As promised long ago, here is another story of Adventures with Dead People.
In August of 2016, I was buying some plants for my classroom. I passed up the Calloway’s closer to the school and went to Ruibal’s. The plants could be pricey, but my mother was a certified Master Gardener, and she said they were excellent. This was back when my mother was alive and could say stuff like that directly.
I’m really straining here to slip in some details you need to know without ruining the story, but I don’t know how to do it. I’m just going to have to lay it out.
- My grandmother Jean, my mother’s mother, had died almost a year before.
- Not strictly relevant but entertaining in its way: my grandmother famously had a “black thumb.” Presumably, my mother’s talent with plants came from my great-grandfather, who grew “dinner-plate dahlias.” My grandmother could kill a plant just by looking at it cross-eyed.
- St. Fiacre is the Irish patron saint of gardeners (also of sufferers of venereal disease, fistulas, and hemorrhoids, but you’ll be pleased to learn that those appear in this story not at all).
- I knew who St. Fiacre was because my mother had long searched for a St. Fiacre garden statue. No, St. Francis would not do. And yeah, the Interwebs have All The Things, but the cost of shipping a garden statue is shocking.
- My grandmother loved Gerber daisies. They were her favorites and everyone knew that. To this day, Dad plants them by his front door for her.
I picked up a few nice, murder-resistant, green classroom plants (sansevieria, pothos, some other leafy guys, no flowers) and then felt a pull toward a corner full of huge flowerpots. I did not need or want a huge flowerpot, so I thought, Nah, and then I thought, But then again… Oh, I wish I could explain how ordinary it is when it happens! It’s not weird. It’s not like being possessed (I assume, having been free of demons to date). It’s just a very compelling argument in my own head.
Side story: the purpose of such compulsions does not always even become clear. I was driving home from somewhere once and got close to a Barnes & Noble I liked. Now, it doesn’t take much to get me into a bookstore; it’s getting me out that presents the challenge. But this particular day, I was done with my errand and I really had to use the restroom. So I thought, no, I’ll just go home.
Barnes & Noble has a bathroom.
I know. But I could also just go home.
BUT YOU COULD ALSO GO TO BARNES & NOBLE.
We (I still don’t know who or what was the other party on the line) went around like this a few times. At one point I moved the wheel to change lanes and then said aloud, “No, okay then, I guess not,” and got back in the right lane and turned in to the parking lot, because apparently that’s what we were doing today.
I did the standard “shopping with dead people” bit: wander, keep an open mind, pick things up and put them down. Once I had used the restroom, I felt nothing compelling at all. Frustrated and feeling a little crazy, I left.
In the parking lot was the green Saturn sedan belonging to my ex-husband, Jason. Not just a similar one, but clearly his car, with the CELEBRATE DIVERSITY sticker intact. He had been in the store with me. In fact, unknown to me at the time, he was working there. But I hadn’t noticed him, and I had no idea what I should have done about it if I had.
I stood and stared at the car for a minute. Then I left. And I never figured out what the point of that whole thing could have been. Maybe it wasn’t about me at all; maybe he needed to see me for some reason. But I never spoke to him again, and after some years he died quite suddenly.
And yes, in fact, I did hear from him after he died, which was especially interesting because he was an atheist. His grandmother, a sweet-tempered and deeply devout Christian, is one of the few people who’s ever visited me in a dream, and I assume it’s because Jason himself simply did not truck with that nonsense. I remember only that the dream had snow in it, and that at the end, I didn’t want her to leave, so she started to…materialize, I guess. And at that moment I learned I did not ever want to see a real ghost. Ever. And thankfully, I haven’t yet, and I hope I never do because I’d be terrified.
Jason never would have been so overt—even in life he was so unassuming—so he sent me one of those “coincidences” that will never convince the unconverted but work quite nicely for me. The morning after I learned of his death, I heard a song by Throwing Muses, a band he had loved that I’ve hardly ever heard on the radio. I said aloud, “You have my attention.” The next one was Tori Amos’s “Cornflake Girl,” another deep cut from an artist he liked. “Okay,” I said. “If the next song is by Natalie Merchant, I’ll know it’s you.” And damnit, it wasn’t Natalie Merchant…exactly. It was 10,000 Maniacs, which is the band she was in before she went solo. Close enough, says I. I was moved, and a little awed, and grateful.
But why couldn’t he have just opted for one of her solo hits? There were plenty. And why “Cherry Tree”? It’s about illiteracy, of all things. And of all the Tori Amos songs he’d put on my mix tapes, “Cornflake Girl” had never appeared. It always goes like this. Some part of the experience is always not quite cooked to order.
I am quick to acknowledge that such a discrepancy between the request and the result could occur because it’s all coincidence and none of it means anything! That’s a very respectable and defensible point. You’ll never embarrass yourself in polite society with a stance like that. You’ll always win that argument. But this story is maybe not for you.
By that August, I had had a few of these experiences, enough to recognize the wordless pull of Psst! Over here! I did not need a huge flower pot. But I rolled my cart into the corner anyhow…and a door opened. I had never noticed a door in that corner of the greenhouse. I went through it, and to my left were large concrete garden statues. I knew Fiacre would be there. I recognized him immediately by his spade, but I checked the tag to be sure. Two hundred bucks was steep, but I knew my family had to have him. I lugged him up into the seat of the cart.
In those days, Ruibal’s had a little food market, and I had been planning to pick up a few groceries. But before I could get there, I was beset by courteous employees who wanted to help me get my cart to the checkout. I saw their point. St. Fiacre was heavy and two feet tall and cumbersome and leaning dangerously out of his seat. I let them take the cart and trotted behind. As we swept through the market, I grabbed a loaf of bread from a display and chucked it onto the checkout belt: at least I could check that off the list.
And St. Fiacre was on sale! Score! After I got in the car, I looked at the receipt to see how much I had saved on my discounted saint. The first three items on the receipt were “St. Fiacre” and “Grandma’s Perfect White Bread” and “Gerber Daisy.”
I had not bought any Gerber daisies.
I was dying to talk this over with my mother, but my parents were out. Finally, I left St. Fiacre by the back fence where they’d see him right away when they got home. Mom said later that even though she wasn’t wearing her glasses (and her eyesight was terrible), as soon as they turned into the alley, she said, “Oh, that must be St. Fiacre,” as if she had been expecting him any day. When I spoke with her that night, she offered to pay me back. I said not to worry about it.
A few weeks later, I was visiting my parents, and Mom approached me with some cash in her hand and the oddest look on her face: a little hesitant, a little dazed. She explained haltingly that actually, it was my grandmother who had been looking for the St. Fiacre to begin with. She’d wanted it as a gift for my dad, who had taken up gardening in the last few years. She’d told my mother to buy it if she ever found one, and my grandmother would pay her back.
“But you don’t have to pay me back, it’s fine,” I assured her.
“Well…I’m not. She is. I’ve been keeping blankets in the bureau I got from her house. I’ve been using those drawers for a year and never saw anything. But today the corner of the drawer liner was folded up, and this was under it. So I think this is yours.” She handed me two hundred-dollar bills: the original price of the St. Fiacre.
I keep wanting to explain that I am not insane or stupid. I know how probability works, more or less. I live with garden-variety coincidence every day of my life and don’t get hung up on it. I can’t prove anything or convince anyone, and I promise I’ll never try because that would be crazy. It’s not the things that happen. It’s the way they feel when they do.
I’ve been sad lately, and agitation seems to cause static in my reception. So it’s been quiet in my little World of Woo-woo. But last week I went out for a walk for the first time in a while. I wondered what it might be like to feel my mother’s spirit so surely that she could tell me where to turn. Not that it mattered where I walked, but just to feel her, to be less lonely. And I got the urge to cross the street at a random point. I didn’t credit the idea with any particular importance. Then again, what would it hurt to just go with it? Why not? It was late at night. No cars, little light. As I crossed, I said in my head, I hope you know that normal people call this mental illness. Now I was on the other side of the street. Looked pretty much the same. But now I was close enough to see a mailbox that stood in shadow; I almost walked past it before I turned around. It was decorated with astonishingly realistic butterflies: one of my mother’s many sigils (probably the most conventional one in a long list that includes carousel horses and Jackson’s chameleons). It was beautiful. It didn’t change my fate or anything. But I got to see it because I crossed the street. That’s all. It’s like that.
The Sabbaticle 