then she did a surprising thing. She put the receiver to my mother's ear. I cannot describe the wave of...something...which came careening across the phone line. I stood in the bumpout of my 100-year-old house two hours away while the wave hit, and out of my mouth came the only words in there, I'm sorry Mama sorry sorry sorry sorry

My mother was still flipping switches in those weeks after her death, as I wandered my midnight rooms, a shadow among shadows, snapping on the jar. Something she would have disapproved of. But for the love of Mike, what did she expect? You cannot possibly comprehend the distance between (she's) Here and (she's) Not Here until you get on the boat and make the crossing. There's no going back, and there's no map. The best you can hope for as you ride out the tsunami is one last phone call. Or a bump. Or, sometimes, a bump in the night.