Ghost Gathering appeared in the Arizona Republic, September, 2001.

It was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.


Ghost Gathering:
I-10 between Tucson and Phoenix


I travel east on I-10 past mile after mile of broken glass, tire skins, rusted axles and brown dirt and wonder how anyone could ever say there is nothing on this road. I went to college in Tucson, and every time I travel this stretch, I feel out of balance. Some years, leaving Phoenix and driving to Tucson was going home. Other years, the opposite.

Cars filled with 18 year olds off to college jam the road. Possibilities stretch in dotted lines in front of them. Retirees from Minnesota driving motor homes bigger than my house inch over the lane markings. The road behind them releases regrets.

Altars speckle I-10. Crosses edged with carnations, candles, letters and balloons are monuments signifying that at that spot someone’s life changed forever. My own crosses are not marked with wooden sticks and hand-lettered signs, but I see them three-dimensionally every time I make this trip on this road where I grew up, grew apart, grew together.

On the way to Tucson, I gather the ghosts. Sacatan Rest Area, with its brown round restrooms and vending machines and warnings about dangerous insects and snakes, is where I pick up the first one. She’s nineteen and bitter. Fire cracks in her eyes. She just buried her father. Just left her family. She climbs into the backseat, smacks her spearmint gum, pops a few M&M’s in her mouth and stares at the back of my head. We pull out of the rest area and are reminded to “Buckle Up: It’s the Law”. The ghost looks out the window, yawns, and refuses to put her seatbelt on. It’s 78 miles to Tucson. We’ll have a long time to chat.

I almost died at mile marker 199, where the second ghost jumps in, east of Casa Grande. Looks like an ordinary roadside, with the stray Adidas tennis shoe upside down in the dust and the coyote bones bleached almost clear, patches of its tan fur pressed into the dirt. Along the highway’s edge, the road dissolves to gravel. I was tired. Driving in the dark. Going back to college. Fell asleep. A semi truck behind me flashed its brights and honked its horn and my head jerked up and awake, my car swerving inches from the mile marker sign and a wooden fence post. I spun in the gravel on the shoulder and stopped, heart pumping, hair electric, palms sticky. I rolled the window down and smelled the asphalt and musky heat. Even with cars passing in both directions, I knew the land around me was deep enough to walk into and vanish, wrapped in a cloak of indigo night.

The second ghost has only one tennis shoe and hair so short she’s almost bald. Her mouth is stitched closed. She kicks the same things over and over with her bare foot and cries when her toes bruise. Time to wake up. Remain present. Accountable.

The third ghost lives at Toltec outside the Carl’s Junior. She waits, drinking an up-sized Diet Coke at the yellow plastic table, for me to pick her up. She’s got a ferret, a brand new college degree and bright red hair. Her ring finger is bare, but the suntan line still glows from the diamond she wore for two years. She comes to sit in the passenger seat, looking warily at the ghosts in the back. She hates them. She turns the radio to the pop station. I smile and ease the dial over a few notches. She doesn’t realize that the modern music she’s looking for has somehow become classic rock. I pull out of the parking lot and wait for a caravan of Wal-Mart trucks to enter the onramp in front of me. They spit black smoke into the air. The red-headed ghost coughs and drums the riff to a Foreigner song on her legs.

The fourth ghost hitchhikes on the hill just outside of Marana where the high school stretches into the middle school and farther down to the playground of the grade school. Cops wait here to catch the speeders. This ghost smiles and waves. She’s jumping into a new life, a new future, a new home. She’s hopeful, hoping. She squeezes into the backseat and the whole energy of the car shifts. I like this one. I remember her. She still wanted to play.

The ghosts ride with me into Tucson and through it. Past U of A, where I hardly recognize the campus anymore, and the signs above the construction zones tell me my mother’s tuition dollars are still hard at work. Past my old two-room apartment with the lima bean green door where I learned more in a year about what I would not tolerate than at any other time in my life. Past Greasy Tony’s where we’d eat Philly cheese steak sandwiches and French fries like our metabolism would never change, and we would always have hours in the afternoons to talk about Woolf and Faulkner.

Back to Phoenix and the car is heavy, carrying all the excess. I feel it in my shoulders. I hear it in the whine of the 4-cylinder engine shifting gears as we go from zero to seventy-five as quick as my little Sentra can.

Let them go. Let them go.

 hells of buildings litter I-10. The Picacho Motel is nothing but a monolithic sign in front of dust. The Precision Machine Shop just east of SR 87 stands empty, the glass in the window coated with green dust. Train tracks run both east and west along I-10’s westbound side. Cargo trains pull double-decker loads of boxcars painted yellow and gray past crossings where the red lights flash to warn no cars of its approach.

I wonder who stops and buys genuine Indian jewelry at the Dairy Queen off of exit 219. Who buys the “real” Mexican blankets and the black hills gold? Who stops along the edge of a speeding highway to breathe in the dust of trucks and travelers and eat a banana split and trade journey stories with the man behind the counter? Seekers. People searching for their stories. Thinking perhaps a bit of history in the form of petrified rock bookends or leather moccasins might answer some of the deeper questions of their hearts.

In the backseat, all four ghosts sleep in each other’s arms. The car is quiet, the whining of the engine vanished. I watch them in the rear view mirror, breathing together. I pull into the rest area and stop the car.

“Hey,” I whisper. “Move on now.”

They wake up, a collective quad of self-reflections, and slip through the door into the desert. The car smells of vanilla. I move forward, zero to seventy-five in record time. I breathe.

People say there’s nothing on this stretch of road. Nothing much, maybe. Just everything I’ve ever been, and the possibilities of everything I am to be. The mountains in front of me are rimmed in magenta and burnt umber. The sky is gray to the south, baby blue to the north. Dust winds a serpentine path upward. Ahead of me, the sun.

Land of the Living

“I’ve decided to buy an insurance policy that will cover my cremation,” says my mother, wearing a white sweatshirt with a green appliquéd snowman on it. She looks at me through her bifocals. “You don’t have any problem with cremation do you?”

I do. But apparently the whole family had determined that I didn’t. “Well,” I say. “Actually -- ”

“Funerals are terribly expensive,” she says. “They can be $12,000. That’s just stupid to spend that kind of money to put me in the ground. I’m already dead. I won’t know.”

I don’t disagree, but …

One of the numerous drugstore singing Christmas clocks that decorate our house at Christmas time goes off. O Come All Ye Faithful.

Maybe it will be different this time. I’m not nineteen like I was when dad died. I don’t live in the same town as my mother anymore. I have always assumed it will be different when she dies for all the obvious factors, plus my maybe naïve one that I will be better prepared because of all the work I’ve done. I will be better prepared by the simple fact that I’ve done it before.

I went to the cemetery to visit dad’s grave a lot the first few years. I liked sitting in front of the stone on top of his body. I don’t believe he’s down there. I know there’s six feet of earth and a coffin between us, and I know I don’t want to know what his body looks like now, but I was comforted nonetheless, knowing I was close, physically close, to something that had at one time been him. I brought a tape recorder to the cemetery and played music for him, read letters to him, just sat with him until the sun went down. His body was comforting to me. The bodies of the others held me. His body surrounded by living earth healed me. I smelled the earth grow damp with dusk, watched the sun set, listened to the jackrabbits in the oleander bushes. I sat with the dead, but I was surrounded by life. It helped to see everything hadn’t died. I watched two rabbits chase each other, hopping over the gravestones, whiskers twitching. I laughed. Other mourners came. Some sat. Some cried. Some yelled. But they lived, too. 

I sat with the dead, but I saw life.

I stayed all night at the cemetery the day I decided to move from Phoenix. I watched the moonrise splash the stones.  Chapel chimes rang every fifteen minutes. I brought a final gift to place in the earth beside his stone.

I had separated.

When I finished my final vigil, I got in my car, drove home, and began to pack. I haven’t been back since. I have separated. The earth, the night, the jackrabbits, the moon and the sun helped me do that.

Of course I couldn’t argue with the practicality of not spending $12,000 on a funeral. My mother is nothing if not bone-numbingly practical. I don’t know how she grieves, but for me, grief hasn’t proven to be practical at all.

“You never had a problem with cremation,” my sister says. “It was me.”

Well, actually…

It was me. Maybe it was her too. I honestly don’t remember. 

Here’s what I’m certain of:

I am attached to bodies. I don’t think I would have gone to a columbarium and played music to an urn in a wall. I don’t think I would have gone to a columbarium to tell dad mom was getting married again, or that I was leaving town. I would not have sat and prayed to the earth in a space made of concrete and stone. If my mother is cremated, I will be one of those people who takes some of the ashes and puts them in a blown glass vial and wears it around her neck.

I know now, after having done this before, that I would know when to take it off. But there’s that space – that indefinite amount of time – when it’s up to us, the living, to do the separating. If the body becomes ashes before its natural time to turn to dust, then aren’t the dead doing the separating for us?

“You should start thinking about making a trust to turn your assets over to us,” says my sister. “So the state can’t take anything.” She’s a lawyer. My mother is sixty-four. She’s healthy. We’re not millionaires.

To be fair, the comment isn’t as cold as it sounds. We would never keep money from our mother, and it’s true, unprotected funds can be used for health care expenses until the person is destitute. My sister works for the indigent health care plan of the state. She knows what happens. None of us wants that.

This isn’t necessarily a strange topic of conversation for a family, but…

Another singing Christmas clock. This one is round, white with green trim, with a Christmas tree in the center whose branches serve as arms for the clock. Silent Night.

I have visions of my mother, in her need to be prepared and fair, putting sticky  notes on every piece of furniture, every dish. Green for me. Yellow for my sister. I’d read of someone doing this in a short story. If I remember, the children in the story still disputed over who got what.

“I want the nativity scene,” says my sister.

Together, we turn to the table to look at it. It’s made of industrial strength cardboard and is now falling apart. The orange hay is glued to the floor. It was our mother’s when she was growing up in Brooklyn. I remember getting down on the green- carpeted floor of our house in Charlotte and playing with the manger figures. An angel hung above the barn. She was pretty, but sharp because of the pin on the back to hold her up above the star. Two other angels, without pins, stood safely outside the manger. There was a cow and a donkey, three wise men, two shepherds with a few sheep, quite a few of which now had broken or missing legs. There was Mary, in her standard issue blue gown, and Joseph in predictable orange. He matched the hay. The baby Jesus grinned from a bed of Big Bird yellow hay, apparently quite pleased to be stuck all over his body with hay needles.

“Fine, then,” I say, surprising myself. “I want the baby Jesus.”

Everyone looks at me.

“You what?” asks my mother.

“You’re not even Christian!” says my sister.

It’s true. I’m not. I just, in my three-year-old space, don’t want her to have the complete set. I have no attachment to the Christmas story. I have despised Christmas, in exponential increments, every year of my life. But I do remember holding that baby Jesus figure, stroking the smoothness of his belly and head. He was the only thing bright in the manger. Every other figure was painted with muted colors. His blonde hair and blue eyes (something which today causes me to groan) popped from his hay bed. He looked sweet and friendly. I didn’t want him to save me. I wanted him to have a happy life. From everything I’d read, it didn’t turn out so well. You can live your own life. I used to whisper to the figure. You’re not responsible for us.

The Singing Santa stationed by the front door, dressed in red from his hat to his boots, begins to sway from right to left. Santa Claus is Coming to Town. Indeed.

I didn’t have a particularly bad Christmas experience (if you don’t count the one when I was twenty-five and my mother told everyone I wanted socks for Christmas because she forgot who she told what to and I ended up with fifteen pairs of socks and nothing else). I resent, I suppose, the idea of forced family. I see my mother and sister regularly. I talk to them on the phone. I don’t really want to support the idea of mandatory consumerism. Not because I’m pious and believe in the essence of Christmas. But because, I guess, I believe life is continuous, not observed on a single day.

What will the baby Jesus figure save me from if I have it with me after my mother dies?

My stepfather offers wine. For once, we all take it.

“I don’t understand, Laraine,” says my sister. “What problem do you have with cremation?”

I feel my throat tighten. I’ve seen a cremation. When I trained to do grief counseling, I had to spend some time at a mortuary. I’ve seen embalming. I don’t have any doubt that the body is empty when either is performed. I know what my problem with it is, but I’m the oldest child and it’s my job to make sure that everyone else’s needs are met first. My mother is an oldest child, and that’s what she is trying to do – save us from unnecessary stress and financial obligation when there is nothing left to be done. She’s trying to be good. She always tries to be good. She leaves no trace of having been somewhere. She leaves a park bench cleaner than when she found it. She looks around to make sure she hasn’t forgotten anything when she visits. She erases as she goes. In some ways, I do this too. I don’t want anyone else to be obligated to care for me or to pick up after me. I am self-reliant. Don’t leave up to others what you can do yourself. My internal mantra.

Paying for her own cremation is my mother’s self-reliance. She will erase herself forever. She will think it is easier for us that way.

“It’s fine,” I say.

“But I don’t understand.”

“ It doesn’t matter.”

My mother is about to launch into a story about an expensive funeral she attended recently. Lately, she’s been very concerned about the cost of long-term care, funerals, hospitals. She’s been very clear on wanting no extraordinary measures if she is in a terminal condition.

We’re all in a terminal condition, aren’t we? It’s really just up to time.

Christmas clock number three. This one is white with a snowman in the center. You guessed it. Frosty the Snowman.

My mother got rid of my father’s things the week after he died. I managed to save a maroon golf sweater, a blue golf T-shirt, and a money clip with his initials on it. I would not have moved his things out so fast. But grief is different for all of us. I would have slept awhile in the shirts, looked at the shoes, held the watch. I would have kept the after-shave, maybe a razor, a toothbrush. Not forever. Just until I had separated.

I know now what it will be like.

I will keep the baby Jesus on the shelf next to the orange cat my father got me from Eckerd’s when I was seven. It says “I love you this much” with its yellow-gloved arms stretched out wide. I will have no living place to go with my grief, no cemetery, no trees, no grass. Just stone. Cement. Nothing soft. Nothing alive.

From time to time I will take down the baby Jesus and touch his head.

You don’t have to save us. You can live your own life.

And I will step outside, my own flesh now the only piece of my mother that will ever return to earth and find salvation.

Letter to a Stranger

I began my teaching career in Phoenix at an urban community college. When I asked my students to write stories about their favorite memories or people who mattered to them, I would inevitably get stories about family. Cousins. Second cousins. Third cousins. Uncles. Aunts. Sisters. Brothers. I would read these papers with a bit of sadness. I, with my Protestant Lutheran upbringing, could not imagine a quincinera with a hundred family members coming to my backyard to celebrate my turning fifteen. I could not imagine cousins who were best friends or great aunts who lived in the same house. Family was what you invited because you had to, not because you wanted to.

I come from a family of four. My parents were also products of families of four. My dad’s sister had two children. My mother’s brother had three. My aunt lived in Wilmington, North Carolina. My uncle in the suburbs of Chicago. We lived in Phoenix, Arizona for my adolescence, having moved from Charlotte when I was twelve.

My dad’s sister’s children have gone on to have children of their own. I would not know them if I passed them on the street. I honestly cannot remember all of their names. This is not because no one cared or because there was a huge rift in the family. It’s just simply because. After my dad died it became harder to maintain contact with his family. There was really no one left who knew them. And so time passed and the yearly Christmas card photographs showed growing children, then graduating children, then marrying children. My second cousins were getting married and not only was I not invited to the wedding, I have never even met some of them.
What would my students say?
           
Lately, I have been scouring the Internet for articles about my uncle or aunt or cousin still in Wilmington. They are active in the community and it isn’t hard to find some clipping here, some mention there. My aunt and uncle just celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary. My cousin Steve owns a corporate real estate firm. I scan through the pictures on his firm’s website and I am visibly surprised by his appearance. He is still handsome, but gray, and there is a weight in his face that I don’t remember. He had a mild heart attack last year.

I am eight years younger than he.

Steve is the one I remember best. We were living in Charlotte in 1976. Steve was sixteen and I was eight. My dad had a heart attack and was hospitalized for weeks. My aunt drove in from Wilmington, picked my sister and me up, and took us back to stay with her until dad came home. Steve’s sister was already out of the house, in college and preparing to marry.

Steve was funny. I had an eight-year-old-girl crush on him. He laughed easy and made me feel like everything was going to be alright. Every night we were there, my aunt had big family dinners. My grandparents were there. My great aunts. People who knew my dad. We ate at the long linen-covered dining room table and Steve cracked joke after joke and we laughed.

We laughed.

Everyone knew, except me and my younger sister, who was five, that my dad might never come home. He was only thirty-six. The heart attack was massive. Everyone knew.

But we laughed.

Steve made a joke about having “clout” after swiping his father’s Visa card. The ads for Visa at that time implied that the credit card gave the owner status – clout. I laughed so hard I spilled my glass of sweet tea. No one got upset. In fact, my aunt brought me chocolate ice cream. There was always chocolate ice cream. Every night.

And we laughed.

My aunt talked to my mother every morning on the avocado green rotary phone.

Everyone knew but us.

It was August. Hot, sticky, stormy beach weather. I’d been reading, as I always did. Hurricane Candice, which had been downgraded to a tropical depression, was passing by on its way northeast. My sister and I, living four hours west in Charlotte, had never seen a storm over the ocean, and my aunt thought it would be interesting for us to watch the ocean churn. Steve had just gotten his driver’s license, which I suspect made chaperoning his two tiny girl cousins around a bit easier. We went to Wrightsville Beach to watch the waves. It wasn’t raining yet, just heavy with black moving clouds and spanking wind. The red flag waved over the lifeguard tower. No swimming. Stay out of the water.

Danger is coming.

We walked on the sand, shielding our eyes from the pecking grains. My hair stuck to my neck. The ocean looked to me like a huge upset stomach, moving every which way it could to extract whatever was causing it pain. We couldn’t hear each other over the waves. I was awed by the ocean’s power. There was nothing anyone could do to stop the storm’s approach. There was nothing anyone could do to make the ocean smooth. All we could do was watch and wait.

Steve drove us to a refreshment stand where he bought us chocolate covered marshmallows from a vending machine. We got to drink real pop from the red can. No one stopped us from doing anything. They watched and waited.

Reading my cousin’s bio on his company’s website made me cry. I’ve gotten used to unexplained crying episodes in my life, but I usually know what to connect them back to. This time, I couldn’t figure it out.

Until now.

I read his bio, saw the blinking blue e-mail address and thought I should contact him.

I started the e-mail.

I closed it out.

I started it again.

I saved his e-mail address to my computer.

What would I say? I miss you? I wish we had known each other. Thank you for taking me to the beach to watch the storm. Thank you for buying me a piece of chocolate and for telling jokes that summer. It made a difference to me.

But we don’t know each other. Not now as adults. So what would I say?

I remember you staying at our house when you were in junior high. You were attending a football camp in Charlotte. You ate like crazy. I remember you as the closest thing to a brother I have had.

I guess I just wanted to say hello. I am part of your family too, even though we may never see each other again.

Hello.

I am a part of you.

Do you remember me?

Those three weeks we spent with my aunt and cousin were a bridge. Dad would come home, that time, but the Dad I knew had gone. The one who came home was angry. Sick. Small. The one who came home was no longer immortal. No longer a conquering hero. The one who came home was a human, not invincible, as I thought a father should be. Those three weeks in Wilmington were a precious limbo wrapped in the embrace of family who held us not because we agreed on everything, but because we were family, and that was enough. Those three weeks where everyone knew but us were the last three weeks of my childhood. The last time I did not know that danger was coming.

Steve, this is why I cried when I read your bio.

I saw my father’s father for the last time in 1990. He would be dead in six months. My father had died three years earlier.

“We always wanted the best for you,” he whispered in my ear at the airport.

What is that? What does that look like? To you?

I do not know. I will never know.

Hello.

Thank you for making me laugh.

You were a part of the last weeks I played with abandon. You were a part of the last weeks I believed that grown ups could make it all better. The last weeks I completely trusted I would be taken care of. The last weeks I could wait and watch the red flag flying without having to jump into the center of the storm.

Hello.

Do you remember me?

I remember you.

You are my family and you matter to me.