The Incident

OK. I've thought about it, and I'm going to write about what happened yesterday, while the details are still fresh in my mind.

First off, a confession. I haven't been entirely open lately, as anyone who knows rudimentary Polish might be aware. The person who died on Tuesday morning wasn't some random neighbor. She was my aunt, my mother's sister, my grandmother's daughter. My mother has now lost three siblings in the last three years - a brother in 2005, another brother in 2006, and now her only sister, my Cioci Tozi. She has gone from being one of five children to one of two surviving children. This December it will have been ten years since my grandmother died. I find it very sad that three of her children have outlived her by less than a decade.

I bought my grandmother's house back in 2006, shortly before my second uncle died. I still haven't moved in, though I do maintain the place and sleep there on occasion. Two members of my family died in that house - my grandfather in 1972 and my grandmother's brother in 1974. Who knows how many people died in the more than 40 years between when the house was built and when my grandparents bought it?

I don't believe the house is haunted, though. I don't believe in ghosts, and I don't believe there was any unfinished business left in the house to cause anyone to leave a ghost behind, anyway.

In the years that I worked in my previous position at my company I did a lot of work with video. I helped out with QC and even video compression whenever I could. These tasks require meticulous attention to visual detail, and a certain speed of visual recognition - the ability to spot and recognize visual defects that are displayed for one field, 1/60th of a second.

That's a trick. A trick I eventually got down. I don't know if it's faded yet, but I do know that even last summer I watched a bee in flight poop, on several different occasions. I don't think that's something that most people can see.

So I'm not sure if I really saw something in the bedroom at the end of the hall when I was coming out of the bathroom. When I first glanced that way it looked like there was... something there. A dark shape, slightly bent over. With a hat. Could have been a skinny version of me.

Or just a play of light and shadows interacting with the floaters in my eyes. I don't know. Whatever. I blinked, and all that was at the end of the hall was the bedroom.

I wasn't scared. More sort of...annoyed. I don't have time for this crap, I thought. I'm tired, I'm hungry, and I still have a blog post to write. Besides, I needed to go into that room to get changed out of my lawnmowing clothes.

So I just marched down there. The lamp on the vanity against the front wall had been switched on, and the radio was blaring some obnoxious music from the local NPR affiliate. I expected this, of course; I have the lamp on a timer, and the radio is a clock radio, one of several that make noise at various times throughout the day. This was its time to come on.

I changed, not in any particular hurry. I was lacing up my boots when the phone rang. It was my mom, asking if I would be wrapping things up soon. I told her I would.

I folded my sweatpants and went to drape them over a suitcase near the front window. And that's when I noticed something...odd.

One of the two cabinet doors on the vanity was open.

I tend to notice details. In the past two years, I've never seen those little doors swing open by themselves.

Fine. Fine. I'm supposed to look in there, and there will be something belonging to my aunt in there, right? OK, I'll play your silly game. Fine.

I opened the door and saw just a few items. Two sheets of onion-skin typewriter paper, old but undamaged by acid. I opened them carefully and read. They were typed-out poems by the Romantic authors. Dull, turgid, unromantic stuff. Probably an assignment from typing class. The ribbon had been slightly out of alignment so part of each letter had a little bit of red in it. I've used typewriters like that. I doubt they make them anymore.

There was no name on the poems, nothing to indicate who had typed them, or when, or why. I folded them up and set them aside. Then I reached in and pulled out the other object, the thing that had been under the letters.

It was a plaque of sorts, with a religious painting of Jesus from the "suffer the little children" scene. I read the inscription, and the names that had been filled in on the blanks. It was a First Holy Communion certificate.

I was not at all surprised by the name of the person it had been issued to. Really, I had been expecting it.

I called my mom.

"I'm going to take a detour on the way home," I said. "I found Cioci Tozi's First Holy Communion certificate. I'm going to take it over there."

Her family was utterly delighted.



Tomorrow night is the wake, and Saturday is the funeral. Don't know if my blogging streak will remain unbroken. We'll see.

Take care!