A Freecycle Ghost Tale

From RTT (presently in Memphis, TX) comes this shot of Milo with the enigmatic caption: Stylin’.

So. My exciting day begins at 6:30am as I cruise various Big Box garbage bins looking for ways to unobtrusively comingle my trash with theirs.

Then it’s time for Box Harvesting! I make a second run through the bins looking for cardboard boxes with no obvious signs that they once held rotting food or biohazardous materials.

Then it’s time to scurry home and compose my first list of Freecycle Giveaways for the day!

Yesterday I listed Robin’s old karate sparring gear; many, many copies of The Year’s Best Erotica (editor’s a good pal, I got them for free), tons of office supplies, tons of craft supplies, my mother’s VHS video collection, a bunch of I-climbed-Everest-and-all-I-got-was-this-lousy-teeshirt type books, huge numbers of detective novels and thrillers (broken out by author) and, of course, the ant farm.

Nobody ever wants the ant farm. Sigh…

How do you choose among potential Freecycle recipients anyway? Their emails are mostly one-line variants on gimme, gimme. Occasionally, some scent of their underlying situation wafts through. The woman I gave my industrial gift basket supplies to alluded to fund-raising efforts on behalf of a worthy non-profit. The guy who got my James Lee Burke collection informed me, I’ve got plenty of time to read! because he’d just been laid off. The man who got the mountain climbing books wrote me that he was a paraplegic: I only get to climb in my dreams…

I didn’t think anyone would want my mother’s video collection. Boy was I wrong. There were over two hundred and fifty of ‘em – lots of British TV shows, BBC fictionalizations of the Lives of Royalty, sprightly reenactments of the Classics, Pauline Kael’s ghost’s list of The Top Twenty Hollywood Movies Since I Shed Those Mortal Coils. Though she never made provisions for upgrades in technology, my mother took very good care of her things (unlike her daughter) so all of these tapes were in good condition.

Twenty people responded to the listing. I had no idea how I was going to choose among them. One response mentioned that the person who wrote it – Pat – “didn’t get cable,” and I began to fantasize – why didn’t Pat get cable? Because Pat was a writer living in a simple shack in the Big Sur mountains alone with his VCR and collection of Dirty Harry flicks. Every morning he would climb the precarious cliff down, half a mile or so, for two buckets of water. He would use it to make his coffee, boil his eggs, give himself a sponge bath – I saw him standing in the filtered sunlight under redwood trees, stripped to the waist, dabbing at his underarms, giving his nipples a manly splash. Great pecs for his age – which must be a little younger than me, around 50.

But no, Pat was not a potential love interest for me – he was a potential love interest for my dead mother! All day long I continued embellishing the tale in my head – as a ghost my mother would appear at the age when she was most beautiful, around 26 when she wore her hair like Loretta Young's. Pat would only see her ghost when he put a tape into the VCR, and he would only feel her ghost when it was a tape she liked. When it was something she no longer liked, that she had outgrown as her tastes continued to grow more refined after death – Coppola’s Dracula, say – she’d only appear as the vaguest of wraiths. Pat and the ghost of my mother talked, got to know each other. She accompanied him on his morning hikes down the side of the mountain -- timing the tape in the VCR got a little tricky here, he'd have to pick a very long movie like The Prince of the City -- and eventually Pat would fall desperately in love with my mother's ghost, and they would have hot, passionate sex -- only with the right tape of course! Say the early 80's BBC production of Brideshead Revisited

And my mother would finally be happy! Not only would she have improved Pat's tastes in cinema. she would have gotten laid!

Alas when Pat finally showed up she was a plus-60 matron in a white Prius who didn’t have cable because she was too cheap to spring for it.

My poor mother, shafted by me even in her grave. Or at least that’s the way she would see it.

Luv Among the Ruins

I think if my landlord wasn't married with six children and I wasn't married with two children, my landlord and I would have a passionate affair. One of those crazy middle-aged lust things, you know, like The Bridges of Madison County. He's got the bluest eyes and he looks just like Oliver Reed circa Women In Love except a beneficent Oliver Reed rather than a drunken lout. And he likes me. He really, really likes me.