Not in My Wildest Dreams

Late middle age has crept up on me, and I can still honestly say it is the most terrifying nightmare I've ever had. In it, I am at a wake for my maternal grandparents. In reality, my grandmother died in the mid 1970s and my grandfather, years before her, in the mid-1930s. 

Image by Teece Aronin

At the wake, my grandparents are laid out in a wooden double coffin that looks oddly similar to a piano crate. My grandmother, looking like the 86-year-old she was when she died, is dressed in a snow-white wedding gown. My grandfather appears to be a young man, in keeping with his early death while still in his forties. Although he was not in the military that I know of, he is dressed in a muddy, wool, World War I uniform. It seems he died in battle and is being buried in the uniform he was wearing when killed. His hat lies under his hands which are folded across his stomach. His face and body appear to be those of a worn and battered store mannequin, hard to the touch with telltale chips all over. 

The room is filled with people coming to pay their respects, and suddenly the crowd parts to reveal my grandmother, padding around barefooted. Her wedding gown is gaping in the back like a hospital gown, and she is dragging an IV pole around with her. I look to the piano crate/coffin to see that my grandfather is no longer there either. I'm both shocked and terrified, thinking that if my grandmother could rise from the dead, hop out of a combination piano crate and coffin and scamper off to join the party, there was no telling what my grandfather was up to. 

Then a voice, a sort of Hercule Poirot presence, makes an announcement. He tells the crowd that my grandfather's corpse has been stolen and that both thief and corpse are still somewhere on the premises. 

Like someone who has fought her way to the surface of a deep and murky pond, I smash back into wakefulness. I am shaken but confident that my grandparents are securely ensconced, side by side in the cemetery - and not in one huge double-sized grave - just two nice regular-sized graves - as any long-dead married couple should be.

Peg Entwistle and the HOLLYWOODLAND Sign

I am afraid I am a coward. I am sorry for everything. If I had done this a long time ago, it would have saved a lot of pain. ~ P.E.

Poor P.E. If she had hung on a little longer, she might have been remembered for her life and not her death, and she might have spared herself the fate of becoming the ghost who haunts the grounds around the Hollywood sign - assuming, of course, that the rumors are true.

Peg Entwistle, photo source/licensing: Wikipedia Commons

P.E. was Peg Entwistle, the 24-year-old starlet who jumped to her death from the H of the HOLLYWOODLAND sign, the one with the freestanding letters high up on Mount Lee, the one that now reads simply, HOLLYWOOD and is an icon of the movie industry.

It was 1932. Entwistle had grown despondent over her career; after all, she was a washed-up almost was, having accomplished nothing more than a Broadway debut in her teens and a performance in Ibsen's "The Wild Duck" that inspired a teenaged Bette Davis to rave ". . . I want to be exactly like Peg Entwistle!"

Such is the lie of depression, that it has convinced some of the world's greatest overachievers that they are worthless and have nothing to live for. No doubt, Entwistle could be hard on herself, and reports indicate that she could be "moody." She is said to have shared the following about her struggles to nail a performance:

"To play any kind of an emotional scene, I must work up to a certain pitch. If I reach this in my first work, the rest of the words and lines take care of themselves. But if I fail, I have to build up the balance of the speeches, and in doing this the whole characterization falls flat. I feel that I am cheating myself. I don't know whether other actresses get this same reaction or not, but it does worry me."

According to IMDb, under the direction of Blanc Yurka, Entwistle played Hedvig, the girl in "The Wild Duck" whose life would end by suicide. Bette Davis, who was roughly the same age, saw a performance with her mother, Ruthie and was transformed. Two years later, as Entwistle headed to Hollywood, Yurka hired Davis to play Hedvig.

Entwistle, whose family moved with her to the U.S. from England when she was about five years-old, took some hard hits early on. Her doting stepmother died as the result of an illness, and her father was killed in a hit and run accident. Peg and her younger brothers were entrusted to the care of their uncle, an actor and theatre manager said to have gotten Peg at least one of her early breaks. 

Eventually, Entwistle and her uncle made their way to Los Angeles where Peg hoped to break into films. It was at the height of the Great Depression, and she landed a role in the play, "The Mad Hopes," which also featured Humphrey Bogart and Billie Burke. The play ran its course at the Belasco Theatre in downtown L.A. and earned Entwistle some helpful industry buzz. Billie Burke, by the way, went on to play Glinda, the Good Witch in MGM's 1939 production of "The Wizard of Oz." But according to online sources, while Entwistle was no doubt grateful to be earning a living, she longed to venture outside her "type," which was shaping up to be the amiable ingenue.

Entwistle got her chance to leave girlish roles behind in her one and only film, Thirteen Women, starring Myrna Loy and Irene Dunne. She played Hazel Cousins, a role with scenes running roughly 16 minutes in the first cut but slashed to just four minutes after the film failed to win over test audiences. Some say that the encroaching presence of the Hays Code, a massing force for Hollywood censorship, was to blame for some of the challenges the film experienced. All the same, having her most promising work to date snipped onto the cutting room floor, was a tough blow for Entwistle. "Thirteen Women" premiered in New York on September 16, 1932, the month following her death, and in L.A. the following November.

Entwistle's death is said to have happened like this:

On the evening of September 16, 1932, she left the house she shared with her uncle, saying she was going to the drug store for a book and then to visit friends. Whether that was a ruse, or she impulsively changed plans, no one knows. What we do know is that she made her way to the Southern slope of Mount Lee, site of the Hollywoodland sign, 13 letters, 50 feet tall, advertising a real estate development. She climbed the maintenance ladder at the back of the H and dove off.

According to reports, two days later, a woman desiring to remain anonymous, phoned the Los Angeles police saying she'd discovered a woman's shoe, purse and jacket while hiking near the sign. She added that she'd found what appeared to be a suicide note, and that when she gazed down the hilly terrain, she'd spotted a body. After the body was recovered and a postmortem conducted, the cause of death was determined as "multiple fractures of the pelvis."

Entwistle's uncle identified his niece after reading a newspaper account of an unknown female corpse and a suicide note signed P.E. found near the sign. He told police that she had been "suffering an intense mental anguish."

One macabre side note: When Entwistle was 19, she married actor, Robert Keith. Two years later she was awarded a divorce after alleging cruelty and claiming that Keith neglected to mention his previous marriage and six-year-old son. That boy grew up to be the actor, Brian Keith. Sadly, that Keith's daughter, Daisy died by suicide. Her death came at a time when Keith's health was declining. Two months later, he died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. His death was ruled a suicide, but Keith's friend, actress, Maureen O'Hara, insisted it was an accident and that Keith had been in good spirits. She added that being a Catholic, he would never have taken his life.

Entwistle's suicide caused one of those sensations vintage Hollywood is famous for. Her funeral was held at the W.M. Strathers Mortuary on September 20, and she was cremated and her ashes buried next to her father in a cemetery in Glendale, Ohio.

But that isn't the end of Peg Entwistle. Since her death, people have reported encountering a young blonde woman near the Hollywood sign, dressed in 1930s era clothing. She has been described as "sad," "brooding," and in one case, "disoriented." The smell of gardenias, Entwistle's favorite scent, has been detected during these sightings. She is said to vanish as suddenly as she appears.

If you should ever stumble across a time machine, set the dial for September 16, 1932, go to the Hollywoodland sign and wait for Peg. Maybe you can change her mind.  




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Starstruck Marta and the Torch Song

Their names were Marta and Joe. They were born in Poland before 1920 and met in the U.S. while still very young. According to Marta, they’d been married forever.

Image copyright, Teece Aronin

I met them in 1980, I believe. It was when they showed up at the Hollywood Hills office of Forrest J Ackerman, whose many idiosyncrasies included shunning the period after his middle initial. He was a literary agent and editor of "Famous Monsters of Filmland," a magazine children had been clamoring for since 1958. I worked for him during my summer vacations from college. 

Marta was slim, almost frail, and elegant with her soft voice, her white, free-flowing hair and her loose and gauzy garments. Joe fit her perfectly. Slim, neatly dressed, and with a pencil mustache, he could have been a movie director in the silent age of Hollywood - and she a leading lady. 

Unaware of Forry's sci-fi and horror niche, they had come hoping to find a literary agent for a book of poems by Marta. They were about her heart, her husband, her sons, her gratitude, and the buckets of wonder she could wring from a single ray of sunlight.

That sunlight was important because Marta was supposed to be deep down in the dark by now. She had been ill for most of her adult life with a heart condition doctors said would kill her before she could grow old. They also said she should never have children, but she defied the doctors and the odds, acing pregnancy with the birth of a healthy son. One of her poems was about the bright and perfect joy of hearing that baby cry for the first time.

Soon after, Marta aced another pregnancy and gave birth to another healthy son. Joe stood by her through it all, doting and protective. Joe, who had survived a pogrom and seen someone killed right in front of him, found himself partnered for life with a woman whose experience with death was just as threatening and, astonishing as it sounds, far more personal because the threat came from her own heart.

The couple was in their late sixties the day I met them, and they proceeded to “adopt” me, this apple-cheeked college kid from the Midwest. One Friday, they ventured from their home, a sleek, one-level mid-century modern in the California desert, to L.A. to pick me up for the weekend. Settled in for the evening, Marta, who adored Joe's voice, begged him to sing for us. Eventually he gave in with an acapella performance of an old torch song about the agonies of love, "I’ve Got to Pass Your House to Get to My House."

A little recent Googling revealed some history on that strange song I’d never heard before and hadn’t heard since. Released in 1934 on the Columbia label, it was recorded by a young Bing Crosby. The genre was "pop," which is a little hard to believe when you hear the song. 

That weekend was filled with white wine, delicious food and talk of everything from sex (which I had yet to experience), to desert weather, to writing, and there was lots of talk of writing. It was one of the first times anyone had treated me as a fully formed adult equal.

They both had so much to say, and every other word wore a fresh coat of grace. As to that old song, it may have been recorded by Bing Crosby, but you haven't heard it until you've heard it sung by Joe to a thrilled and starstruck Marta. 

Lasts

When my Aunt Izzy was very old, she and my Uncle Mel had to replace their refrigerator. They were people of deep religious faith, and in Aunt Izzy's case, that faith was coupled with a wide stripe of pragmatism.

Image, copyright Teece Aronin

"Mel, just think," she announced, clapping tiny, arthritic hands together, "this should be the last refrigerator we'll ever buy." I never heard whether my uncle embraced her realization as enthusiastically since she might as well have told him that the grim reaper was holding the refrigerator warranty and an extended warranty was not available. 

No doubt her enthusiasm had a lot to do with a conviction that something more rewarding than major appliance-shopping awaited her after death. Years later she put her faith where her mouth was by proving herself fearless of death. As she lay dying, she looked around her room at all the family bustling in and out, sobbing and waiting on her and sighed, "Oh, I'm having the most wonderful death!"

In 2014, four years before he died, Philip Roth, the last of a human chain of brilliant American writers which included John Updike, Saul Bellow, Kurt Vonnegut, Bernard Malamud and a doll's handful of others, made this pronouncement: "I can guarantee you that this is my last appearance ever on television . . . absolutely my last appearance on any stage anywhere."

He got around that by granting interviews via email and in his home. But still, that appearance may well have been the last - of a kind. Being one of your country's most treasured novelists, can make it hard to sever all ties to the limelight. 

I say all that to say this: Lasts are interesting things. Whether it's your last refrigerator or your last television appearance, the last anything is a small death. 

Bridge Years

The day that would have been my mother's 93rd birthday passed in January. The second anniversary of her death fell in February. She is still the first thing to slip into my consciousness at waking and the last to cross the backs of my eyelids, with the good and the bad and the slights and the love, just before I sleep. 

I have two kids in their upper teens, and lately I'm comparing my mother's situation when I was a young adult to the ones I face with my children. As I write this, my daughter is taking a "bridge year," in her case, a break between high school and college. Like many young people, she’s anxious about setting sail and hesitates over her options, even though I point out - more often than is helpful - that she doesn’t have to declare a major until later. Next year, if she's ready, she'll start at community college then head to Michigan State. That's the loose plan anyway, and it's given us a lot of time together. When we laugh, we are so like my mother and I, all those years ago.

Though I lived on campus and loved dorm life, I was home much of the time. I expected my parents to pick me up on Friday afternoons and take me home for the weekend - almost every weekend - a three-hour round trip. On Sunday nights, as though for the last time, I'd hug and kiss them and shout goodbyes, and they'd be gone - until they came back five days later. If they felt even the slightest discontent at doing all that driving, it never showed. All I saw were two happy, tired people. They would ask me how my week had been, and I, a merry egotist, would spend the next two days telling them. Much of that time was spent curled up next to my mother in my parents' bed, spilling the tea about all the things my father would rather not hear. We'd lie in that bed laughing and talking until my bone-weary dad would come in to say I really should be in my own bed.    

As to bridge years, I took one, too - between earning a BA and earning an income. My parents approved, provided I used that year to develop my writing skills, skills I'd just recently discovered. I'd sit at our dining table, portable Brother typewriter before me, plagiarizing a book on Laurel and Hardy. The plagiarizing wasn't intentional, and I'm sure my manuscript contained some embryo of an original thought. Still, if they ever peeked over my shoulder while I typed, my parents must have slipped away afterward to weep.  

I landed a full-time job as an employment agent when I was 23. I had gone to an agency for help finding a job and was hired on the spot. And that job proved to be a keystone in my career, so the bridge in my bridge year didn't collapse after all, except that I didn't need writing skills until much later. 

The other night I dreamed that I was an adult living with my parents when it occurs to me that I really should get a job. My mother asks if that means I'll be getting my own place, too. I tell her that I'll live at home while I train for the ideal job, and even after, since it will take time to save a down payment on a house. Upon learning that I plan to move out eventually, my mother sounds lighter than she has in years as she chats on the phone, sharing the news with friends. Later in the dream, I'm telling my father that he is absolutely correct to throw out all the knick-knacks and curio shelves before he redecorates the house, and then I question his choice of wall paint. I honestly did dream that dream exactly as described and hope I wasn't that big a jerk in real life. 

My mother and I were always close and are even now, in our own way, since some days she feels as real to me as if she were alive. As she lay dying, I drove almost 600 miles to surprise her. When I walked into her room, it was late, the lights dim, and two aides were struggling to make her more comfortable. They weren't struggling because she was hard to please; my mother was unfailingly appreciative and expressed her gratitude generously. But there wasn't a part of her body that wasn't breaking or broken. She was so ill and trying so hard to communicate her needs, that she didn't see me slip in. I sat by the window and when one of the aides looked up, I signaled her to keep quiet. When they left, my mother lay there, eyes closed. 

"Hi, Mom," I said in my best hushed-but-happy tones. It seemed that even a voice, too loud or harsh, might tear the tender body in the bed. She opened her eyes, looked toward me and started to cry. I cried too. I cried harder when, she said, "Oh, Mom. Mom." 

I gathered her in my arms and kissed the top of her head.

"It's Teece," I murmured against her hair. "I love you. I'm here now. I'm here."

"Oh, I'm so glad," she sobbed, and I wondered if she minded that my tears had wet her scalp.  You wonder a lot of odd things when you hold a dying parent. I doubt she minded, though. Very few things had ever bothered her. It took something as big as death to trip her up. For a while, I regretted telling her it was me when she thought I was her mother, but I think for her, by then I was child and mother. Besides, this was her bridge year, and who am I to say she didn't see her mother?    

Now that I've thrashed all this around in my head a few thousand times, I've vowed that the next time someone tells me about their kid who's studying abroad, nailing down a second master's, I will proudly share that my child might be living with me for years. 

Stand Still, Bright Eyes

The docent met my daughter, my friend, and me at the back door where a sign instructed visitors to ring the bell. She showed us through the old home and told us of the family who had lived there when it was new. 

A Victorian couple pose on either side of
their deceased daughter. Notice the 
parents' images are slightly blurred.This 
happened due to long exposure times 
required by cameras of that era and was 
caused when a subject moved even slightly. 
Notice also that the image of the deceased 
is much clearer. Boo.

Now the house, a beautiful orange brick Victorian, serves as a museum and wedding venue. It was decorated for Halloween with orange lights winding up the banister in the main hall and mannequins clad in vintage-style masks and gauzy or satin-y period costumes.

The docent pointed out a photograph of what we took to be two parents and their daughter (see photo at right). The daughter, seated between her parents, appeared to be in her early twenties, and her posture and facial expression struck me as a little apathetic. Then the docent explained. The girl was dead, sitting up, eyes wide open.

There were similar photos planted around the room, and I failed to grasp why photographing dead family members like this made sense, which, it turns out, it does. 

So the first thing out of my mouth was, "Why would people do this?"

Shockingly, it was my daughter who piped up:

"It's called Victorian era postmortem photography," she explained. "Back then, photography was new, and people couldn't always afford to have pictures taken unless there was a good reason. And because the exposure time needed to take a photograph was so long, people looked blurry if someone tried to take their picture goofing around in the yard or something. Even if they moved just a little, they'd look blurry. That's why so many of the photos from that time period were portraits. And if someone died, a postmortem photo might be a family's only picture of them."

I stared at her. She's 19 for Heaven's sake. "How do you know all that?" 

She shrugged. "I read."  

I knew that deceased family members are often photographed. We have such photos in my own family. But what I didn't understand was why Victorians propped them up with their eyes open. Then again, as Syd explained, Victorians held a unique position in time, when photography was there, but not really there. If they wanted a photo of their dead loved one in something resembling a living state, this was often the only way to go. 

Later, I did some Googling and found more photos, purportedly of dead Victoreans, and these upset me for days because these subjects were standing with the aid of a special device, the base of which was visible near their feet. Then I did some more research and learned that it's unlikely these subjects were dead. According to Wikipedia, thank God,  ". . . it is untrue that metal stands and other devices were used to pose the dead as though they were living. The use by photographers of a stand or arm rest (sometimes referred to as a Brady stand) which aided living persons to remain still long enough for the camera's lengthy exposure time, has given rise to this myth. While 19th-century people may have wished their loved ones to look their best in a memorial photograph, evidence of a metal stand should be understood as proof that the subject was a living person."

All of the photos below were said to be postmortem photos. That's why I was so glad I'd read that Wikipedia entry when I found this: 

and this,

and especially this:

It's likely that the only grief associated with this photo was that the parents had to pay for it.

If you happen to do your own research on Victorian era postmortem photography, be warned, it can be unsettling, and to this day I get cheery little teasers from Instagram saying they've found more postmortem photography I might like. And there's a lot of hoo-hah out there about living people being corpses and a lot of photos of perfectly healthy kids that someone will try to convince you are tragically dead. 


Even this photo (immediate right) which an eagle-eyed reader pointed out is not of the Victorian era (noting the woman's dress and visible knee), I'll leave here to prove some points. First, as with the claim that Victorians sometimes had their dead photographed "standing," you can't believe everything you read on the Internet - like me falling for someone's claim that this photo was of Victorians.

Second, whoever posted the photo wrote that the baby was dead and his eyes had been painted onto the photograph. Let's say the photo was Victorian, doesn't it make more sense that the baby is alive but with no clue what that contraption is that some stranger is pointing at him? And if you'd never seen a camera flash before, wouldn't your face look like that too? And in those days, as with the photo above of the girl with the closed eyes and lolling head, sometimes people had to settle for less than the ideal photo. 

So anyway, the next time you find yourself on a paintball field, cursing that paintball that really, really stung, be grateful that some Victorian photographer wasn't aiming at you. 

Swimming Toward the Christmas Lights

I'm writing this on Christmas Eve at the end of one of the most challenging years I can remember. 

My mother passed away in February, a friend died by suicide in September, another died the night before Thanksgiving, an old schoolmate lost her baby granddaughter to a rare genetic disorder, and another friend lost one sister only to have another nearly die in a car accident just weeks later.

And that wasn't all of it. There were other serious illnesses and even deaths among those close to me this year. 

Then, like wolves, arthritis took me down, and these days I use a cane on bad days.

Christmas has a way of stroking our cheeks with the faux fur of holiday stockings, then snapping our bare backsides with Santa's big belt. We find joy in how children wonder over Christmas and then grieve over our own memories of it and just about everything else - the sad, the sweet, the bittersweet. Those memories crystallize into something needle-like and pierce straight into us like thorns on mistletoe. 

A very wise woman once told me that something positive comes from everything that happens to us, no matter how tragic. After some introspection, I'm thinking she's right.

I challenge you to find at least one good thing to come from any memory haunting you this Christmas. Whether it's a lesson learned, a more compassionate self, a ripple effect that's touched others in positive ways, I believe you can find at least that one good thing and maybe more. 

Take me and my arthritis. I don't know how this'll all go down in the long run, but for now, I'm taking it as a scary, painful wake-up call to lose weight, eat better, and move more. I've joined my local Y and am reaping the benefits of swimming, including less pain, more flexibility and a bit more muscle definition in my back. And I'm learning that there are lots of treatment options available to me and that remission is a real possibility. 

I'm also looking at my cane with new eyes and finding that it almost cozies up the entryway. It leans against a table that holds candles and family photos. I think of my Aunt Izzy who lived not only with arthritis but a severe hand tremor. But those things didn't stop her from cooking and baking and lighting our lives with laughter and wit and fun well into her nineties. She's the one who smiled at her nieces and nephews just before she passed, telling them that she was having "such a wonderful death."

I'm choosing - and some days it's hard - to believe that having arthritis might ultimately boost my quality of life as well as my longevity because it's forcing me to make better choices about my health. 

And you? What light has come to you because of the dark? 

Whatever it is, may it guide you to a better Christmas - this year and for all the years to come. 

Aging into Beauty

My son, Jon and I were at a mall food court eating sushi one day. A man at the next table, a roughened, Sam Elliott type, said to Jon, "You look an awful lot like your mother, son."

My parents, young and old - and me, top left and middle right.
Image copyright, Teece Aronin. 

I thanked the man, Jon smiled at him, and then the man said, "Someday you'll age into her beauty." Seconds later, the man was gone, leaving Jon and me baffled and staring at each other. 

"So, which of us should feel more insulted?" I asked. Jon wasn't sure so we finished our sushi and went home.

Looking back, I see how I missed the point in a huge way. Worse, my question to Jon fueled all kinds of stereotypes and outmoded thinking. One can be male and beautiful, and older and beautiful. 

As the mother of an adolescent son, I want his ideas of beauty, aging, and gender to be as inclusive as possible, but is that how I acted? No. Jon should have thrown a salmon roll at his mother's head. 

I'm not talking about sixty-something celebs with stables full of plastic surgeons being beautiful; I'm talking about the beauty in real people - older, male, female, LGBTQIA - anyone, everyone.

While we're at it, why not push the envelope and assert that one can be flat out old and beautiful? The older I get, the more convinced I am that it's true. Then again, I have a dog in this race - an old dog - a beautiful, old dog.

And when are we going to stop using the word old as an insult? 

Here's my list of the old and immensely beautiful:

• The translucent skin of my mother's 91-year-old hands
• My father's face lighting up when I'd visit him in hospice
• My aunt, sick and weak in a nursing home, laughing herself to tears when Jon accidentally ran over my foot with her wheelchair
• Another aunt, dying and deeply religious, smiling at the nieces and nephews bustling around her room and proclaiming, "Oh, I'm having the most wonderful death!"
• Canadian singer, songwriter and poet, Leonard Cohen, who stayed sexy as all get-out until his death at age 82

When Cohen was in his fifties, he wrote a very funny, very sexy song titled, "I'm Your Man." A snippet of the lyrics goes like this:

Ah, but a man never got a woman back
Not by begging on his knees
Or I'd crawl to you baby, and I'd fall at your feet
And I'd howl at your beauty like a dog in heat
And I'd claw at your heart and I'd tear at your sheet
I'd say please
I'm your man

To my mind, the older Cohen got, the sexier he became. 

I once read that the lover Cohen references in Chelsea Hotel was Janice Joplin. With that in mind, consider these lyrics from that haunting, lilting, groundbreaking song:

You told me again, you preferred handsome men, but for me you would make an exception,
And clenching your fist for the ones like us who are oppressed by the figures of beauty,
You fixed yourself, you said, "Well never mind; We are ugly but we have the music."

Eleanor Roosevelt is quoted as saying, "Beautiful young people are accidents of nature, but beautiful old people are works of art."

True beauty is covered in crosshatch designs and marked up with scribbled arrows pointing every which way, and you learn eventually that looks, age, and attraction don't have much to do with each other. What counts is character, experience, a grasp of what's sensual, and who has the music.

Never Depend on a Goose

One of the saddest things I can think of is an animal lying dead by the road.

However, an animal which is probably dead, lying in the grass near the road is worse. There's the possibility that instead of being dead and dragged there by a driver or pedestrian, it dragged itself there and is alive and in pain. Or someone else might have dragged it there assuming that if it wasn't dead yet, it soon would be.

Throw in the misery of a cold, rainy day and someone who doesn't have the sense to just keep driving, and you have the makings of a truly rotten experience.

I had been on the road all day, it was close to 7 p.m., and I desperately wanted to get home to my kids. Suddenly, there was no missing it: about 10 feet from the curb on the lawns of a church was a black goose sprawled on its belly. Other geese trundled by as the rain poured down on all of them. 

I pulled into the church parking lot and thought about calling Animal Control. If it were dead, the goose needed to be disposed of and if it were alive, it needed to be tended to. It took four calls before I got a hold of someone. He said they didn't have anyone on duty at the moment but could tell me who to call, a woman who volunteered for things like that. Her name was Lillian Plentworth. I called the number. 

Ms. Plentworth answered the phone after two rings and within seconds my mental picture was clear: seventy-ish, no nonsense but pleasant, sensible haircut, short fingernails, no polish, and a rain slicker with a pair of waders in the hall closet.

Me: Hello, Ms. Plentworth. I was just driving down Raleigh Drive in Birktown and saw a goose lying on the lawn in front of First Presbyterian Church. I think it's dead but I can't be sure. 

Ms. Plentworth: Well, is it breathing?

Me: I don't know. I got out of my car and tried to check a few minutes ago but I couldn't get close enough. 

I didn't mention to Ms. Plentworth that I couldn't get close enough due to a years-long bird phobia, and having the birds be dead and soaking in the rain just makes it worse. 

Ms. Plentworth: Well, run over there and look again and call me back.

She hung up before I could so much as whimper. After she hung up, I whimpered anyway. 

I got out of the car and walked back to the goose. I'd forgotten my umbrella that day and was already soaked from my first failed mission to assess the goose's condition. 

Looking closer, the goose was probably dead, but I couldn't shake the notion that it was shallowly breathing. And since I'd gotten as close as I could without hyperventilating, I scurried back to the car and called Ms. Plentworth. 

Me: I can't tell if it's breathing or not. 

Ms. Plentworth (sighing): Well, ordinarily I'd come out there, but I just rescued a turkey and now I'm about to take some soup off the stove. I'd rather not come out there if it's dead.

Me: Then I don't know what to do. I mean, someone needs to come get it either way, right? 

Ms. Plentworth: That's true. But if it's dead, that would be someone else's job. I collect them when they're injured, not when they're dead. If I told you where to take it, would you go pick it up?

Me: I'd rather not. 

Ms. Plentworth: Well, let's just assume this one's dead. I'll let Animal Control know to send someone out in the morning. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to get back to my soup. Have a good night!

I peered through the downpour, over the shining wet blacktop of the parking lot, and across the expanse of grass, vividly green from the rain. There lay the goose. It's brother and sister geese seemed unmoved. Shouldn't they perform CPR, or if the goose was religious, scratch together some kind of a service? Shouldn't they be conferring over a place to bury him or her?

I had the sudden realization that one should never depend on a goose to hand one an emergency bottle of nitroglycerin tablets. On the other hand, it also seemed sensible that one could use a goose as a model for how to stay calm in a crisis. 

'Okay,' I thought. 'That goose is in no condition to attack me so there's no reason I can't get close enough to it to make sure it's dead. If it's not, I call Ms. Plentworth back and tell her I don't care if her soup gets fried; she needs to come out here and collect that goose. If it's alive, it must be dying and at least a vet could put the poor thing out of its misery.

I approached the goose one more time.

It had probably been a good 20 minutes since I'd first spotted the goose from the road. I took a deep breath and stood a little closer this time. Clearly, it wasn't breathing. If it wasn't dead before, it was now.

Geese can't count on us either. 

As I Lay Ploozing

A friend of mine once suggested that his elderly, demanding father was refusing to die just so he could be a burden to his kids. 

Image: Teece Aronin

"My father," he said, "may never die. He isn't going gently into that good night, nor is he raging. He simply ignores Death."

That was more than 10 years ago, so my guess is that Death has gotten that man's attention by now.

I used to fear that there is no afterlife, dooming me to sputter out like a candle. Now, I see things differently, and my reasoning is this:

1. Either I go to Heaven, or I don't. Either way, I'm probably fine because I think I've lived the kind of life likely to get me in. But if Heaven doesn't exist, I won't know the difference - unless, by some oversight in the recordkeeping, I go to the other place. 

If Heaven doesn't exist, I doubt Hell does, or Purgatory, for that matter. Then again, I suppose there could be an afterlife that's not Heaven or Hell or Purgatory. If it's not Hell or Purgatory, that would be great, but if it's not Heaven, that could be bad, especially since we're talking about an eternity of something other than Heaven. If by some chance, there's an afterlife that isn't eternal, I might have to die all over again, which seems totally unfair. Then where will I be?

Wait - these are supposed to be reasons I'm not worried, so let me back up. 

2. If there is no afterlife, as I said before, I won't know that. My awareness will be the same as before I was conceived: zilch. Before I came to be on Earth, I wasn't trailing God all over Heaven, nagging Him like a toddler to hurry up and give me life on Earth. My fear of death was predicated on the notion that I would be miserable after death, but that would require an awareness of my lack of life, which means that I would have to be conscious and existing in an afterlife. Then again, I could be in Purgatory or Hell. Ugh. 

3. I'll get to play the harp, and when presented with the prospect of acquiring a new skill, such as harp-playing, I refuse to sweat little details like how I will suddenly know how to play a harp.

4. After I die, I get access to the vault where they store the answers to Earth's unsolved mysteries, such as why John Lennon ever let Yoko Ono sing. 

One thing that still bothers me, though, is that many of the words we use to describe the state or process of no longer living all sound so death-y.

Rather than die, I'd prefer to plooze, and I think we should replace the word death with plooze and dying with ploozing. 

Let's test plooze out by using it in a sentence, shall we? "Did you hear about Frank? He ploozed last year after a fall."

Doesn't that sound better, like Frank slipped and took an unexpected trip down a slide at a waterpark?

I was joking, but now I'm being serious:

If we believe in God, and statistics say more than half of Americans do, it becomes much easier to take another leap and believe in life after death. And then there's this: 

About a month after my mother died, I was lying on my bed, eyes closed. My mind was drifting, but I was fully awake, and I wasn't consciously thinking about her. Suddenly, I heard her voice, blossoming with delight, the state of being where she spent much of her Earthly life. 

"It is so wonderful!" she said.

Heart Murmur

When my mother was 91, sick, weak, and giving up her life, I wanted to tell the healthcare workers the things I knew that they did not.  

That she once had a heart-shaped face, flawless skin, and was a redhead with freckled arms. 

That I had pictures of her, looking beautiful, like a starlet, playing badminton in her bathing suit and reclining in the sun. 

That she was so quick to laugh - but never at someone's expense, that she met people where they were, openminded, fully expecting to embrace them, and that, even in my teens, when I "should have been" rebelling, I would curl up with her at the end of the day and spill every drop of tea in the pot.   

Her caregivers could not have known that when I was seven and had a tonsillectomy, she spent the night by my hospital bed because the staff couldn't get her to go home - this, in the days when kids were kept overnight, and their parents booted out. 

Her nurses and techs knew none of that and were kind to her anyway. But one impatient word, one careless yank on her gown, one exasperated sigh in her direction, and I would defend my mother as she had defended me in the face of child-hating neighbors with perfect yards and the first-grade teacher who said I couldn't read - with all the conviction of an outraged mother bear. 

Because our days came and went like heartbeats, but then there was a murmur, and now I saw my mother as she had once seen me. 

Someday My Prince Will Come To - Or Not

When my daughter, Syd's beloved guinea pig died, we allowed for a proper time of mourning (three days). Then we brought home a baby Netherland dwarf rabbit. Syd named him Prince Charming. He was the umpty-umpth rabbit to hop into our hearts.

"Rabbit Sings the Blues" by Teece Aronin, on 

products in the phylliswalter store at

Redbubble.com. 

Why we were so optimistic about this rabbit's prospects, considering our luck with previous ones is unclear. The closest I can come to why we felt this way is that we didn't feel that way. I think what we really felt was a glimmer of hope and a lot of enthusiasm about sustaining a tiny life with the bonus that neither of us would have to get pregnant. 

The other rabbits had died. With the exception of one, that was snatched from Syd by a dog and killed, we never knew exactly what went wrong; some "syndrome" or another would strike and next thing we knew, our rabbit was gone, hopping up God's bunny trail.

So, now, here we stood, Syd and I, with Prince Charming.

We bought him from a breeder who kept him and a pile of other rabbits from a mishmash of litters all stashed together in a stuffy outbuilding. 

Gently, Syd picked him up. He didn't thrash around; he just gazed placidly back at her as if peering into Heaven, or something just short of Heaven since Syd didn't have carrots sticking from her ears.  

We stopped at the pet store on our way home to buy Prince Charming some supplies. Syd was holding him in her hands when a clerk revved up a noisy floor buffer and Prince Charming promptly fainted.

The clerk immediately switched off the floor buffer. Prince Charming's eyes were closed and his head had lolled to the side, but with the noise stopped, all it took were a few gentle strokes down his back to bring him around. Syd and I breathed again, bought the supplies and took him home.

We'd had Prince Charming for maybe a couple of months, when Syd woke up one morning to find him dead. After the crying subsided (for both of us), I told Syd she could stay home from school. I used a towel to lift Prince Charming from his cage, wrapped him up and placed him in a shoebox. We decided I would bury him in the woods off a nearby bike trail.

I found my garden spade, picked up the shoebox and went outside. Not until I'd walked a few yards up the path did it occur to me how obvious it was that I was the mother of a kid whose rabbit just died, who was single with no one else to pawn the task off on, and was looking for a place to bury the beast. It was still morning but brutally hot.

A few feet into the woods was a little bush that looked perfect for bunny-burying so I slinked off the trail, knelt in the dirt and started digging. Then I thought: What if someone comes by? This was public land and bunny-burying was probably frowned on. If someone did come along, I would pretend to be talking on my cell phone. It seemed to me that would minimize the risk of anyone questioning me.

Digging a hole, even one that short and shallow was hard work in that heat. My hair had fallen into a page boy droop that made me look like Prince Valiant's sweaty father. Then I heard some women coming up the path. When they were close enough to see me, I started talking into the phone with a no-nonsense clip I hoped would deter them from speaking to me. Then I fumbled the phone and accidentally hit the speaker button. Loudly and clearly came the words: "I'm sorry, but your call cannot be completed at this time. Please try again later."

The look I gave the women was intended as a warning that I'd just escaped from prison. They walked on, eyeing me cautiously as they passed. I didn't care; I had a bunny to bury. 

Prince Charming was the last of our rabbits. Maybe someday we'll try again. But right now, two things are sure: 

Fainting bunnies are adorable.

And when they never wake again, it hurts.