With All The Lights Still On (Ghost Story, repost)

This is an old story from 2009 that I am reposting for a dear, sweet friend! The story still stands, but ages and life are way different 🙂

 

With All The Lights Still On

There is a dead bird on my front porch and I firmly believe that FedEx has avoided leaving my much-awaited package because of it.

My front door is surrounded by glass windows, the one above the door being the widest. It is this window that birds, it seems, cannot refuse smashing into, often causing them to die and burdening me with a fresh carcass at my door. Birds are all fancy feathers and songs till they’re lying dead at the entrance to your home. Then they’re just a nuisance; just stupid flying rats.

The sound created by birds hitting my window has never made it onto my list of dismissable house noises. It is loud, firm, and I confuse it with the sound of my front door shutting. And – if you couldn’t see this coming from ten miles away- I usually physically freeze, stop breathing and chalk it up to, yes…

a ghost.

If you know me, you’d think me silly for stories’ sake. If you know me well, you know I am deathly afraid of ghosts. Though I’ve never seen one, heard one, talked to one, or received any infinitesimal confirmation that ghosts exist, I am completely convinced that I am on the continuous verge of being haunted. Sure, who hasn’t slept for a week after watching The Grudge or refused to return a scary movie because the cover art is visibly ‘uninviting’? Who hasn’t, in their adulthood, slept at the foot of their parents’ bed after being unforeseeably subjected to a commercial for Mothman Prophecies? And really, when wasn’t the last time you made your mom and best friend come over to your house while you moved because-you claimed- a ghost was using your keyless entry to repeatedly lock you out of your car? (Yes, this is a true story. Happened over the summer. And, yes, my shame runs ocean-deep.)

I may not fear short skirts, competition, public speaking or public drunkenness, saying how I REALLY feel, admitting mistakes, falling off the bar or karaoke. But ghosts? Just.. Plain. Frightening.

On our recent trip to North Carolina I forced my sister and son to hear countless episodes of my favorite radio program This American Life. One episode, titled Fake Science, featured a story on amateur ghost hunters as well as audio of what they claimed were ghostly voices. In the back of my mind the bell of probable indecency rang being that I had a six-year-old in the car, but, really, I thought, Are you ever too young to be terrified? I have this horrible habit of considering my son adult-like, like me, forgetting that I myself am not much tougher than any average, dopey little girl.

For the entire duration of the program I reconfirmed with my son that he was not scared. No, he said, and asked even that I replay the audio. Here is when it’s a good thing that world leaders don’t call on me in times of national crises, because if my answer isn’t, “Fuck it! Let’s drink!” my default resolution is going to be, “Paralyzing fear is no excuse!” In other words: Despite anyone else’s presence, I can’t resist anything that interests me.

So we listened and discussed and reached our own unworldly conclusions. Then, so I thought, we dropped it.

My son instantly changed in the dark. That night he cowered at shadows and harbored tears of terror in the corners of his eyes which skewed his perceptions and caused him not to leave my side. Finally I told him it was time to take a shower. In the storm of refusal that set in, my son screamed, cried, even clawed his way out of the shower and gripped me with the finality of rigor mortis. “Please don’t leave me,” he begged, screaming. “Pleeeeeease!!!” My initial anger was broken by his desperate action. As I held my son in all his vulnerability, my heart broke, and, still holding him, I stepped into the shower. I was fully clothed: jeans, tennis shoes, t shirt, hat even. I stood with him for(what seemed like)ever, reassuring him over and over and over that “There are NO such things as ghosts,” and in that very breath seeing my arms full of goosebumps and resisting the urge to look over my shoulder to perhaps see some phantasmal figure shaking its head at my hypocrisy.

How is it, I questioned myself, that I got here like this? What course of action ultimately led me to be standing fully clothed in a shower, washing a crying six year old, claiming that the very thing I am ultimately, completely, and unequivocally afraid of does not, in any way, exist?

Aiden and I stood across from each other on the bathroom floor, each pitiable in our own respect. “You’re all wet, Mommy,” he said with a look that showed he knew I had just endured something unpleasant and unnecessary and may be on the verge of snapping into complete hysterics. The truth is: I was angry. I was angry at me because I do so many things I know better than to do, I do them with little thought, and my doing them causes upset in other people and reverts much more heartache back onto me. I was angry at me because I had to stand there in all my cowardice and explain to my son that I am scared too, that I have to choose to be brave, explaining to him in a web of words that I’m something simply stuck inbetween a woman and a child.

My best conclusion- my punishment of sorts- was dripping wet clothes and a bit tongue. Perhaps it is my own unwillingness to face my own fears, perhaps it is my complete disregard for other people on the fatuous premise that a little raunch never hurt anyone. But I do know this above that: You can’t cause a problem and blame anyone else for yourself being showered in its consequence.

I went into my room alone and laid in bed barely-breathing still with all the lights on, checking the hallway for any ghosts that may happen to pass by.

There’s “The Chase” and Then There’s Cutting To It

( I originally wrote this story on 9/19/2010, and am reposting it because it goes along with the post I’m making next 🙂

Aiden and I, after ordering all the desserts on the menu at the Ponce de Leon in St. Augustine this past summer. He said it was the best day of his life 🙂

My son has joined the Cross Country team at his elementary school and I couldn’t be more proud and by “proud” I mean “crazily promoting my kid as a future star athlete”. The school had their first meet this past Friday, and Aiden did amazing.  He came in fourth within his school group, and within the top 20 over about 200 kids.

Two hundred kids in one race… it’s almost militant, that kind of force running at you. They line these kids up in a row unending as the shoreline, with no real consideration for ability or likeliness to win, shoot the start gun, and let them flow forward at random and with varying degrees of effort. The most aggressive kids, of course, are leading the pack, followed by the kids who will never be more than average at anything followed by the kids who are busy looking at butterflies followed by the kids who will eventually shoot them all in high school. It’s like looking into a little character-development crystal ball.

My son ran his ass off. I have never seen my child work so hard at ANYTHING. I think that’s a shining moment as a parent: watching your child’s first desire to whoop it up on other kids.  As team parents, we congratulated each other and complimented each other’s child’s job. I walked around saying, “Oh Johnny did so awesome!” while thinking, “Johnny might do better without such butternuts for parents.” And “Oh Cole did sooo great!” while squinting my internal eyes and thinking “Oh Cole…you may have won this time….just you wait, you little….”

Because, while I may have never been accused of being “careful”, I have DEFINITELY been accused of being “unnecessarily competitive”.

I run drills with the kids during practice and I show no mercy. I don’t care how young you are or how delicate your self-esteem is, given the opportunity to whoop you, I’ll take it. When it comes to me, glory is gladly accepted in any form, even undeserved, and it is my staunch belief that you are never too young to learn your place in the food chain. 

Look, kids, there’s the chase and then there’s cutting to it.

Before many, many practices this year, Aiden has complained: “I don’t WANT to go!!! It’s harder than I thought it would be!!!!” But I’ve kept strapping him in, making him go, tailing him with a bull whip until the bitter end of practice.  The other day I got fed up and said, “Look, son, welcome to Life. Everything is hard work and that’s what you do and then you die, sometimes violently. Have those nature shows on Discovery taught you nothing? You don’t see antelope playing video games.  Antelope run their ass off. Get your shoes on before I turn lioness on you.”

I’m not cruel-hearted, it’s just that at my older age I’ve come to realize that everything I’ve done well, everything I’ve accomplished, has been as a result of choosing something and sticking it out. Everything good I’ve lost has been from behaving exactly opposite: quitting early.  This is not the result I want for my child. I want him, among other things, to develop fortitude.

Fortitude is something I see so lacking in people, almost epidemically.  I see so much starting-and-stopping, so much never-trying, so much co-dependence, and as a result, so much misery. Instead of BECOMING what they want to be, I see people simply hating each other for having what they want. It’s disheartening. Life is already hard, why throw so much effort after tripping up the runner next to us instead of quickening our own pace?  I have found that the quickest way to make someone hate you for no reason is to appear confident in your own performance. 

I got news for you, peeps: Life doesn’t give a shit about you, it doesn’t want to be your friend.  Life does not care if you’re having a bad day or you don’t like strawberry and there is only strawberry or if Phil doesn’t like you or if Carol is hotter than you or you wished on that Zoltar machine and you never grew big or your dad was cold-hearted or your mom’s nickname was Mussolini or you couldn’t sleep because you think your office is haunted because your printer keeps going off at 4am or because you’re too thin or because your boyfriend broke up with you to date a chick who’s fat enough to be silhouetted before a Hitchcock film or because you didn’t get enough to eat at Thanksgiving fucking dinner or any of the other things that people blame their shortcomings on.

So I got my kid up this morning and we ran in the park ALL day. Literally, all day. We jogged and sprinted and jogged and sprinted and drilled and drilled and talked race pace and course strategy. Currently, we both have all the flexibility one could expect from a NASCAR roll cage. I’m not trying to teach my son that winning is the goal; I’m trying to help him show himself something about himself, maybe something I haven’t even seen yet. Something worth all this effort. But I believe something good will happen. I guess that’s what faith kinda is.

And if it’s not being the winner every time or ever, there is definitely something self-proving about whole-heartedly putting one foot in front of the other…  until you either cross the finish line or pass out trying.

“Opportunity is missed by most people because it comes dressed in overalls and looks like work.” – Edison