In the Old Days When the Dead Stuck Around

I confess its a little trick I have of thinking about the late Victorians and the Edwardians and all that happy ghost worship they used to do. My mother was a serious ghost watcher and say what you will, such people are always happily occupied.

One thinks of Virginia Woolf talking to her grandmother:

“We sit in the dark and wait for the dead to speak,” says Virginia to her grandmother—“and they drift into the room so softly, with their faint smell of mohair and whale oil. The smell is like nothing else in the world; the entering dead who waft over our hair.”

Lately as spring arrives and the days grow longer I’ve found myself dreaming of the dead–though not the abstrract chalky missing, but rather those who I have loved and who I still miss though my days are filled with bus schedules and the nearly private gamesmanship  of getting by in the political world.

I miss John Lydenberg, Professor of English at Hobart and William Smith Colleges who taught me how to read Herman Melville. I deeply miss his sharp, unsentimental humor and his unapologetic leftist politics which he learned at Harvard in the years before the second world war when pacifism and idealism weren’t yet sullied by all that’s come since. I especially miss his game of cutting out funny, overlooked newspaper headlines: “Young Couple Happy on Small Newspaper” was particuarly good. I thought of him the other day when I read: “Pope’s Condom-stance Under Fire” .

I miss my father who died on Easter Sunday 2000. One doesn’t need a reason to miss one’s father but today I miss him because I’ve been  reading William Manchester’s “The LastLion” about Winston Churchill and I know that he would have very interesting things to say both about Manchester as a historian and about Sir Winston. I miss my dad’s voice. I miss the way he used to sing to the dog.

14 years ago today I arrived home in Ithaca, New York with my first guide dog “Corky” who changed my life in a thousand ways. How I miss her! I could start crying right now.

So I love the odd, innocent, half-shy silliness of the Bloomsbury crowd. Tonight I want to wear a turban with a sapphire pinned to the front. I want to carry on a bit with my gorgeous and beloved dead and feel them touching my hair.

I don’t think that’s too much to ask.

S.K.

Author: stevekuusisto

Poet, Essayist, Blogger, Journalist, Memoirist, Disability Rights Advocate, Public Speaker, Professor, Syracuse University View all posts by stevekuusisto