Ghost

Today is warm (60F) and I go out for my daily walk from mom's place, picking a new route that avoids the main streets to her north and south. As I walk I realize I am very near the school I attended in second grade, then the street where our family's lawyer lives, which is also where I met my first real boyfriend. A little further on I pass the street with the name I can never get out of my head, but not sure why. Sometimes I forget who lived there. It's not till I see the dark clouds building on my left, the west, that I remember Michael Ruppert.
He was close friends with the lawyer's family, whose son had introduced me to that first boyfriend.
And what I remember is the two of us at a teen retreat my church gave, and we are sitting in front of a fire place in the main hall, everyone else is gone and we're just two lonely geeky kids happy to have someone to talk with. We really had so little in common, but we did, we were Catholic kids and it was the Midwest in the early 70s, after all. We talked for hours.

A few months later he's dead. Not just him, his whole family, shot on Easter day. We found out when we got home from a drive to my grandparents' farm in Indiana. My dad turned on the 11 oclock news, and there it was. I dont' think I quite believed it at first. But over the next months every newspaper had the Ruppert story on the front page, nearly every day. Go out to get the paper, see Mike's family sprawled dead on the floor of their grandmother's tiny house. Or the photos of his uncle, the killer.

But this is not what I was thinking as I got to Vinnedge. If I was thinking at all of anything except the weirdness of this Ohio town. I wasn't thinking about Michael at all at first. By the time I turned home I was talking to his ghost. He was surprised to see me. The rest is between me and Mike. But I was crying by the time I got to my mom's. The wind had kicked up. It was just about to rain.

And so this new age of reckoning begins

We're moving. Leaving New York. I don't want to go. When people hear that we are moving they ask my husband if he is insane. You know, they tell him, Iso belongs in New York. They ask me if I think I can stand it. I've lived here my entire adult life.  All my friends are here. Every job I've had since college, here. My only living son is here.

My family members take me aside one by one and solemnly grill me to make sure this is not some terrible mistake on my part. I'm not sure I can answer that. I tell myself, it's only a few years. It's only if I can stand it. It's only this or that.

I do my best, I know I agreed to let son have the loft and he's agreed to leave me a bedroom with many returns expected. He needs to be 22. He'll be ok. I look at the cupboard shelf full of teaboxes  and tears well up. I have been here this long. My children were born right there in that living room. My son was dying in that same living room. Their father too. On his way to death. So much love and pain has fit into these narrow walls and it's time to let go. It should be easier. It shouldn't be so far. I don't have much choice in this. No other solution would do for my husband. Believe me I offered many. Many.

Fact is: we couldn't move at all if it weren't for me. I have the job, I'm paying for it, I'm the engine of it. It's husband wants, it's what I'm giving him, but I can't tell you what the price will be or who will finally pay it. I don't really care at this point. Something needs to be done. Something needs to change. This is why I took him to Bali. This is why I've agreed to let him move us to Austin. Not because I want to be there. But because right now, my son doesn't need me and I don't know what else to do. Maybe by giving my husband these last years of his mother's life will change things.  Maybe by giving my son his freedom he will take charge of his life in ways I can't even anticipate.

It won't kill me to find out. And I can still cry.

I'm here.

I got to Mom's on Thanksgiving Day, and headed to the

I don't hate writing, or posting. I hate thinking. It's not helping me. The one place I get my dander up enough to post is full of kooks who hate me and my family and my family's family that I'm not even related to, and their friends, and their friends' friends. I mean, hate in real life, as much as that is possible with an intervening Facebook group. It'd be more terrifying of course if I lived in the same town with the rest of my family. A place I now refer to as Suckville, in honor of all the people who make it suck now more than it did when our family moved there in 1966. Back then my parents had to drag me there kicking and screaming from a suburb of DC. Now it's pretty much the same, except it's mom guilting me from NYC. And now I have to gird my loins and wade into the middle of what could be an episode of 48 Hours on ID, or just a very, very isolated and tense group of people in one or two places with the curtains drawn at all times so the stalkers can't tell which one of us drives a boxy car.

I suppose if you live in a boring little suburb with no cultural center and no intellectual life whatsoever, you will find that the local entertainment isn't tv, it's gossip. Even tv is gossip. They watch tv so they can gossip about what they saw there. And now we've been on tv, so we're fed into the grinder like Kardashians. I liked it better when we just moved there and no one knew us nor cared to.

A friend once endowed me with his earthly possessions. I meant to keep them for him, but after a few years I realized he had a place to live again, and didn't seem to want any of it any more. It wasn't completely up to me, I was still with my ex and the only thing he was sentimental about was stuff he'd made himself. Now, my ex, he's been dead for 8 years and I still have way more of the stuff he'd made himself than I can count. When I moved back in, after his death, I threw a lot away, not a lot, just some of the bigger, less successful paintings. They took up way too much space. A whole room. I rescued the ones I liked; had to drag some back from the street when Jesse came back from school and started carving out his apartment from the body of the loft. But it was all his father had, you know. For the kids. Kid. I should have had more of them so I'd never have to stop using the plural.

 It's mostly paintings, he made thousands of them. And pottery.  Not much of it is useful exactly. The ceramics--he was learning the form while teaching it to seniors or was it kids? At a summer camp when he was young. There are some esthetically pleasant pieces. I don't know what my son will want with any of it, but that's not up to me. I suspect he may throw it all away when I leave town. That would be sad, and not because I have any real attachment to the works. Sad because it's what his dad would have hated most, and he still loves his dad. And I never hated the man enough to hate what he made. Or lie that it wasn't any good. 

I'm up late tonight, or rather woke up really early-- midnight. I have no sleep schedule lately. I'm lucky I'm working from home. I'm here trying not to have a long, heartfelt conversation with my son because I think it would probably come out badly. What's the right way to tell your only remaining child that you will die if anything happens to him? I want to say that I want him to feel fulfilled in life, to pursue things he cares about; but it's all just a way of saying I'm terrified of losing him. I want his life to seduce him into staying alive so I can stay alive.  Isn't that what it means, to be happy? Content? I prefer fulfilled. It sounds more valuable, and rare, and rewarding.  I want him to be glad he's alive.  Because that means he won't take stupid risks, or be depressed, or sit on his ass doing nothing. But you can't tell people this kind of thing.

 

So I try to shut up and be positive. He's too old to have his mom even hinting around at how to live his life. He's too much like me to listen, anyway. 

I ran into that friend, many years later, out in the East Village. He recognized me, but I didn't recognize him at first. It was the Jamaican accent when he called my name that made me see his face as him and not some random Village guy. He'd aged so heavily since the day he left his boxes at the loft. He was wearing layers of lighter clothes to keep warm, none of them particularly clean. His hair was shot with gray and straggly. The edges of his eyes had started to yellow.  When he talked I could see how long his teeth had grown and I fretted for him, but it wasn't really my place to ask. He told me he'd gotten a subsidized apartment, "just saving it for my daughter Aiana. That's all I care about. That she has a good place to live when she comes back." I hugged him then for the last time. I never saw him again. 

Now here I am, saving it for my son.