The Creepies

Sometimes, Mom was just downright creepy. When she and Dad went to Europe in the early 70s, they stopped in merry old England first. Of course, while in London, they visited the Tower, a confining thing with dozens of narrow steps winding up and into the room where Mary, Queen of Scots, among others, was imprisoned by Queen Elizabeth. Mom climbed the steps ahead of Dad but just as they approached the last steps prior to entry to the tower rooms, Mom stopped short. She claimed she hyperventilated, grew dizzy, and then nauseous. Believing the climb, and probably the English food they had eaten for lunch, triggered the attack, Dad encouraged her to take deep breaths and wait a bit before proceeding. Even then, Mom said her knees grew weak and she wanted to weep. She was not winded but suffered from the kind of queasiness one gets after seeing a dog hit by a car or someone getting her head chopped off. Anyway, she refused to go one step further and insisted they turn around and get the heck out of that dark, dank tower. Dad's Mary did not want to visit Queen Mary's cell. Otherwise, she loved England and said she felt quite a home while there. She hated France and thought the Germans were loud and overbearing. Maybe it was a genetic thing: part of the family hails from Britannia, after all. Mom hinted at reincarnation, but geez. Although Mom, like Mary the queen, did have red hair.

Mary, Queen of Scotts

Sometimes, Mom was downright weird. She told me that one of the houses she lived in when she was a kid had a ghost. The ghost would climb the steps in front of her and while she could not see it, the sound of its foot falling on the wood preceded the sound her own foot made by just a few seconds, as if her footfall was the echo of the ghost's. Then the open bedroom door would close just before she reached it. No one else was ever in the bedroom when this happened; the door closed on its own. Her entire family agreed there was this ghost in the house, but then, they were all a dramatic bunch! They even name the ghost and claimed it was the soul of an old black man. I don't recall the name or why the believed the ghost to be a man, black, and old, but the ghost seemed to enjoy escorting little Mary up the steps. She said she was never afraid. Quite the contrary, she felt the ghost was simply another soul that needed someplace to rest during the Great Depression.

Other than the ghost story, in the entirety of my growing up, I never remember talking to her about astronomy, astrology, horoscopes, the moon and the stars, the afterlife, Jesus, or aliens, so when she looked up over her iced tea while lunching out one afternoon in New York City and she said, "You know, I don't think I'm from here," I naturally responded with a smile and a shrug. Anyone who had reached their fifties seemed old to me and I assumed they were already a candidate for brief mental lapses caused by dementia. "Of course you aren't, Mom. You're from St. Louis. Remember?" She shook her head. "Oh, don't patronize me, you little shit. What I mean is that I sometimes don't feel quite human. Like I came from somewhere else." The tone she used when she said this was serious, mixed with candid puzzlement and melancholy. She meant what she said. What the hell, Mom?