3 a.m. I'm sitting at the dining room table in darkness, save for the light of the screen. I would go old school, use my old Underwood typewriter, but the hard clanging of keys would wake up the family and I like to pretend there are people still in the house.
I could sit at the edge of my son's -- or daughter's -- bed and watch them sleep like angels. Then Maria would awaken, walk in, wearing only her nightgown, and place her hand gently on my shoulder. We would just feel together, both of us knowing, saying nothing verbally.
Alone. Drinking coffee from a cup with my kids' pictures on it and bourbon whisky from a shot glass I bought years ago in Las Vegas.
I remember a Sunday after church. The preacher, a guy named Torazian, & his wife, Lisa, played Trivial Pursuit with Maria & me and another couple -- don't remember their names. It was a while ago. The man was a right-wing, 2nd Amendment shoutin' Obama hater. But he was a damn good Trivial Pursuit player. A shame. All that knowledge wasted on -- not even a Fox "News," but a Limbaugh lovin' head. But hell, he went to our church, worshipped our God and his friendly laugh almost made you forget he was an asshole.
All gone.
Like the former youth pastor who divorced his wife, knocked up a woman and married another woman he knocked up around the same time. That's how life hits you. Point blank. Or do you just fade away? I don't know what affection the man might feel for the towheaded little boys left behind with the ex-wife. I only know I'd live and die for my kids. And my wife.
Funny, I write here in the dining room instead of in my study, a personal library with full book shelves and a tiny shelved closet where I stored more books. Recently, I stashed Kazantzakis's "The Last Temptation of Christ" in there along with classic plays -- "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" by Tennessee Williams, "Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf" by Edward Albe. Don't know if I'll ever go in that room again.
He doesn't like to talk about it, but my son, Max, said he saw some kind of ghost in there. Some strange apparation wearing plaid pants. "It was just a hallucination," I said. "There's no such thing as ghosts."
But there's the bed I can't lie in, the twin beds I collapsed and cried into.
People never to sit at this dining room table again. Just passing through our lives and the damn social media sites. In and out. Nothing lingers except Plaid Pants Man. Oh and those other ghosts, those dead kids who beckoned my brother-in-law outside the window.
"Come in."
I'm almost not scared anymore. Don't care if I only have Plaid Pants Man to get drunk with. I was known to wear a little plaid myself back in the 70s. I was in the primary grades of elementary school. My parents smoked pot then, I'm told.
I think you should always love people. Even the assholes. Who knows what they have to teach you at the table and chairs of life? I say before you know death & meaningful sadness, know what it's like to touch people and touch and touch like you'll never let go.