A story.

Within a story. It has ghost stuff and jewelry going on. Have a nice day.

A few months ago I took a class on memoir writing. It was a short class held as an event during a literary festival. The description of the class mentioned that we would be working with an object. This is a technique used to let your imagination and creativity move forward about the time and place the writer would like to dive into. I only saw that detail about the class on the way out of the house so I grabbed an object that I felt quite relevant: a photograph of me as a toddler in the apartment of the great aunt that also had psychic ability. It was the apartment that just a couple of years later she would acknowledge that I could see what she saw.

Aunt Anna was a short, stout woman with sensible shoes, a deep voice and a standing appointment for a weekly all male poker game. She smoked a lot. Her apartment had all the trappings of the Italian American woman in the Bronx in the 70s. Gold furniture, light fixtures with dangling chandelier crystals and clear vinyl covering on the velvet tufted couch.

(The Photo of me in the apartment where the first adult acknowledged we could both see spirits. Bronx, NY. 1969)

The tool of her work was a process called tabling. I thought for many years that it was just her process but I was to find out later in a New York Times article about a summer camp for mediums that it is a thing.

For Aunt Anna her table was three legged and one leg was uneven. She would ask it questions and it would bang on the floor to give answers. She stopped doing this for the neighborhood women when the local priest showed up at her apartment and asked her to stop. What a buzz kill.

Interestingly once 20 minutes into the class, the instructor mentioned using anything as a possible inspiration. “….medical records, tax papers….”

It was the mention of tax papers that did it for me. It sent me down the deep deep rabbit holes of my mind. Underneath the origami folds of my tired brain I decided to write about an infamous tourmaline bracelet of my mother’s. That in turn started me writing story after story about that time in my life. I didn’t see it then and honestly I don’t think I saw it before that class but those years in my early teens were frought. A lot of people in my life died at that time. Actually it was about a decade long spell of death. It occurred to me that it was all men.

Other than female relatives whose time it was to clock out, each one well into their 80s and 90s, the people in my life who had passed for all sorts of reasons at all ages, were men up until fairly recently.

Because of which, the majority of spirits that I talk to regularly, were men in their last life. I knew each one of them in their earth bound bodies. I find it funny as a queer woman who works to fight the oppressive system of patriarchy and someone who saw her work stolen all of her working life by men. It is the undeniable leaving of their bodies and their uncomfortable privilege and resentments that I’ve seen in my work that allows me to see the now as neutral, helpful souls of service.

Huh.

One note about the tourmaline bracelet: there were other pieces of my mother’s jewelry that stood out to me from my childhood but mostly due to how they disappeared. In thin air. The energies taking them in an instant. I’ve seen it with my own eyes.

Anyway, here’s the story about that brought me to that time. And in turn got me to start writing Men I Lost To Horrible Things—-which if you’ve been following me you know it’s a book about those men who I lost to horrible things.

THE TOURMALINE BRACELET

We had just gotten in the groove of a new life. A big apartment. A structure of how life would look. I’m not sure things were better but things were happening and I’ve always been one for change And action.

That tourmaline bracelet was big and unusual. Mid-century and extraordinary. My mother treasured it. It wasn’t traditionally glamourous like the other pieces my dad had bought for her during their marriage but it was fabulous.

The shards of the green tourmaline set in gold. Lined up vertically on the wrist. It looked like a sky line with its reflection in the water. I would try it on and feel the heft of the piece on my young arm. I would pull out all her jewelry often and put on as much as my body could hold. My mom with her new York sneer would say, “You can have it all when I’m dead”

It must have been somewhat warm out, early spring I’d say. I can still see the blowing, very green leaves outside the big living room windows as I let myself in after school that day. My new latch key life.

I was met with the presence of our new super Jimmy. I don’t think it alarmed me. He was so good to us as we moved in a few months earlier----post divorce. Always helpful and my mother was comfortable around him. A rarity.

“I was just taking care of some plumbing. I told your mom I was coming.”

Okay.

I the cell-free time of the 1970’s that felt reasonable. I was 11. The mysterious ways of the adults illuded me. 

I called my mom at work to let her know I was home and that Jimmy was there and had left. Taken care of the plumbing, blah blah blah. I could hear the change in her voice.

“Lock the door. Don’t forget the chain.”

And within the hour she was home.

All the jewelry gone. The gold, the watches and mostly gems---all markers of my parents upward movement in the world were gone.

Jimmy had cleaned us out.