Dear Ghost,
Letters to you are music. I sit here in the dark, touch a couple of notes, and listen for echoes. I find the black keys work best. Sometimes I don’t hear anything at all, but other times colors blossom and you’re there.
I remember being little, but I also remember being very old. That’s crazy, I know—as crazy as spending most my life looking for someone I saw once when I was a toddler, without knowing I was doing it. As crazy as actually finding you.
At three in the morning, an ancient guy with an attitude looks at me from the bathroom mirror, and I wonder how the hell I ever got to be a hundred, like something out of a damn storybook. You told me once that time is a map, and if I learned to read the road behind me, I’d be able to read the road ahead. Maybe when I see myself old, I’m just reading your map.
I dream about a birthday party—your 98th. There’s ice cream and music, and you laugh and tell me I’m in charge of the fireflies.
When I was one, I almost drowned in a bathtub. That’s another story, but not this one.
My mom never met a crisis that couldn’t be met with a crazy counter-attack. She decided I might try again, so I needed baby swimming lessons. That was before ‘water babies’ and all sorts of other modern things that have come and gone. In those days, learning to read before you were five didn’t happen. Everybody got married when they turned twenty-one. Nobody threw babies in a swimming pool.
Undaunted, my mom found a lady named Shirley who taught babies to swim. I know we had to drive a long way to get there, once a week. Her sitting up straight behind the huge steering wheel, a red-and-white 1957 Pontiac Star Chief, and I liked to stand up beside her and hold onto the seat back. She made me sit down over and over, like that kept me safe.
She was enough to keep me safe, but she wouldn’t be there for very long.
There was an airport on the way, and it was my favorite thing. (She told my dad, and he said maybe I would be a pilot.) It was only for small planes, and there were parked lines of Cessna and Piper, all the same white, but with different color stripes. Crayons.
After my lesson, we always got an ice cream sandwich, because that was both our favorite thing. It was our moment, our towel-and-wet-hair shared secret. We never had ice cream sandwiches otherwise, and we never had them later—just when I was a toddler, after baby swimming lessons.
I’ve liked ice cream sandwiches ever since, but I never knew why until you came along and reminded me. There are good secrets and bad ones. The good secrets are kept sometimes, like promises, so ice cream is a doorway to all the things I’ve lost.
I remember one day in particular. I close my eyes and play a couple more notes and I’m there.
The pool is aqua and so bright with sun that I have to squint. I want to be sure I can see before I go under, but Shirley submerges me before my eyes are ready, so I cry. I’m not afraid of the water—I’m mad. She wants to do it again—onetwothreeBobby—but fuck her, you know? I cry harder.
Shirley tells my mom that I won’t cooperate today, and maybe it’s best not to force it. They agree I had been doing so well and it’s too bad. My mom is embarrassed but she stays very sweet and polite and keeps her poker face.
In the car on the way home, we pass the airport and I happily point out the planes all lined up. (I can see them right now.) I’m standing up again, but she isn’t making me sit down. She tells me that we aren’t getting ice cream because I cried. That was the deal we had, Bobby. If you don’t cry, if you’re GOOD, you get ice cream after. We’ll try again next week.
I’m bewildered. Our thing has nothing to do with swimming, nothing to do with Shirley. We pass the ice cream sandwich store, and I turn backward to watch it disappear in the rear window.
Lives turn on a dime, and I think mine would have turned out differently if that had been the end. It might have been easier, better-ordered, more goal-oriented. I might have learned an important, valuable lesson that day. I might be sitting now in a luxury condominium looking at travel brochures, instead of sitting here in the dark, writing letters to a ghost. Life is a hell of a lot easier without magic.
I do know I inherited one thing from my mom more surely than anything else—a granite exterior and a marshmallow heart.
We turned into a big supermarket parking lot, a strange one we didn’t go to. She got me out. All the way in back, the ice cream freezer had a glass door that let out a breath of frosted cold when it got opened. She was carrying me and had to lean inside. The woman at the register smiled at me while my mom fumbled coins.
That day was even better than usual because my mom wasn’t sure if she was doing the right thing giving it to me when she said she wouldn’t. She had broken a good-parent vow. She wanted it too, though. The ice cream didn’t matter as much as having deepened the secret. If we were bad, we were bad together. Sweet.
I hope wherever she is now, my mom knows that breaking the rules that day probably saved me. I hope it makes her smile, remembering.
A couple of years later, I was still little when I saw you, ghost. Solemn and dark-eyed, you held your mom’s hand and watched me. That was about ice cream too, and I never forgot you and never stopped looking for you. I have a feeling I was seeing you not for the first time, but—again. Maybe your map shows past lives and other worlds, too.
I need to sleep, so I close the cover on the piano. I see fireflies. I see night sky, and lit colors. It’s warm.
Happy ninety-eighth, ghost. You’re going to be beautiful.
(Fragments and Letters: Finding Sadie)
Bob Bickford
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.
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