Death and Mystery in Deepest Suburbia: A True Story That Happened To Me So There.

 It was 1968:  a great time for seeing flying saucers.  You could not go a week without there being another report in the news.  My mother saw three, and I saw one too one night after a report on the news alerted us to the fact that a mysterious green light was to be seen travelling slowly up the Willamette River Valley. 

 Out into the driveway ran my mother and I, and we saw the green light, right where it was supposed to be, moving slowly southward, while my father stood on the front porch and scoffed ‘It’s just an old airplane or something. Aw, yer fulla baloney.”

I wasn’t very impressed either.  I figured it was a light being towed behind a plane that was flying without lights, and maybe it was.  Hundreds of people saw it and everyone discussed the whole matter to no conclusion.  But Mom was one of those people who want to believe, and she did.

There were mysteries and wonders a-plenty at our house.

Now this was back when ‘What’s your sign?” was a common conversational opener.  My mother had a turn for numbers and patterns and studied astrology with great interest.  She soon became able to cast astrological charts, and manipulate all the arcana associated with that practice.  As long as I’m on the subject I should say that she was an Aquarius, my father was a Pisces, and I am a Taurus, which suits me.  

In addition to being a dab hand at astrology, my mother could read fortunes; cards, palms, and tea leaves.  She had taken a correspondence course in Graphology and had learned from that to analyze handwriting and read the psychology of the writer from the curves and slants and the way the ‘t’s were crossed and the dash of the signature.  Past lives and precognition were  matters of fact.  When Uri Geller appeared on television, my mother was so electrified she sat glued to the screen, yelling for me to go through all the drawers in the kitchen and the sideboard while she watched the television avidly, yelling “Don’t forget to check the clocks!  Check the clocks!”  Because Uri, it was widely believed, could send his peculiar powers through the television set into the homes of viewers, who would end up with bent cutlery and clocks that acted peculiar.  Fortunately, we were passed by that day.

  After that show there were some attempts at spoon bending made at our house.  She could make the spoon heat up - per her testimony - but that was it.  I couldn’t even do that much.  So after a week of holding spoons and stroking them like kittens while concentrating our mental energies, we gave up that exercise.  We just didn’t have the right stuff for spoon bending.

One day while we were watching The Addams Family, my mother told me a very peculiar thing, in passing; that when I was an infant, she would use the Ouija board next to my crib, the little bit of me her partner, to gain help in finding lost items or answering whatever question she put to The Other Side.  “Children attract the, you know, ghosts,” she informed me.

We did?

Now I knew better than to press my mother on any information she might volunteer, because she would deny it.  She did not like to feel that she had given away knowledge of herself without payment,  and she would make up a new lie every time the original story was mentioned, or simply deny that she’d said any such thing.  So I sat on the couch and listened to her tell me this, and inside I was absolutely - appalled?  Weirded out?  Set back on my heels?  We’ll go with that.

While she spoke to the spirit world, then, I assumedly laid there and blew spit bubbles while aethric forces directed the planchette around the board.  The fact that it did not strike her as odd or in any way peculiar that a person might not occasionally take up a Ouija board and sit next to their infant in its crib, using him or her as a small psychic pipeline, in order to summon the shades of the dead to help her find where she put the postage stamps, is what struck me then, and now, as extremely peculiar.

The ouija board figured regularly in my early childhood. So much so that I would be begged to join her.  “It won’t work without you,” she’d yell.

“Dad could help,” I said.

“Like hell I will,” he’d snort from his Barcalounger.

“Play by yourself then,” I’d say.  I wanted to go back outside.

“It won’t talk to one person.  Come here and do the Ouija board with me!” she’d demand.

I was probably the only kid in...miles, probably...who was ever regularly subjected to a demand like that. 

The first thing we’d do is recite The Lords’ Prayer.

I know.

Sitting facing each other, we’d balance the Ouija board on our knees, and put our fingertips lightly, lightly on the planchette.

And the thing would begin to move.

Did I say move?  It would skate. Shoot right out from under our fingertips.  We’d have to catch up with it. Once we all got into synch, then, it would travel around the board in swoops for awhile, just kind of enjoying itself, as my mother kept telling me to concentrate harder.

“Tell me what I want to know,” she would intone.

“What do you want to know?” I’d ask.

“Shh.”

“But how can I concentrate on it if I don’t know what it is?”

“Just concentrate,” she’d say, as her cigarette burned away in the ashtray at her elbow.

I remember that it would visit “Yes” and “No” a lot.  Once she had her answer, she would write something down in shorthand on a notepad, and then it was back to the grindstone. I spent hours of my childhood at the Ouija board, concentrating.  And sighing heavily.  

 As I grew older I began to wonder how my mothers’ wholehearted belief in the extranormal fit with her wholehearted belief in Catholic dogma. 

We had a holy water stoup in our living room, and a scapular that she used as a pull for the lightbulb that hung over the washing machine.  Holy cards held the place in the T.V. Guide.  We also had a nice landscape painting over the fireplace, several street scenes and some commemorative plates hung up here and there... in addition to the pictures of Jesus and Mary exposing their flaming, thorn-bound, anatomically accurate hearts floating in midair outside their clothes at chest level, as they looked at you in a very matter-of-fact way.  Flames splurted out of a little stack at the top of their hearts, and golden rays surrounded it all while the organ hovered there, dripping blood and glowing.  It occurs to me now what an awesome t-shirt that would have made, but the little Catholic girl who still lives inside me would be too horrified to wear it.

As if this weren’t enough, there was a large portrait of the Pope in the spare bedroom.  I forget which Pope. He seemed like a nice man. One night  my husband and I did the deed on the carpet beneath his beneficent gaze to keep my parents from hearing the bed creak, and the fact that the Pope was watching didn’t add or subtract a thing from the experience.

My mom liked the gory saints. Sure, a martyr was a martyr, but a mystic who could levitate, and had bleeding stigmata, and consumed the cast flesh of lepers was right up her alley. And yes, those are all real saints. Read about St. Agatha sometime. She was one of Mom's favorites, along with the arch grossaroni-maroni, St. Catherine of Sienna. Here is the greatly amended and sanitized version of her story: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catherine_of_Siena

When I moved out my mother claimed my empty room as hers, and my presence there was replaced by wall to wall images of the goriest, nastiest, creepiest saints in the Catholic tradition, topped off by - this is true, every word - a five foot tall crucifix.  I have no idea where on earth you would get a five foot tall crucifix unless you robbed a church. But there it was, where once had hung posters of Elton John, complete with Christ suffering His last agonies, depicted mercilessly. Poor emaciated Jesus, like a pitiable figure from Auschwitz, bleeding copiously and realistically from multiple places, filthy, barely clad...with his eyes firmly fixed on yours.

I showed my husband during the first, and last, time that we visited.  He hadn’t believed me until that moment.  There is something about suddenly seeing a painstakingly detailed tableaux fit for the Torture Chamber in Madame Tussauds’ Wax Museum (right next to the Lebanese Hook perhaps) looking you straight in the eye when you aren’t expecting to see any such thing that will make a certain impression on a person.

‘Jesus Christ,” said my husband.

“Yup,” I said.