family

Ghosts of Our Lives Past


Wednesday morning I was waked by a finger poke to my side. It wasn’t painful but meant to get attention. I was startled but thought it was Dee, even though she wouldn’t come into our bedroom at such an early hour. We trained her long ago to treat our bedroom as off-limits. I had an open bedroom policy for her when she was little and it was just her and I, but once Rob and I coupled, I decided it was time to go old school like my folks. We kids weren’t allowed in their bedroom under pain of pain. I can remember standing at the door in the middle of the night, sick as a dog and still not daring to put so much as my big toe in their room without permission.

Dee knocks, a very soft rapping, or if she is unwell, she calls from her room.

I half sat up and found no one.

They’re back, I thought.

The house has been quiet and empty of spirits for a while. That feeling of being watched had disappeared after the cat incident on Rob’s birthday. But that poke in the side woke more than just me.

I didn’t mention it to Rob. It was just a poke. There was nothing behind it other than a call to attention, and I figured I would know what I was supposed to be paying attention to so enough. Ghosts, I have come to discover, are resourceful.

The next morning was 6AM Ashtanga. Yeah, I get up at five and drag my sleepy self out into the cold, drive into town and pretzelize myself with a vigorous yoga workout for an hour. Rob, sweetheart that he is, sets his alarm to wake me because my alarm is alarming and lost since May when we ripped up the hardwood in the bedrooms to prepare for new, smoothly delicious looking hardware (which is down now and gorgeous in case your mind was inquiring).

Shortly before five, I hear the soft knocking on the door that I associate with Dee. I am instantly awake and waiting for her voice, but I hear nothing. I sat up and looked toward the door, thinking that I would see light. The doors are back up but the trim isn’t and if Dee’s light is on, I can see it.

It was dark.

I laid back, thinking that the alarm should be going off soon and pondering when I heard the stairs creak. Our stairs are in needing of a good screwing down and make quite a distinctive sound when anyone comes up or goes down. This time, the creaks were descending and as Rob’s alarm went off, I found I was not in a hurry to follow.

Now I have never seen a spirit/ghost/whatever your preferred pc term is in the time I have been living here. Heard a voice. Being shoved and poked and watched, but haven’t seen anything.

“What is that overhead?” Rob asked.

I looked straight up and there was a white light twirling just about our pillows. It reminded me of  similar experience Rob had in the early morning hours last year when we were in the midst of dying fathers through the fall and end of the year. The light swirled like dust caught in a sunbeam.

“I don’t know,” I said. I didn’t tell him about the knock on the door. Mostly because I didn’t think the sign was for him at the time.

Reluctantly I crawled out of bed and headed downstairs. I wouldn’t have been surprised if I’d seen someone in the living room or office at that point but saw nothing but dark. I put on my yoga togs, had some tea and toast and headed into town with a bit of trepidation because the early morning traffic that races by our hamlet on the way to the plants is careless and will someday kill someone. I crawled through the intersection and drove in no great hurry to town.

The street where the yoga studio is located is deserted at just before six in the morning. The building is right next to a bar/flophouse where the clientage run mostly to people who flirt with homelessness on a monthly basis. I have been heckled and ogled and generally creeped out by the inhabitants to the point that I avoid walking directly past it, so I park right in front of the studio.

Yoga passed and I did not fall over from exhaustion but I was tired. I’d lost a lot of sleep with Dee’s being ill. She had been up in the night and I was running on not quite six hours. In days of yore, I could do 4 or 5 hours of sleep a night for weeks on end but these days my body will not stand for the abuse. It literally punishes me with all manner of threat of collapse.

After yoga, I climbed into the truck, wondering still about what I was supposed to be paying attention to. The radio was set to the XM 70’s station and the song that came up first was Cheap Trick’s I Want You to Want Me. I first heard that song the summer before high school. The next door neighbor’s had a grand-daughter visiting from California who was my age. She attached herself to me without my permission and I was forced to entertain her for the month she was there. She was vapid, willfully illiterate and thought poking sticks at the local in crowd was a fun pastime. Her only redeeming quality was a collection of the latest hits on cassette tape. She had a Cheap Trick cassette that she let me borrow and copy which is where I first heard this song. Decades later, I marry Rob and come to discover that this same song was “their song”. That love song that all couples have. The one that played when they first met or danced or kissed or had sex or simply dogged them through their first weeks/months together.

Now I am confused. Why would I get a song sign from my husband’s late wife?

Later in the morning during one of the several phone conversations Rob and I have during the day (we used to email back and forth all day when I was in Iowa and he was here – now we call each other), I told him about the poke and the knock on the door. He had no explanation, but later called me back to say that perhaps our house was s conduit for recently departed spirits. An older gentleman down the alley had died recently and maybe it was him.

Loathing that idea very much, I told Rob about the Cheap Trick song.

“Well, that shoots my theory to hell, ” he said.

Which was fine with me because I do not want to live in a conduit for the recently deceased.

That evening as he was going through his blog reader, he happened upon the posting of The Zoo for the day and what was their song video du jour? Yeah, Cheap Trick.

There has been nothing since. I don’t know if we were just getting Christmas greetings or if it was a heads up. And you might wonder why Shelley would contact me first instead of Rob but it’s not much different from Rob getting dream visits from my late husband as opposed to Will showing up in my dreams. Our passed on spouses appear to be quite comfortable with our choices in second mates.

It’s all very fitting for the season I suppose. Very Dickens. We haven’t neglected Christmas here this year but it has been rather lackadaisical and low-key in terms of preparation. I believe this is an outgrowth of our discomfort with the materialism though.

If I should discover deep meaning in the visitations and signs, however, I will let you know.

The Adventures of St. Nick*


Just about everyone we knew as kids celebrated St. Nicolas day but us. The leaving of small toys or treats in children’s shoes was not a tradition my dad had any interest in. If he or Mom were St. Nick recipients as wee ones, I can’t recall a single tale. Mom came from a fairly well-off background by comparison, but her father was a skinflint, who I highly doubt participated in the consuming side of Christmas any more than he was forced to. Dad’s family was dirt poor. Great-Grandaddy Christie lost the family farm in the bank crash after the first world war and Grandaddy and Gran were essentially the poor relations, who tenant farmed for years before winding up farming Gran’s family farm for first her father and then her sister. One Christmas, Dad and his four siblings got a single pair of skis which they took turns with until Uncle Leo ran into a pig and broke them. More than once I can recall Dad and his second oldest sister discussing how they each got an orange apiece in their stocking and that this was a rare treat. So, St. Nick? Not so much.

I may have put something in Dee’s shoe when she was two or three, but keeping track of holidays I didn’t grow up celebrating was not long on my list of necessities, so that good intention died before it had chance to take root. My sister, DNOS, however, has managed to instill the specialness of the day into N2 (Nephew2).

“But he slept over at Mom’s Saturday night and I forgot about it completely, ” she confided to me on the phone. “I hoped he would just forget about it, but nope, we were in the car on our way home from school and he wonders why St. Nick forgot him.”

“So what did you tell him?” I asked. DNOS is a great one for covering up parental faux-pas with stories that only an 8 year old could possibly believe. I admire that.

“I told him that St. Nick visits houses alphabetically and that he probably hadn’t gotten to the O’s yet.”

And N2 bought this as reasonable as any third grader would because “alphabetical” is how the world works.

After they got home from hockey practice later that evening, DNOS hustled N2 downstairs to strip him of his gear and pop him in the shower. According to my husband, hockey gear takes on an odor of its own and so, I imagine, does the child wearing the gear. As N2 showered, his father snuck upstairs and began stomping loudly about the living room. It’s a little house and BIL is a big guy, so let’s imagine timbers rattling.

“Mom,” N2 pops out of the shower, “There’s someone in the house!”

Eyes as big as saucers and shivering with chill and fear in his birthday suit, he began yelling for BIL.

“Dad! DAD! There’s an intruder upstairs.”

BIL has stealthily slipped back downstairs without notice and asks, “Are you sure, N2?”

“There’s an intruder!! Dad, get the gun!”

BIL hunts. He keeps his arsenal in a locked cabinet in the basement and he dutifully went for a shotgun and went upstairs to “look around”.

“Oh my god, Mom. There’s an intruder! And I’m naked!” N2 was literally beside himself with horror at this point and how DNOS and BIL live with the guilt is beyond me. They are great actors though and neither one cracked so much as a smile, let alone snickered.

“I didn’t see anything N2,” BIL reported when he returned.

“Get the soap out of my hair, Mom! I need to get dressed!”

A few minutes later, sans soap and pj’d, N2 charges ahead of his parents to the upstairs.

“Hey Buzz, nice of you to go first,” BIL calls after him and N2 freezes in mid-step.

“Mom, you go ahead of me and Dad you go ahead of Mom,” he said.

They crept through the kitchen and into the living room to find, not an intruder, but three St. Nick’d shoes. N2 took the contents out and distributed them and sat heavily on the rocker, clutching his small toy.

“Mom. Dad. I have to say this how I have to say this,” he said.

And they waited with bated breath.

“Dad, you almost frickin’ shot St. Nick! He’s Santa’s brother, and I wouldn’t have got anything this year if you’d killed him.”

And no, they didn’t laugh. They are that good.

*This tale is told with the permission of DNOS, who I am sure recognizes that I didn’t get it word for word as she told it because I am not the story-teller that she is.

Dad’s Family


My Aunt Peachy is 101. She is the youngest of my Grandma C’s family, dad’s mother. She’s lived in a care facility for the last ten years after a fall took out her hip. Up until then, she lived on her own. She even drove though she’d shrunk so much she had to sit on two or three thick telephone books just to see over the dash. Don’t ask me how she managed the gas and the brake.

Peach is a former special education teacher and she is a writer. She’s gone back to college more times than I can count. She was still auditing courses at Loras College around the time of her fall.

She writes a fairly regular column of sorts for the local paper where she tells stories about “the olden days” as Dee would call them. Although Dee makes no distinction between my personal “olden days” and those of her grandmother and great-great aunt. Anything that predates her is olden.

This week Peach wrote about her auntie, Sr. Mary Lucian, coming to visit from the convent in town. In big Irish Catholic families back then, it was common to have a child or two dedicate themselves to the church. In fact some families even designated the children and forced them in that direction from an early age. I don’t remember Sr. Lucian. I am fairly certain she was dead before I was born. She was Grandad Fagan’s sister at any rate. Among his children, no nuns were produced though all his daughters were educated beyond high school and became teachers or nurses. My Great-uncle John was the only one “called” to God. I can’t imagine a poorer choice on the part of an omnipotent being, but who am I to judge worthiness, eh?

Peach mentions both John and Matt in her article. They were the two youngest boys but still a bit older than she was. John was a terror, and I remember him clearly though we didn’t see him much after he retired from his parish in Cogon, Iowa and went south because of his heart problems and asthma. He died the summer before I graduated from college and I clearly remember being forced to attend his funeral. I only went for a chance to mentally cuss his lifeless body. He was a mean old man who never missed an opportunity to take pot shots, but he was crafty too because he always managed to be out of earshot of the other adults when he said something to me. No witnesses meant it was my word against a priest’s. The last conversation I can remember having with him ended when he said,

“Do you know how fat your are?”

I was fourteen and plenty aware of what I looked like. We were in the living room at Aunt Peach’s. I’d been reading and he wandered in and found me by myself.

Peach was the only one who didn’t take crap from John. She was the only one who didn’t address him as “Father” either.

There are stories aplenty about Fr. John in my family. I have always doubted that he was called to the church as much as he was told that was what he was going to do though I could be wrong. He was not the only short-tempered, dismissive angry priest I encountered in my younger years. Most of the stories about Fr. John stem from his alcoholism. He was as devoted to the bottle as he was to the Pope.

During WWII he was stationed in North Africa. He was an Army chaplain who earned the nickname “Foxhole Fagan”.  Not on account of his fondness for his own skin, but as the result of rolling a jeep over a foxhole while he was drunk.

He officiated at the wedding ceremonies of both my parents and my dad’s older sister and her husband. On both occasions male members of the family were sent looking for him as weddings seemed to bring about the need to go on a bender starting with the rehearsal dinner. My mom’s mother was livid when my dad’s younger brother, and best man, Jimmy, showed up to the church late with a much worse for wear priest in tow.

I don’t remember Fr. John as a drunk, but I do recall hearing that he gave up the bottle at the insistence of his superiors who sent him off to dry out a few times before a heart attack finally convinced him to give up the demon drink. For all of my conscious recollection, he was a sharp-tongued, wick-witted old man who never seemed particularly pleased with the life his Lord had allotted him.

My Uncle Matt was a different matter. I heard stories of a wild and rebellious youth because he and his father did not get on, but the fellow I knew was jovial, sweet and tender. One of my favorite childhood pictures is of me and Uncle Matt when I was about three years old. He had a habit of stopping by every couple of weeks with a bag of Brach’s root beer barrels and sitting just long enough to have a cup of coffee with Dad and catch up before heading back to his home that backed up to the city golf course.

At the point where my memories of him begin, he lived alone. His wife – who I never knew – had died during a trip to California to visit relatives. She had a heart attack. There was at least one photo of her setting out in the dining room, I think. Their daughter was grown and gone off to college when I was younger than Dee is now. Uncle Matt never remarried or kept company even as far as I know, and I remember being quite surprised to discover he’d been married and his wife had died. I was very young when I learned about it and who knows how I rationalized a man having a daughter without ever having a wife. Perhaps I’d been watching too much television. Motherless and fatherless families abounded in the tv wasteland of my childhood. I wondered at his cheerfulness. How could he be so loving and happy when his wife had died. Even my widowed grandmothers and great-aunts sometimes seemed … distant. We had a widowed neighbor down the street whose husband had committed suicide and, though she was a lot like Matt in that I never saw her without a smile or heard a harsh word from her, she had a sadness about the eyes.

I would stop in to visit Matt after he went into the nursing home where my grandmother (his older sister) lived when I was in college. He’d had a stroke and couldn’t communicate very well, but he always had a half-smile and a squeeze of the hand in lieu of a hug.

Dad looked a lot like Uncle Matt in his later years. After he gave up drinking and embraced the idea of life – finally – he even had Matt’s gentleness.

My great-aunt is the only one of that generation left. When she dies she will take all these memories that make up my extended history with her. For years, my cousin and I have talked about the need to sit down and record, but in the meantime, Aunt Peachy writes for us.