Sheila's LiveJournal

When I bought my condo in Long Beach almost a decade ago, I knew it was on the fourth floor and had a balcony with an unobstructed view of distant mountains, both features that pleased me. I moved in just before Thanksgiving, and was busy emptying and stashing boxes, and then – exhausted and frazzled (I won't describe how I almost killed my dog on our first trip in the elevator) – I set out to drive almost a hundred miles to spend Thanksgiving in Riverside County farm country with the family.

LosCon followed in Los Angeles on the heels of the family feast, and by the time I got back to the new condo I was really not into astronomical discoveries. Plus, the weather was cloudy for several days. And I was going to bed early and sleeping late, trying to make up for a serious sleep deficit.

Then one evening as Christmas approached, I went out onto the balcony for some reason and couldn't help but see the huge full moon rising in the east – directly in front of me. I was enchanted. If my balcony faced due east (as it did) could I also see the rising sun? Luckily for me, the sun rises late in December. I first saw the sunrise on the solstice, December 21st, and happened to notice which dark silhouette of buildings it seemed to rise over.

Okay, you're ahead of me. For the following year, I noted where the sun appeared to be rising in its journey as it moved (apparently) further and further north in the sky, then back again. And for the following years it has given me a certain shiver of connection with ancient ancestors to know I too can make marks to show the passing of time as reflected in the sun's passage, even though my marks are on a wooden balcony rail in a Southern California city and not in the arrangement of stones at Stonehenge.

I've mentioned before that since I retired from full-time college teaching I've been volunteering three mornings a week at a local hospice. Once morning a week, I take the dogs in too. I love doing this work; the house is a warm, friendly place, full of laughter and music and good talk and two resident cats. I learn a lot in the time I spend there. But this morning, I suddenly realized something that I think is important: Hospice is a place where we get to tell all our stories once again for the last time.

Everybody has a story to tell, but over the course of a lifetime we've probably worn out our listeners – family, close friends – from the repetition.Yet the stories remain important and powerful for us, and we yearn to tell them one more time. Or else there are family tensions that prevent the stories from being received – or received without blame and recrimination. Sometimes, a lonely soul will not have any one who ever wanted to hear the stories, or else everyone who matters has passed on already. What a burden it is to the soul to have life stories that have to go untold!

But in hospice there are loving people taking care of us and listening to us. And above all, there are volunteers whose sole job is to do whatever we need, and if that means listen to stories, they'll listen willingly. One of my favorite hospice patients was a ninety year-old gentleman who frequently said, “Oh, you wouldn't want to hear my boring stories!” But when he was assured I did, he gave me hours of wonderful yarns of growing up on a poor Illinois farm, living in a rooming house with other unmarried young men in Chicago and shyly courting the young ladies at social dances in the Roaring Twenties, running errands for the local Mafia, riding the rails like a hobo out to California to work in the (now non-existent) beanfields of Orange County, serving in the Navy during World War II. He seemed to have a need to put his whole life in perspective one last time, and I was happy to give him the permission, as it were, to do that.

I've heard stories about being a female impersonator in night clubs, a gay prostitute in Hollywood, the first Black, female mathematics teacher in her school district, a collector of semi-precious gems. I've seen photos of beloved pets and heard their stories. I've heard family anecdotes and family traditions, funny and sad. I've heard family ghost stories and strange experiences. Every day, it's something different.

And I see a great peace settle over people when they've had the chance to tell these stories they've been keeping inside their hearts, just one more time, or maybe for the first time ever.

If humans are language making animals, as Lewis Thomas calls us, then I would add that we are story-telling animals before anything else. It's a great privilege for me to share some of the vast stream of human experience through these stories.

This isn't a scary story, just a puzzling one, so you can come out from under the table now.

Many years ago, when I was still married, my husband and I and the oldest two girls (my youngest hadn't been conceived yet) were on vacation in England. For part of the time, we left the kids with Nanna and Grampy just outside London, and rented a car to do some exploring on our own. One night before we set out, I had a very strange dream that I had once owned a cross made out of moonstones and that I should look for it. I even drew the image I'd seen in the dream: seven, round, blue moonstones, about a fourth of an inch each, as the upright, set in silver, and four more making the cross arms. I liked moonstones well enough (they're my number stones) but I'd never owned any that I knew of. Still, the dream was insistent, so I pestered my husband to stop at every antique shop or pawn shop we encountered, all over the southern counties of England because I was convinced that “my” cross was out there somewhere. We never did find that cross.

Time passed, I had another daughter, the marriage broke up, and I went back to teaching full-time in a community college. I forgot about the cross, except as one of those unexplained dream imperatives that don't make any sense when you wake up. Then one day I was teaching a fiction workshop at night, and one of my students was a somewhat eccentric older lady, also English, whose husband had been in the diplomatic service. She took a couple of weeks off during the semester to go back home to England for a visit.

Upon her return, one evening close to the end of October, she came into the classroom and said, “I have a gift for you.” Now, teachers aren't supposed to take gifts from students, but this lady wasn't used to being told no. She laid a small box on the desk in front of me.

Can you guess what was in the box? An antique moonstone cross set in silver. Exactly like the dream image I'd drawn several years earlier but never found. Of course I asked here where she'd found it! But she wouldn't tell me, saying only that it wasn't a family heirloom (I think she thought I'd be unhappy if I found out it wasn't terribly valuable! As if I cared.) There was also a pair of moonstone earrings in the box that didn't match but went together fairly well. They weren't a set – or even found together – she hastened to tell me. But I already knew that!

I'd love to know where “my” cross had been found – because of course it's mine –
or what it had been doing in the years since I owned it. So what is this story? A ghost story? A massive coincidence? A tale of re-incarnation? Your guess is as good as mine.

Happy Halloween!

Do you believe in ghosts? I saw a lot of little ones tonight, going around begging for candy. But I got to thinking about the phenomenon we call ghosts. Where I come from – England -- everybody has a haunted house story, and it's no big deal. I've often thought about all the pseudoscientific explanations for the why and how of ghosts and apparitions, but I'm not really convinced. I guess you could say I'm an agnostic when it comes to ghosts.

Yet I must admit that I have seen ghosts of pet animals who have passed. The first one was a big yellow dog we named Buddy, a probably three year-old St Bernard/Labrador mix, a stray my daughter brought home to me, starving and exhausted. He was a sweetheart, and in the manner of rescued dogs, he was very grateful for his home. Then, one December about three years after I took him in, he began to develop seizures and was very sick. I took him to the vet where he was hospitalized. There they recommended an MRI when the traveling machine would come to their clinic in a couple of days, and I agreed. The following day, after teaching, I went by the clinic just to see him. I knew when I saw him that his chances of making it through the sedation they'd have to use to scan his brain were rather poor. I sat with him for forty-five minutes, stroking him and talking to him about what a good dog he'd been. And I gave him leave to go if he needed to.

Then I went home and put him out of mind. It was almost Christmas, so I had packages to wrap. I put some carols on and started to work in the kitchen. Suddenly, out of the corner of my eye, I saw him in the kitchen – a big yellow dog. (Note: There is nothing yellow or even light brown in my kitchen.) Of course when I looked full on, he wasn't there. But at that moment the phone rang. The vet was calling to say Buddy had just had another seizure, a very bad one, and they had been giving him external heart massage, but did I want them to do open heart surgery on him? Shocked, I said no; I couldn't put him through that. Then the vet told me in a kind voice, “Well, I had to ask you that, but to tell the truth, Buddy has already gone.” Of course he had! He'd stopped by to say goodbye.

The second story is briefer. My sixteen year-old cat Billy, a black and white tuxedo cat, had finally died a couple of months earlier. One of my daughters and her boy friend were visiting me, and we were standing in the doorway of my condo (they were outside and I was still in) while I looked for the door key so we could go out to eat. All of a sudden, a black flash dashed between us and out the door. Billy, I knew it. My daughter and I exchanged glances – she knew too. But the interesting thing is, the boyfriend who had neither known the cat nor believed in ghosts, exclaimed “What the heck was that!”

I have no explanation for either of those stories. Perhaps Hamlet's words to Horatio have it right, “There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy.”