musingsonwomenshealth.com

Reflections on 40 years as a doctor in Women's Health

Remember me, thou poor ghost, while memory holds a seat


I don’t think I believe in ghosts, at least I never have … But I am older now, and I’m not so sure. I have lived thus far on solid things; except for the wisp of my imagination, or the words I write to pin it down, there is no room for ghosts.

Perhaps it is because I’m not really sure what a ghost is. Is it simply whatever was that revisits? Is it a once-lost memory that surfaces unexpectedly; a long-dead face in a passing crowd you think you recognize when it makes eye contact with a smile; a smell that you haven’t experienced since childhood…? Ghosts are by no means simple. But neither is Life…

I’m old enough to have travelled many roads, taken untold detours, and visited places I had not intended. Am I a ghost without my knowledge: mistaking as a recognition of my existence the glance of someone on the street who smiles at me? I mean, I smile at anybody with whom our eyes engage even by mistake, by chance, or because I, too, am mistaken about them. I do not know if I am a ghost.

Nor do I know if visiting a place I haven’t seen since I was a child means that any smile from a stranger is intended, and if, being seen at all, it is merely as someone who is no longer there; or, for that matter, can pass unseen by anything but memories -mine, or theirs… Does it work both ways? Are those things I pass -the buildings, or scenes l once knew- now the ghosts; or is it me? I wonder…

After I retired from a long and interesting life on the Canadian West Coast, I decided to revisit my old childhood neighbourhood in the post-war prairies. My most vivid memories of the Winnipeg days were of huge winter snowbanks along the just-ploughed roads near my house where we used to build our forts: cold and dangerous redoubts used for snowballing the little Morley bus that used to slip its way along the still icy streets.

But I chose to visit in summer this time, and brave the flies and mosquitoes rather than the frostbite of the almost forgotten days of long ago. My house stood across from the grounds of a hospital -a group of hospitals actually. If I walked along the street perpendicular to those hospital fields where we used to play pickup baseball on weekends, it wasn’t far to the elementary school and its dirt-and-gravel playground where so many of my memories lived. But the school was too close… it seemed much farther to the little legs of my childhood.

Actually, try as I might, nothing fit. The street was shorter; even my house was smaller: its white stucco walls were shabby and cracked, and the big gable-covered porch where I used to sit and count the number of red cars that passed, seemed tiny. The witch who I had been certain lived in the crawl space above it would have had a cramped and uncomfortable life there; I was convinced that she left it in the darkness of night to stretch in the adjoining much bigger but unfinished attic where I was finally rewarded with a  separate bed away from my older brother downstairs. I remembered nightly dust from the asbestos insulation dropping from the ceiling in the glare of the streetlight just outside the window; I knew it dropped because the witch was walking around in the shadows, her hat scraping the asbestos from the slabs between the rafters. Even looking at the house from the street now made me cough… Does that mean I had just been in there again?

But no, I could see from the street now that the porch roof was far too small for a witch to squeeze under. Still, I was small in those days too; I wondered if, some 70 or years later, I was now just a slightly taller ghost: like her ghost…

The elementary school, close as it was, seemed only a smaller faded-brick copy of the huge imposing building on whose concrete front steps Charlie used to shelter from the prairie wind and take out his glass eye to show it for money. He and I used to spend all our spare change at a little corner store a block away. But even when I could hear the coins jingling in his pocket, I remember he never treated me to the red liquorish sticks I’d always loved.

The store was an obvious place to visit next, although I wondered if I should risk destroying those precious memories by seeing something different; something banal and far from the anticipatory excitement I used to feel as the two of us headed for it after school -he with his ill-gotten gains, and me with Boots, my faithful dog who always waited for me beside the school steps when classes were released for the day and seemed to know just when to arrive.

The little corner store was still there after all this time; the post-war houses that lined Morley street were still there -still old, and still hiding under the even older trees (although most of the elm trees had apparently succumbed to the Dutch elm disease in the 1970ies) -so maybe what remained were not elms… even a ghost doesn’t have all the answers.

The store still had the crooked wooden step in front of it’s door -the step on which I had a vivid memory of Boots saving me from a much larger dog who tried to bite me. I could still feel the fear as I lingered on the step for a moment and glanced around the area for the fearsome dog. It was a significant experience for me: since being saved from that near-death experience I have never had a fear of dogs; but standing there again, I could almost smell the dog’s saliva, see his teeth, and feel Boots squeezing between the two of us to intervene. For a brief moment, I was there once more; but maybe it was the steps, the little bell that hung over the store’s entrance door, or the smell of age that also greeted me like a memory when I entered.

What I remembered was a large cavernous interior with rows of cans, and cereal boxes towering above my 9 year old head, and up front by the cash register the glassed case guarding candies in front of it; the bowls of liquorish sticks, cherry Twizzlers and the tasteless Pez candies that we used to buy not because of their bland taste, but because of the novelty of clicking them into our mouths with their dispensers -they were still there, but sadly miniaturized and unappealing. The owner’s ghost -or someone oriental like him- still patrolled there, but leaning on his cane as he and I walked slowly along the uneven creaking wood of the floor. It was a sad ghost now; or was it just me who was disappointed…?

I bought nothing there although the old man watched me carefully from where he stood behind his cane, and then behind the counter. I decided not to ask him how long he’d owned the store, but I could tell from his expression that he was probably minding the place for his son… or maybe grandson. For a moment before I left, I thought I saw a glimmer of recollection in his eyes, but it was a wrinkled face, and the eyes were rheumy. I don’t think that either of us knew if we were just eyes passing in a crowd of two: strangers once, and strangers still.

 I left the store and turned the corner. There was an elderly lady leaning on her walker who stared at me as I passed. “Do I know you?” she asked in a slow rasping voice and mounted a tentative smile.

I stopped and looked at her for a moment, and then she shook her head -sadly, I thought. “I was a teacher at the school many years ago,” she continued, nodding in the direction of my old school. “I sometimes think I see a former pupil.” She stared at me for a moment longer, and then shook her head again. “I get confused nowadays,” she explained. “Sometimes I mistake my classmates for my pupils… It was so long ago…” She sighed and then turned away from me and pushed her walker forward in little uncertain jerks.

I was going to ask her if she remembered Charlie and his eye, but by then she had made it around another corner. And anyway, can ghosts really see each other, converse with each other? Or do the cares that infest their days just fold their tents like Arabs and silently steal away…?

I guess I’ll never know…

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gozzter

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