Bob Bickford

Remember when you told me about parallel parking? You never really had to learn, not the awkward teenager way the rest of us did. You saw a diagram, drawn with chalk. It made perfect sense, so you went outside and echoed it perfectly in a car. Just like so, and just like that.

Everything is simple, about echoes, you say. It’s just knowing how to tilt your head and squint. Ghosts only move in the corners of eyes, and you’re a ghost so you should know.

It’s 5:15 in the morning. Early summer here, and it’s supposed to be dark, but I can see. That’s the thing I like best about summer—it’s usually light outside. Things glow, even in the dark. Rachael Yamagata sings “Over and Over” from my tiny speakers, looping over and over. You’re probably asleep, because ghosts dream too, and there’s a dragon egg beside your bed, lit blue.

I think a lot about forever, lately.

There’s a house on the corner of 20th and Pine, in Halstead, Kansas. It was our house, once—mom and dad and seven kids, and our granddad, too. Our back-then neighbor told me the house has been occupied for many years now by a lonely man, all by himself, who is quite proud of it. The grass my dad used to burn when it got too long for his machete looks like a green golf course. There’s a new front door, and the upended tricycles and my mom’s dead 1956 Plymouth Belvedere are gone from the driveway.

The scraggly pine tree I used to climb in the front yard (I dreamed about the top, but was never brave enough) has been cut down and replaced with something decorative—a Japanese maple, maybe. Something beautiful, with purple leaves that never tolerated children.

Sometimes I wonder if phantoms wander the place, laughing and crying. Our memories, the echoes of us little, more vivid than we were in life.

After dinner, my grandfather stood at the curb in front of the house, watching the road. In my recollection, he always wears a metal eye patch, from cataract surgery. He smokes the one Lucky Strike my mom allows him each evening, since she heard the Surgeon General’s report. I think it was his favorite time, and he went out to be by himself. He’s still there I think, holding his cigarette between finger and thumb, barely visible in the twilight. Ghosts go back to their favorite things.

(Remember that when you’re sad.)

I wonder if the new owner ever hears splashing in the garage that he built on the spot where we had our pool. My sister had a transistor radio, and I was swimming in cold water from the hose the first time I heard Frankie Valli sing “You’re Just Too Good to be True”. I fell in love with someone I couldn’t see—and started looking west, without being aware. It would be decades before I knew that wasn’t really the name of the song. It’s still too good to be true, and I’m not lost anymore.

(Even if you’re a ghost, don’t die first. When we’re both gone, meet me at the green house on Pine Street.)

Perhaps the man, the new owner, keeps the door to the smallest upstairs bedroom closed, the spare one my mom designated a “playroom”. We rarely played in it, because it had a very bad shadow that hadn’t been dead long and was still angry. Opening the toy box always ended up with hitting and pinching and pulling hair. I’m sitting here, years and years later, and wondering how a family with seven kids and a grandfather possibly kept a spare bedroom. It dawns on me that my mom must have seen the shadow too, so nobody slept there.

Maybe a dog named Smokey still wanders the back yard. He’s buried near the new garage, but I’m sure the man doesn’t know about his bones. Smokey was big and yellow. He belonged to friends in California, before we packed and moved to small town Kansas. My parents visited them a lot, and he fell in love with my dad. One day he showed up at our door, looking for him. It was a story that got repeated, because in family lore we lived a hundred miles away. I know that isn’t true, but it was a long way on desert highways, regardless. My dad put him in the car and took him back, but a week later he showed up again. Everyone agreed he had found his true home, and it was for the best he came and lived with us. So he did.

He was an old boy, and barely tolerated children. He didn’t want to play, and might snap if you tried, so he was just there, always moving through the childhood scenery. He still lingers, in the pink and green and gold long ago.

Dogs were put out in the morning, and came home at night. Sometimes, if you were walking to the library, you’d see your dog crossing the street and say hello and keep going. Smokey got hit by a car and the impact broke his back legs. He wore casts with blood seeping from them. When the plaster came off, he was too slow to get out of the way anymore so it happened again, and maybe even a third time. By some miracle, he survived all the cars and died of old age. One afternoon he was out in the yard, and he threw up and fell over.

My dad wanted to be by himself when he buried him.

When we leave, the people who remember us, who remember our laugh and our favorite ice cream, gradually vanish. They disappear too, one by one. It comforts me that this business is now between my dad and Smokey, so it doesn’t matter if their story leaves with me (and now you). It gives me the idea that love doesn’t depend on knowing where the bones are.

No matter how much I write, I can’t tell you everything because some stories don’t have words. I use crayons and do my best. Sitting here with the dark-light summer morning outside, I can only tell you that there’s no sadness in faded Polaroids. It all unfolds the way it’s supposed to.

I know these things because you told me about parallel parking. I’ve never stopped looking, and I found the song that still plays on the radio by a small swimming pool in 1967, didn’t I? Someday I’ll get to the top of the scraggly pine tree I never climbed.

The oldest pictures of when we were little haven’t even been taken yet. The Polaroids always move, never end, never stop, never die.

I’ll see you on Pine Street.

***COVER PHOTO BY DONNEZ CARDOZA***

When I was little the library was my favorite place.I was born in Lone Pine, California. My parents liked to move and so did I, for a while. I have roots throughout the United States, but I was mostly raised in Toronto, Canada.

My father was a psychiatric social worker who grew up in the slums of Boston. He was a tough guy who got an education on the GI bill and pulled himself out of his birthright. He married twice, the first time to a woman who left him a widower. Alone with a toddler, I suppose he was determined that it wouldn’t happen to him again, because the second time he married a woman much younger than he was.

She was the product of a Southern family; royalty that included the same Duke family that bought a university and named it after itself. Wilful and rebellious, she scorned Southern convention, rejected the closeted skeletons and wide streak of alcoholism that hid behind decorated formality. She disowned her family, converted to Catholicism, marched for civil rights, and married the older man from a poverty-stricken background. I am the oldest of the seven children she bore, one after the next.

We were brought up in curious contrasts. There were the economies that so many mouths to feed on a middle class income made necessary; (hand-me-down clothes, Tang and powdered milk, peanut butter for ten thousand consecutive school lunches), but my mother’s background dictated private schools, music and dance and art lessons.

I attended St. Michael’s Choir School and studied piano and organ at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto. I hated studying anything at all; my mother was determined that I should be a doctor and despaired over my future. I only wanted to read fiction, and did so endlessly. The library was my favorite, enchanted place (it still is). I didn’t realize I was in fact studying for what I wanted to do most.

My father’s plan to not be widowed again fell through, and my mother was suddenly gone when I was 16. He had been ill equipped to raise one child the first time, and now there were eight of them; the youngest only three years old. In some sense we lost him, too.

Life changed, just like that. My behavior guaranteed me a quick expulsion from my exclusive school. I did manage a high school diploma (by the skin of my teeth) but I was mostly happy to leave school for good. I lost an early love, and wandered to Los Angeles. I learned about the streets, and about living in the places that cause most people to lock their car doors when they drive through. I was blessed with the same genes that took my father through life in the mean part of Boston, and survived.

Eventually, I grew up and moved again, first to Atlanta and then back to Canada. I made a living in the ‘fixing cars’ arena. I live in a very old house on a wooded lot that is infested by dogs and turtles and parrots, and perhaps the ghost of a young girl. My teen-aged son is a light in my life who wants to be an author and a professional football player. I never tell him that both are nearly impossible, because they aren’t.

The library has continued to haunt me. When age said the possibility of a university degree was long past, I decided to try my hand at a novel anyway. Somehow I finished it, and have produced one a year since. I’m working on my tenth.

You can visit Bob’s Blog HERE.