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she· verb
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06.01.03 When we last met, our heroine was off to Connecticut to visit the house where she grew up and where her father died. It was a tumultuous weekend and as she began to forge a new relationship with her mother, one that included dinners for two, not three, she discovered something so... Oh for heaven's sake. It sucked, alright? It's always very difficult for me to get back into this website after a period of suck and I've had another large dose. A near overdose, in fact. But I'm going to give it a whirl this time. The only huge gaps in this journal occurred when I was miserable, yet those are the times I wonder about and wish I could look back on. Were they as crappy as I remember them to be or maybe I'm sugar-coating certain times in an effort to delude myself? Who knows? I didn't write them down. So I'm going to forge through this particular era of suck. This part of my life when it's been almost a year since my father died and almost two weeks since Hula got laid off again. (Next entry, I promise. First, I go back in time.) When I was about 11 or 12, I became fascinated with the occult. I read and nearly memorized every book from 130.0 through 139.999 of the Dewey Decimal System in our local library and I very much wished, in typical prepubescent-girl-fashion, that I had either ESP or telekinesis. Some girls are obsessed with horses and unicorns while others get goofy for psychic powers, okay? More than anything, I wanted to see a ghost. Aside from spending an inordinate amount of time in the library, I frequently played in the backyard of the Congregational Church.
It was, and still is, a spooky New Englandy cemetery chock full of people who expired in the 17th and 18th century, including Mr. Lemuel Whittlesey, who died Oct. 8th, 1785 by the accidental fire of a gun in the 14th year of his age.
While not a real-life ghost in the sense I wanted him to be, nevertheless, he haunted me. About my age and at the time, dead nearly 200 years, I wondered a great deal about him and the circumstances surrounding his demise; what his family was like, where they lived, how they lived. I was morbidly curious and found out all sorts of things about him through ancient records kept in the town hall--he was born July 3rd, 1772, his parents were named Hannah and Lemuel, his brothers and sisters were Hannah, Dorothy, Chauncy (two of them) and Asaph. Most amazingly of all, I discovered where he lived. The house still stands today. I longed to finagle my way inside of it, but lacked the nerve to knock on the door and ask the current owners if they knew anything about the history of their house. I was certain it must be haunted. Years later I discovered a girl in my high school actually lived there, but again, was too afraid to try and get inside, though I did ask her about the Whittleseys and she told me that the backyard was once used as a burial ground (setting off all my dork glands at once). Either you have amazing predictive powers and know where I'm going with all of this or I'll have to spell it out for you: After all these years, I finally got my wish. I got to spend the night in a haunted house. Only the ghost is me. And the ghost is my father. It's us, all of us. Gracie at 7 is as dead as my father is now. So is Gracie at 10, 13, 17 and 21. But all I have to do is sit in the living room of my parent's house with my eyes closed and listen to that clock ticking on the wall and the ghosts of us return, memory after memory, voices and laughter and fights and tears and life. The clock marks time still, and has as long as I can remember--recording it, not easing it forward but urging it, pushing it, never letting it go back no matter how much I wanted to. Each second both a promise and recrimination. And I'm angry. Angry that all that's left of my father and myself are ghosts. Because the Gracie who went to Ireland last June is also dead. The Gracie who saw her dad for the last time a year ago tomorrow is dead, too. No new things will ever happen to either of us ever again. But I'm also grateful. Grateful that I have the ghosts and that they will be with me always. And I feel lucky. Lucky that the clock is still ticking for the rest of us.
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