ghosts visit.
They don't really manifest themselves, they just lodge in my consciousness. Other times they simply whisper in my ear.
Laughter mostly comprises the bulk of my audio memories; it's what I hear when I remember folks whose ghosts sometimes visit me. I hear the distinct timbres of their laughter.
The egoist in me wants them to be more literary, my ghosts: to run away from me like Charlotte the child does to Seymour Glass and leaves a yellow scar of happiness across his palm from where he tried to reach out and grab her dress. Or to appear wise and distinguished as when they attempt to help Peony cross into her own afterlife. But my ghosts don't play that way.
You see, my ancestor worship has a Southern accent and thus are my ghosts as far from literary as a disembodied spirit of the past and the ordinariness of working people's particular cultures and lives can be.
Embrace the mundane, I learn from my ghosts. They are wiser than they look (or sound) on first appearance.
I recently observed a birthday. Strange events in our culture: birthdays. Stranger still for those still inclined toward ancestor worship, whatever accent or inflection it carries. I had a professor once who used to observe how skewed a culture it was that celebrated solitary birthdays. Your birthday is never yours alone; it is always a shared occasion. (It's that mammalian thing, I guess) That is, until your parents are no more.
My parents are no more. And I've had ample time to adjust to that change in my world. Except that my birthday brings it all back into focus again.
My birthday is made all the sadder, however, because it was on my birthday that my mother actually fell ill for the last time. She went into the hospital on my birthday 13 years ago. Within days she was asking us to take her off the respirator. She gave us all enough time to travel to see her, in the hospital, where we fulfilled that request. She died that day, within a week of her collapse, within a week of my birthday.
That can add a different kind of veneer to the day.
This year the lines of the calendar and the path of the moon have converged to put that day, in the shadow of my birthday on Easter Sunday. So in two days time, while the bulk of the Western, Christian world celebrates the foundation of their religion, I'll be entertaining ghosts. Without a handbook.
Wish me luck.
PS: I suspect they'll be sweet tea.