A Ghost Story

October 26, 2012 / roughwighting / 13 Comments

I know it’s going to happen tonight. All the signs are right. Children off on their own, husband away on business, my two best friends gone on vacations with their families.

I am alone. Finally.

For the past two months I’ve been preparing for this time, not knowing that it would come, but preparing nonetheless.

The sun finally loses its power over gravity and sinks down into the dark rose horizon. The moon floats ahead, but herds of black clouds cover its cheerful shine, darkening the sky and the earth below.

I turn off the lights to the living room, the hallway, then the stairway, and finally my bedroom.

I am swathed in glorious blackness.

I close my eyes, then open them so the room is revealed to me like a developing photo in a dark room. Familiar shapes and shadows relax me.

Then an unfamiliar form floats from the window to the door and stops a few feet away.

“Virginia?” I ask. She nods her head. I see no face, no female body, but still, I know it’s my dear friend of many years, my mentor, dead over 15 years now. I have talked to her so often in my prayers, but never a response.

Now she speaks, though no words fill the room.

We revel in memories of the life we shared, and she laughs heartily. My soul fills with the sound. I have missed it, but now realize that it has always been part of me, and shall remain so.

She answers my personal questions of what lay beyond. I won’t tell you what she says.

Felicity, my cat, creeps into the room, staring at me with her yellow eyes. I’m afraid she may think her mistress has lost her mind, but instead she meows to me. “Why stay here? Take a cat nap and see the world.”

Oh, I suddenly realize; I’ve always been able to go back and forth between worlds. I just don’t nap enough.

I close my eyes, feeling Virginia’s presence close at hand. We soar off through the window panes into the black night. I am so happy my heart balloons twice its size. I see George, then, and grandmama, and, of course, Pauli. They are just as free as me.

We head toward the prism that has suddenly appeared, and just as suddenly we’re in a garden of roses and delphiniums and hydrangeas. The soil is moist and smells like cut grass, starfish, and summer moonlight. Felicity joins us and converses with a butterfly.

“Change is imperative,” the colorful flying insect says wisely.

I wink and find myself back in my dark bedroom, seated Buddha style, petting Felicity in soft gentle strokes. She gazes up at me and says only one word in a long, low purr.

“Llllllooooooovvvvvvvveeeeeeeeee. ghost story, butterfly, cat, soul

“Sometimes the soul takes pictures of things it has wished for

but never seen.” (Anne Sexton)

Under the Princess Canopy

October 19, 2012 / roughwighting / 24 Comments

To my 4-year-old granddaughter, the most exciting part of my visit is that I get to sleep with her in her queen-sized bed.

At 9:30 p.m., Sophie’s constant energy is barely contained, even with the lights out and flannel sheets up to our chins. The bed is crowded with just the two of us, since half a dozen “my little ponies” have joined us on the counterpane, jumping in high spirits at my presence.

The chatter between Sophie and her tiny plastic friends finally turns to whispers, and then soft little snores. I start to fade out myself until I’m poked on one hip by a pony fairy wing, and I feel a plastic tail wiggle in my ear. Quietly, I place all the fantastical toys in the bin on the floor, and sink back into comfortable oblivion.

Until my eyes pop open. Two little-girl feet are propped on my face. I raise my neck a few inches and notice the sleeping child’s head down at the foot of the bed.

Not wanting to wake her (I really do believe in letting sleeping ponies, and little girls, lie) I slowly twist away and gently move the child’s knees off my chest.

An hour later (or is it only minutes?) an arm whaps me on the neck, and then a precious child, now right side up, cuddles into my stomach, finding my body a useful pillow.

I stare at the wispy white princess canopy over my head and demand my brain to stop laughing and GO BACK TO SLEEP.

Which I do, until an errant dolly finds my lower back, and brilliant little Sophie begins talking in her sleep.

Geometric solutions?

Poetry?

An arcane language?

Oh. She’s mumbling about “glimmer winged” pony Rainbow Dash chasing Fluttershy in the magical night air.

5 a.m. and I just lay on the soft bed with my sweet grandchild, pretending that winged ponies are flying in and out of the canopy, dusting us with glitters of grandmotherly love.

DAILY PRACTICE

October 5, 2012 / roughwighting / 12 Comments

Back in the old days, people were encouraged to attend to daily prayers. Not just encouraged, bullied into it almost.

So I have a hard time with the idea of a “daily writing.” I’ll write when I damn well please, thank you very much.

But then I think of pianists. They need to play the piano, daily, for weeks and months and years to become merely proficient in their musicianship, much less able to say that they are accomplished in playing the piano.

I watched the New York Open with open-mouthed awe this summer, and listened to the stories of some of these incredible players. Who became incredible by natural ability and then hours of daily practice hitting that damn yellow ball back and forth over the net since they were pre-teens. Day after day, month after month, year after year.

Then I think of my friend, who is training for a marathon, again. She gave herself, and her ailing kidney, a year and a half off from the last marathon, watching her body become sluggish and her figure add the weight she had run off to such effort. Now, six weeks back into daily training, her face is rosy and her step lighter.

Will my writing become rosier, my fingers lighter if I succumb to daily practice? Will I become a more accomplished writer, by forcing myself to put my words on paper (or laptop), every day? At some point in time, will someone read my stories and say “incredible,” because of the extra effort I’ve made in my life, to write daily?

I know what the answer is, damn it.

How about you? Do you practice your craft/hobby/thethingthatrocksyourworld – daily?

TO MY READERS: I’ll miss next week’s blog post due to an important meeting with the newest member of my family, now 2 weeks old and impatient for my visit. But I shall be writing my observations of a New England fall, my musings about new life and life’s renewals, the joy in reunification with the best daughter in the world, and the fear of flying…. DAILY.

baby, newborn, grandson

Pressing Matters

September 28, 2012September 28, 2012 / roughwighting / 20 Comments

I call my son Sean on his cell phone, at work, 11 a.m.

I don’t usually call my boy during the day. After all, he works, in the big city, in a big high-financing job that I understand absolutely nothing about. I hear his explanations of investing, solar, banks, corporations, tax credit, energy, but to be perfectly honest, at banks and tax credits my brain gets fuzzy and my eyes roll back so I just nod my head and say “Ohhhh!” as if I’ve understood every fast-speaking, super-intelligent thing he’s said.

But today, I just want to hear his voice. I miss that, now that he’s not the little boy who absolutely and completely loves his mother, buying her flowers when he’s driven her close to distraction, and offering a huge smile and hug every night until he leaves for college.

My son is MINE until he meets his match, his sunshine, the chink to his armor, the woman he’s dreamed of before he ever met her — his wife.

Now he’s hers, and that’s the way it’s supposed to be, the way I want it to be.

Until I call him at 11 in the morning and he doesn’t answer his phone, and I think, “Sean doesn’t have time for me right now.”

Before pressing matters.

The truth is, he doesn’t, not now that he’s married and the father of three little boys and commuting to the big city and worrying about bills and pre-schools and property taxes and how to celebrate each anniversary (at their third, he discovered the traditional gift is leather – and by god, he bought his love … a leather bracelet). By the type of man he is, the husband he is, the father he is, I know I did good. But I just want to hear Sean’s voice and let him be my little boy just for a minute.Please!

But five minutes after I call, I receive a text. Let me explain that I am at work myself, so I’m happy to see a text, since I really can’t take the time from work to talk then anyway – ah, the vagaries of motherhood.

But the text takes my breath away.

Here it is.

Ready?

“In meetings all day. Can we talk tomorrow? Anything pressing?”

PRESSING?

“Like an iron,” I text back angrily without thinking.

When, oh when, did I get to the point of being a person in my son’s life whom he has to find a schedule for, whom he can only talk to if it’s “pressing,” whom he…

“You’ve been married too long to dad,” he texts back.

I smile. My man is known in our family circle as a frequent (though not necessarily accomplished) person-who-puns.

I pause. Sean did text back soon after my missed call. He did make sure I was okay, then asked if we could talk later.

Sean with one of his pressing matters.

I text him a funny face :+) and let go of my loss.He’s still my son, but he’s not my little boy. He still loves me, but he’s expanded his heart to love a wife, three children. He’s made a life, a family, and where do I fit in?

I’m his mom.

Forever.

Illustration thanks to Pam Rubert, http://pamrubert.com/about/press1/

Spa STRESS

September 21, 2012 / roughwighting / 24 Comments

I seize the opportunity to enjoy an afternoon at the spa to spiff up and stress down.

I succeed, sort of.

My visiting mother, always full of zip, is a bit reluctant, but my friend Dee urges us to take the time to R E L A X. So we arrive eagerly, quickly getting into the mood by wearing the spa’s over-sized plush robes as we sit in front of a warmed pool in the dazzling Sausalito sunshine.

We’re each called away by our trained de-stressors. Mom’s facialist is a warm Hawaiian woman who sooths her at ‘hellooooo.’ Dee expects a woman masseuse, so when a handsome young man leads her to her massage, I whisper, “just think 50 shades.” The shocked blush-red expression on my friend’s face starts me giggling, even as my massage begins– not the best way to let my muscles go limp. As strong fingers push open tight tender back muscles, my stomach bops up and down in suppressed laughter.

An hour later, warm lavender tea in front of a roaring fire as the fog swirls amidst the sun’s rays continues the amazing effects of a splendid afternoon at the spa.

Until we’re back in the car, coasting out of the driveway, and I think out loud, “Where’s my cell phone?”

My foot drops on the brake as my mind searches for the last time I used it.

Then I get a sinking feeling: “Oh NO!”

Just in case I’m wrong, I empty the contents of my purse and my book bag as Dee, sitting in the passenger seat, calls my phone on her cell. She figures if we hear the ring, we’ll find the phone.

Too late, we realize I’d turned the sound off while we were sedated and pacified at the spa.

“I know where it is!!” I yell, blood pressure already rising, pupils dilating. “Don’t move!”

I jump out of the car and race up the long walkway back into the sweet peaceful spa.

“I need to get back in there,” I roar as gently as I can, pointing my finger toward the curtained rooms beyond.

The two tall lithe women behind the desks, the ones who dress in loose black silk and talk only in whispers, just stare at me as if they’ve never seen me before, then nod their heads. I suppose I look different than even 10 minutes earlier, when I’d floated out.

I try to walk, not run, to the elegant locker room, where we’d changed back to our ‘regular selves’ and plopped our spa bathrobes into big wicker baskets.

Gone.

Not one used bathrobe in the room.

An attendant notices my wild eyes and directs me down a hallway to a well-hidden cleaning room. A man and a woman are sorting the bathrobes into HUGE bins for wash.

“I think I left my cell phone in the pocket of my robe,” I explain breathlessly.

The woman laughs (yes, laughs!) while nodding her head toward the pile of many, many thick cream robes. “That will be like finding a needle in a haystack,” she says.

“I’ll look in every pocket,” I exclaim, and the man slowly begins to look himself. As my heart pounds, I ponder: I have just wasted an aternoon’s worth of de-stressing.

But before I can even get to one pocket, the woman shouts, “You have good karma!” and yes, in her hand is my lifeline to the world (and all my contacts)– my cell phone.

I take a deep breath and smile as broadly as the California sun.

Ahhhh, a splendid day at the spa.