Echoes in a Hollow Space

I just realized I forgot to go public with Epiode 14. See below.


This is the only spooky Christmas story I have. As it’s a bummer I will understand if you don’t read it.

Background: I've had two fathers. There was my "biodad" who contributed the DNA to make me. I loved him, but we had a troubled relationship. And there was my step dad Tom, the father of my heart. Tom was a gift from the Universe for both my mom and me. He was the love of her life, and for me the only parent who gave me unconditional love, who made me believe that maybe the world wasn't such a crapper after all. A gift, and not one that every person gets in their life. I feel incredibly lucky to have known him.

In December 1992 I gathered some of my loved ones together for our annual Christmas dinner: my two BFFs and ex-roommates, Lynn and Carl (now married to one another for 43 years), my mom, and Tom. These were nice gatherings, everyone enjoyed everyone's company, and I really got into putting on a big show by cooking a special meal.

So right in the middle of all this—it may have been during after dinner chat, before the obscene dessert, I can't be sure anymore—when everyone was telling stories and laughing, the world—or at least my part of it—came to a standstill. I've tried to describe this sensation before and that's as close as I can come to it. I was sitting there in that room, but I was outside of it, too. I could see everyone talking, but I couldn't hear them anymore. Though I saw all this movement, inside of me everything had gone completely still, the kind of silence and stillness I've never felt before or since. I heard a voice, not just in my head but in my soul, if that makes any sense at all. My impression is that it was deep, but I can't be sure anymore and I can't be sure whether it was male or female, but it was a voice of great conviction. It said, "This is the last Christmas you will all spend together like this." With those words came the utter conviction that one of us would die before the next Christmas. I didn't know who, but I suspected it was one of my parents. Then it was like the bubble burst and I was back in the room just as before, only trying hard to pretend nothing had happened, to deny what had happened, because I didn’t want to spoil the evening and because I knew everyone would just try to convince me I’d imagined it when I knew I hadn’t.

This experience was not created by too much wine at dinner. In fact, after that experience I was cold sober. As much as I put it down to excess imagination or bad brain chemistry or alcohol or whatever, I also had a deep conviction that it wasn't any of those things. I didn't tell anyone—I felt foolish just contemplating it. But I had this sense of the clock ticking, of waiting. That sense only grew over the months.

I felt desperate in that waiting place, helpless, unable to do anything, and still I had that reluctance to talk about it because of the fear of looking foolish. I began reading up on spiritual matters and found that the experience I'd had was not unknown. It had happened to other people. This wasn't especially comforting (except to know I wasn't alone) because these types of experiences tended to be portentous. I'd had premonitions before—sometimes trivial, sometimes not—but just enough that my friends jokingly called me "Spooky."

My parents decided to go to DC on vacation and I began to focus all my worry on that trip, sure something would happen to them back there. But they came through fine. I'd put so much energy into worrying about that trip that the knot in my stomach began to uncoil. Autumn arrived and I really began to feel silly. Here I'd been worrying myself sick for months over something that was probably the result of mixing my liquor and I finally relaxed enough to tell Lynn about the whole thing. We had a good laugh about it over dinner one night. Two days later, just after dinner, my father collapsed with an aortal aneurysm. Ironically, that isn't what killed him. They repaired the aneurysm, but Tom's heart—that wonderful, giving, loving heart—was so scarred and damaged by a lifetime of smoking that it just stopped beating. They revived him three times but in the end they couldn't save him.

We got the word in the wee hours of the next morning. It was hard to take in at the time, but the nurse attending us all night in the waiting room—a big bear of a Jamaican man and one of the most compassionate souls I've ever met—said that if Tom had lived, his life would have been greatly diminished. He'd have been an invalid, and that would have been a living death to Tom, who had always been active. "Maybe his soul decided not to go through that," said the nurse, "not to put you guys through that." Oddly, these words gave some comfort in the weeks to follow, the months and years of learning to live with it.

On the drive home from the hospital I asked the Universe politely but firmly to never, ever, EVER send me a premonition again. What the hell good are they if you can’t do anything to change the events??? I was done with them and with the horrible waiting to see if they came true. I haven't had one since. I don’t miss them.

All Weird Things Index

I can claim no service for myself, but my dad was a Marine for 30 years. He fought through the Pacific campaign in WW II and the Inchon Basin in Korea. Tough, bloody campaigns. He was one of the kindest, most thoughtful, and gentlest men I've ever known. That wasn't necessarily the case when he was on duty. That was Business, and a different thing altogether. But we rarely saw that side of him, and never directed at us, only at fools.

I remember one time when my apartment was broken into and Mom and Dad came over to wait with me until the police arrived. When the LAPD showed up, Dad (who never forgot a face of anyone he served with) said to one of the cops, "You were once one of my Marines, weren't you?" The cop acknowledged that Tom had been his gunney sergeant many years before. Mom, who only knew gentle Tom, said, "But I bet he was much nicer than those guys usually are." The policeman looked a little embarrassed, but then he smiled and said, "M'am, in my experience, gunneys are never nice." My dad laughed so hard.

But it proved a point. Being a badass when it's required to get you through a tough situation is appropriate and will help keep you and those around you alive. But it doesn't mean you have to carry that badassery with you everywhere you go or use it as an excuse to lash out. There was still room in Tom's soul to be kind, thoughtful, and gentle.

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This reminds me so much of Temple Church which we visited in Cornwall. It was also built by the Templars. It's not just the style of the church—which I understand was a pretty standard Templar construction (they built them all over), but the peaceful little green valley that it was built into. They chose their spots well.


Full URL: https://www.undiscoveredscotland.co.uk/temple/temple/index.html


Temple Church, Cornwall

I'm not a Christian, but this was a genuinely holy spot. There was peace that surpasseth all. Some churches are like that, usually in quiet, out of the way spots. Others are merely hollow shells.

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Don't let anybody tell you any different: trolls exist in both sexes. From a female POV it may just seem like they're all male, and maybe the preponderance are (I have no objective evidence to prove it one way or another), but trolls definitely swing both ways.

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I have good taste. I know because Pinterest is always telling me so.

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It's rare when something lives up to its hype, but in the case of Fleabag, it absolutely does. A wonderful series, completely unique.

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This time of year I'm always so glad that I stopped following the Dodgers years ago.

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D*mino's: Pizza that tastes like it was made really, really fast.

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Donald Trump apparently believes that betraying our Kurdish allies and unleashing ISIS on the Middle East again will distract people from his impeachment. His usual bait-and-switch but it may backfire on him badly. Unfortunately, it also is going to kill a lot of innocent people.

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Crone

I thought I understood
but it was yet
another posture,
something not
comprehended
until skin ripples
on bones
and toes curl
walking the walk.

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From "Demolition Man," The New Yorker, Dec. 24 & 31, 2007:


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I think everybody goes through a clueless twat phase in their life. Some of us do it in our teens and twenties, some much later in life, but in the old days, the cluelessness was viewed by a handful of people who just shook their heads in disbelief and moved on. With the advent of the internet and so many people longing to be "influencers," that cluelessness is often on display for the whole world to see and has the potential of haunting you for the rest of your life.

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I think Trump's Syria move may be an attempt to have a safe haven in Turkey when he flees the U.S. legal system. A back-up plan to Russia.

I was tagged by mnfaure and was so very, very tempted just to update this entry from a few years back and pretend it was new. That wouldn't be sporting, would it? But that list is much more interesting. I've been squeezing my brain to come up with some more things. I'm really quite a boring individual and if I'm ever asked to do this again, I'm definitely using a previous post.

1. Although I'm right-handed, I'm quasi-ambidextrous in that I'm always doing things left-handedly. I wear my watch like a lefty on my right wrist, for instance, and, weirdest of all, I taught myself to use the mouse upside down. It seemed natural to me to go UP when I wanted the cursor to go DOWN.

2. I am related by marriage to the Old West desperadoes, the Dalton Gang. One of the siblings of one of my ancestors married one of the Dalton boys.

3. I once asked Danny Elfman if his mother was named Rosemary. We were at Madame Wongs, he was in Oingo Boingo at the time and between shows, I was drunk, someone dared me. I've been humiliated in retrospect ever since, but at the time I knew no shame. Hussy! (Hmm. Maybe I should have posted this to postsecret instead of here.)

4. There are three degrees of separation between me and Marilyn Monroe. 1) My friend, Stephan, had a writing partner I knew as 2) Bobby Miller. I later found out his real name was Arthur Miller, Jr., and 3) Marilyn Monroe was once married to Arthur Miller, Sr., therefore Bobby's stepmother.

5. I've been to the top of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. It has an open-air ramp winding all the way around the outside, always going up (naturally). When I got to the top, an Italian film crew was filming a commercial.

6. I've had my purse snatched three times, and my old apartment which I shared with roommates, was robbed four times. I am hypervigilant and distrustful as a result.

7. I have roughly 400 books in my To Be Read pile (really, three small bookshelves), and that's not even counting most of my nonfiction and the one or two boxes still packed in the garage. Can you say "sickness"?

8. My biological father was a lot older than my mother. Added to that, I was a late in life baby for my mom. As a consequence, the timeframe on my father goes back much further than most people my age. Dad was born in the year 1900, lied about his age (by one year) in order to join the Army, and fought in World War I. This also means my half-brother (now deceased), fathered by Dad in his mid-twenties, was two years younger than my mother. It also means that all but one of my nieces and nephews are older than me.

9. On another genealogical note: two creeps from history share a common ancestor with me—the genocidal maniac and incompetent general George Armstrong Custer, and the obscure, crazy, Nazi-sympathizing poet, Ezra Pound. I sure hope it doesn't run in the family. Why couldn't it have been somebody cool???

10. The house I grew up in was in the middle of the city (Venice, part of Los Angeles), but had open fields on both sides, which was quite lovely. However, this house no longer exists. Developers bought the entire block and turned it into a public storage facility. This makes me very sad.

Ghost Hunters of the day: I can't believe that goofy Brian is now a father. My only thought was, "I hope the mom isn't the psycho he was involved with in earlier episodes." (Not that it's any of my business.)

And what's up with the show being over for the summer? They were on all of six weeks, I think. Both of the episodes from last night—the Manson murders and the Chaplin studios in Hollywood—could easily have been hour episodes on their own so I don't see why they were truncated. The Manson stuff was truly creepy.

It was also interesting to see Chris Fleming of Dead Famous on the show (as seen on the Biography Channel). IMO, Chris is somewhere between Most Haunted and Ghost Hunters on the credibility scale. He combines tech with mediumship, though no mediumship was evident on the Ghost Hunters episode. I just have a very hard time buying "channeling" and orbs. I notice that Grant, Jason, and Chris will be appearing at a ghost hunt on the Queen Mary in December? Two hundred thirty dollars a head, if you wanted to attend. A little rich for my blood.

Interesting fact of the day: Today my biological father would have been 107 years old. I was born in the last quarter of his actual life, but it still amazes me that he was so old when I showed up, and that the anniversary of his life was so very long ago. It's like I was living with ghosts since the day I was born. Rest in peace, dad.

Random quote of the day:

"The life of the dead consists in being present in the minds of the living."

—Cicero

I swear to God this came out of the quote file after I wrote the two entries above. Sometimes the synchronicity of this file floors me.

Picture of the day:

I decided to illustrate this quote with this image.

Here is the photographer's story about that day.

No, not the firecrackers or the flags or the barbecue. The watching of Le Independence Day!

Every year I get suckered into watching that movie. I think, "I'll just drop in long enough to watch my favorite part, then move on to something else." But I usually wind up watching the whole thing. Last night was no exception, although I read while watching most of it. (It's not like the movie requires one's full attention at all times.) What I like about it is the sheer aw shucks unpretentious, unapologetic popcorn appeal of it. It doesn't pretend to be anything else but what it is.

What's my favorite part? Watching L.A. get blown up, of course. I enjoy watching New York explode equally well, but there's something about watching that ugly bank tower in downtown L.A. turn into smithereens that—in the immortal words of Laurell K. Hamilton—"flat out does it for me."

When I watched ID with a real live L.A. audience in a theater, one of the biggest laugh lines for that audience was when the space ship first comes in over town and the earth shakes. Viveca Fox's character wakes up bleary-eyed and says, "That's not even a 4-pointer. Go back to sleep." That was such an L.A. moment. I've said similar things myself.

The great irony of the movie for me, though, is that Wil Smith's character is stationed at El Toro Marine Air Station and that some key scenes happen there. Almost at the same time as ID was released, the Pentagon decided to close El Toro—it didn't survive the previous round of base closings. And the folks in Orange County have been fighting over that prime real estate ever since. Condos vs. private airfield vs. park, round and round and round. But the air base is long gone.

I visited El Toro once with my dad, The Marine. A sleepy little place, like a little town out in the country. Well, except for the big honking aeroplanes.

So, off to mom's for the rest of the 4th ritual. No firecrackers, but some BBQ, and undoubtedly some flags. She was married to a 30-year Marine, after all.

So, I was sitting in the waiting room of a hospital last week—waiting. My mother had surgery of a minor sort and the percentages were low that anything would go wrong, but life has taught me that you can't always trust the percentages. Added to that, I'm deeply phobic about anesthesia (harkening back to a hospital experience when I was six) and anytime I or my loved ones go under, I get real anxious. Although my mom is healthy as a horse, she ain't no spring chicken—so I was nervous as a cat on a hot tin roof. Animal metaphors aside, I had a bad tummy ache and couldn't concentrate on the stash of F&SF's I'd decide to catch up on. She came through fine, though, and the knot inside my gut started to uncoil when the handsome young doctor came out to tell me so.

My worry wasn't all melodrama, I don't think. Nobody likes waiting rooms, but having once spent a long, hard night in one they hold a peculiar echo for me, layers piled on layers of experience. Even if these experiences are not in the forefront of my consciousness, they always work on me. I really don't like waiting rooms.

My father, really my step-dad, Tom, died ten years ago last October. I've had two fathers. There was my "biodad" who contributed the DNA to make me. I loved him, but we had a troubled relationship—still do although he's been dead nearly twenty-five years. And there was Tom, the father of my heart. Tom was a gift from the Universe for both my mom and me. He was the love of her life, and for me the only parent who gave unconditional love, who made me believe that maybe the world wasn't such a crapper after all. A gift, and not one that every person gets in their life. I feel incredibly lucky to have known him.

In December 1992, ten months before Tom died, I gathered some of my loved ones together for our annual Christmas dinner: my two ex-roommates, Lynn and Carl (now married to one another), my mom, and Tom. These were nice gatherings, everyone enjoyed everyone's company, and I really got into putting on a good show with the food.

So right in the middle of all this—it may have been during after dinner chat, before the obscene dessert, I can't be sure anymore—when everyone was telling stories and laughing, the world came to a standstill. I've tried to describe this sensation before and that's as close as I can come to it. I was sitting there in that room, but I was outside of it, too. I could see everyone talking, but I couldn't hear them anymore. Though I saw all this movement, inside of me everything had gone completely still, the kind of silence and stillness I've never felt before or since. I heard a voice. My impression is that it was deep, but I can't be sure anymore and I can't be sure whether it was male or female, but it was a voice of great conviction. It said, "This is the last Christmas you will all spend together like this." With those words came the utter conviction that one of us would die before the next Christmas. I didn't know who, but I suspected it was one of my parents. Then it was like the bubble burst and I was back in the room just as before, only trying hard to pretend nothing had happened, to deny what had happened.

Now, I hear you thinking: PJ had too much cooking sherry, too much wine with dinner, too many aperitifs. I did drink that night, but I was not drunk, and after that experience, cold sober. Yeah, I know how much that scenario sounds like a bad piece of fiction, and I do write fantasy...but this happened to me. As much as I put it down to excess imagination or bad brain chemistry or alcohol or whatever, I also had a deep conviction that it wasn't any of those things. I didn't tell anyone—God, I felt so foolish just contemplating it! But I had this sense of the clock ticking, of waiting. That sense only grew over the months.

I felt desperation in that waiting place, helpless, unable to do anything but wait, and still I had that reluctance to talk about it because of the fear of looking foolish. I began reading up on spiritual matters and found that the experience I'd had was not unknown. It had happened to other people. This wasn't especially comforting (except to know I wasn't alone) because these types of experiences tended to be portentous. I'd had premonitions before—sometimes trivial, sometimes not--but just enough that my friends jokingly called me "Spooky."

My parents decided to go back east on vacation and I began to focus all my worry on that trip, sure something would happen to them back there. But they came through fine. I'd put so much energy into worrying about that trip that the knot in my stomach began to uncoil. Autumn arrived and I really began to feel silly. Here I'd been worrying myself sick for months over something that was probably the result of mixing my liquor and I finally relaxed enough to tell Lynn about the whole thing. We had a good laugh about it over dinner one night. Two days later, just after dinner, my father collapsed with an aortal aneurysm.

Ironically, that isn't what killed him. They repaired the aneurysm, but Tom's heart—that wonderful, giving, loving heart—was so scarred and damaged by life that it just stopped beating. They revived him three times but in the end they couldn't save him.

We got the word in the wee hours of the next morning. It was hard to take in at the time, but the nurse attending us in the waiting room—a big bear of a Jamaican man and one of the most compassionate souls I've met—said that if Tom had lived, his life would have been greatly diminished. He'd have been an invalid, and that would have been a living death to Tom, who had always been active. "Maybe his soul decided not to go through that," said the nurse, "not to put you guys through that." Oddly, these words gave some tiny measure of comfort in the weeks of decimating grief to follow, the months and years of learning to live with the scar.

On the drive home from the hospital I asked the Universe politely but firmly to never, ever, EVER send me a premonition again. I was done with them and with the horrible waiting to see if they came true. I haven't had one since.

I really hate waiting rooms. In the larger sense, all of life is a waiting room. We're all going to leave it, one way or another. It's the not knowing how and when that makes us antsy. I've gone through my materialist phase where I figured there was nothing after this life; I've gone through my spiritual phase where I was convinced something more came after. I still think there is an after, but life has a way of wearing down the sharp edges of conviction. I'm not freaked out by death. I don't want to die, but fear of my own mortality really doesn't dominate my consciousness. I'm more afraid of the death of loved ones. Having lost several of them, I feel I've done my share of grieving and don't want anymore. Unfortunately, life rarely asks for our opinion on that score.

So, when I die it's either going to be the Big Fat Nothingness and I won't know or care about anything else ever again, so why worry? Or, I'll get to see all the people I love again. Seeing those loved ones—all sins forgiven, all grievances put aside—has got to be worth the price of admission. Maybe I'll know for sure when the waiting's done.