I’ve just returned from the post office. Ostensibly, I was mailing a toner cartridge back to the manufacturer for recycling. However, as I confessed to Dave — the friend I ran into along the way — I was just using the errand as an excuse to wander around a bit. I awoke this morning with an itch to write, but it was more of an all-over tingling sensation, rather a specified spot that wanted scratching. So, I was hoping that a couple loops around the block might help narrow me in on a target. Dave’s suggestion prompted by the sticker book that his son Gus showed me, was to pen something on ghouls and vampires. Halloween? I thought, now I’m bobbing for metaphors!

But a gauntlet had been thrown down. How could I dismiss a challenge from a cohort with whom I’d shared long discussions on Thomas Pynchon and innumerable cups of rye whiskey over the course of four years together in the geographic center of Ohio? I could write volumes on the ghosts of college memories alone. Hmmm, did I just feel a bite on my neck?

I suspect that some phantoms are real. Yet, I’m more interested in the specters that haunt the imagination. These hobgoblins of the mind are the shadowy creatures of our own recollections, dreams, hopes, and fears. So much of life is choices; so much of the angst we carry is rooted in doors we did not open and the paths we did not travel. We cannot fold and refold time like a quilt, choosing a different pattern for the surface again and again. Even if we could, all the old squares would remain, less visible, but still very much an aspect of the whole. Shouldn’t we then, at least once a year, shake out these wrinkles and unbury the dead ends? Shouldn’t we welcome the ghosts of our former selves and remember, make peace, and even allow for some reincarnation?

Last week, I had dinner with a former flame from many moons ago. We caught up on daily details then talked at length about how much harder love is to sort now than it was back in the carefree days of our youth. Perhaps this woe is just another ghoulish manifestation of the head, rather than a reality of the heart. Be that as it may, the perception remains. I reminded my old beau of the time he traveled to Switzerland and somehow arranged to have a different poem arrive in my mail box each of the eight days that he was away. It occurred to me that I’d never figured out who he’d enlisted as a co-conspirator. Each missive was postmarked Washington DC, where I lived at the time. He shook his head: “Did I really do that? I can’t believe I ever had it in me to concoct such a lovely gesture. Where has that guy gone?”

I still have the letters as testament to that guy’s existence. Maybe he’s the one who needs to receive them now. Our romance may have been laid to rest, but the spirits that guided it remain within us. They need to be let free to soar and stumble and stir and share again.

We stayed up late into the evening, reading the same poems that we used to read to one another so long ago. Just two old friends crying like kids. Sometimes the costumes that we wear are those of our waking moments. These are the guises of daily life. Could it be that the airy beings haunting our dreams are more accurate reflections of our true selves? Happy Halloween.

RECUERDO
by: Edna St. Vincent Millay
We were very tired, we were very merry –
We had gone back and forth all night upon the ferry.
It was bare and bright, and smelled like a stable –
But we looked into a fire, we leaned across a table,
We lay on the hill-top underneath the moon;
And the whistles kept blowing, and the dawn came soon.

We were very tired, we were very merry –
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry;
And you ate an apple, and I ate a pear,
From a dozen of each we had bought somewhere;
And the sky went wan, and the wind came cold,
And the sun rose dripping, a bucketful of gold.

We were very tired, we were very merry,
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.
We hailed, “Good morrow, mother!” to a shawl-covered head,
And bought a morning paper, which neither of us read;
And she wept, “God bless you!” for the apples and the pears,
And we gave her all our money but our subway fares.