My Own True Ghost Story

Okay, here’s the one true story I have about ghosts:

I was twenty-five years old when my dad Michael died of cancer, and because my parents are divorced and my dad never re-married, my sister and I inherited his house. My dad was an idiosyncratic man–there was duct tape all through his house covering speaker and electrical wiring that he’d jerry-rigged so he could listen to music and turn the TVs on and off all just how he liked it. He would have long dinner parties and play the music really loud as he washed the dishes in his kitchen, which was covered with joke postcards and Far Side comics he taped up over hideous purple and green jungle wallpaper that by the time he died was almost 30 years old. He treated that wallpaper like a joke–he treated almost everything in life as a joke, but if that makes him sound like he was relaxed, I’ve given you the wrong impression.

My dad was seriously concerned with things being done in very orderly, particular ways that only he understood–he cared deeply about the kinds of pen he liked to write with, the order he turned on his computer equipment, the very exact method he had for taking out the trash. He couldn’t stand to see things messed up and, generally, the people messing it up were my sister and me. He loved us more than anything, though, so he never got angry, just exasperated and, mostly, since we didn’t live with him, he did everything for himself.

The day after he died, every fuse in the kitchen blew when we tried so much as to turn on the coffee maker. We never got the VCR working again. The duct tape came down when we tore the wallpaper off the kitchen walls so we could paint and rent the house, and though the stereo components remained stacked in the living room, we never again were able to get the music to play in all the rooms of the house.

For years, we rented the house during the winters, and visited in the summers. It was a one-story, rambling ranch and I always felt like I could smell my father in it when I first got there, or hear his step just around the corner. Always, I had a sense that as one thing after another in the house broke down, my father would have been tsk-tsking at our irresponsible management of his property.

In May, about five years after he died, I came home from a weekend away to get several messages from my sister. These messages told the story of a near-disaster up at Dad’s house.