mallorys_camera | I See Crocuses and Dead People!!!!

First crocuses appeared three days ago. Crocuses have a short growing season; in another three days, they'll be gone. By then presumably the green arrows shooting up beside them will have metamorphosed into daffodils.

Harbingers of spring, yes?

Though, of course, the odd black-crusted snow pile can still be seen in vacant lots. Poughkeepsie has a lot of vacant lots. These snow piles are kind of like the remains of some mythical antediluvian creature named Winter. When sunlight hits them, they vaporize. Poof! Magic!

###

A lot's been happening.

Nothing's been happening.

Albany approved my feasibility study, so I went back to Pollyanna last week.

Nothing's changed there, but of course, there's no reason why it should. Pollyanna hasn't gone broke quite yet, but I'm guessing the lights will go off permanently around the first of September. I have this mental image of Reverend Cal in an ankle-length great coat and natty fedora cackling madly to himself as he makes his final tour of the light switches. A demonic mythological presence himself, that Reverend Cal. Much like Winter.

The Pollyanna family -- yes, this is how Reverend Cal encourages them to address each other in emails, Dear Pollyanna Family -- continue to respond to this uncertainty by oscillating between a kind of frantic inappropriate merriment and sullenness. It's exactly the kind of reaction you'd expect in a real family if Dad was an alcoholic or molesting the family dog. Sure, it's not good. But you don't wanna rock that boat too much.

Over the course of my lifetime, I've held some extraordinarily prestigious, high-paying jobs. But I've also done my time in the low-hourly-wage salt mines. The dysfunctionality of the American workplace never fails to amaze me. Is it like this everywhere in the world? Are research scientists -- a term I define broadly -- really the only people who enjoy what they do for money?

###

I see Lucius everywhere. It's disconcerting because, of course, he's dead. So I'm not really seeing him. Except I am.

I've had a number of friends and family members die over the years -- at the age of soon-to-be 62, that's unavoidable. Some of them I've felt after they died; most of them, I haven't.

I won't try to explain, justify or defend seeing ghosts, subconscious psychological projections or whatever the fuck you want to call them. In the ancient cathedral town of Ely -- a ghastly island floating in muck for most of its geological history until the East Anglia swamps were drained -- I once fell into a fugue state and watched a blind monk tap-tap-tap his way over some 14th century cobblestones.

When I got stuck in that Yosemite blizzard for three days, lost all sensation in the distal toes of both feet to frostbite (permanently, as it turned out), and had to be rescued by helicopter, there was a point when our little band of four was struggling up a mountain on our cross country skis in the blinding snow and I saw a downhill skier coming down in the opposite direction. He was wearing a bright yellow muffler and huge futuristic goggles so I couldn't see his face, but he waved at me. Neither Ann nor Joe nor Dan saw him, and I knew that he was dead.

Those were probably my two most extreme visions.

When my mother died in 2001, I felt absolutely nothing. On the other hand, after Tom died in 1995, I felt him hovering just out of reach for years afterwards, a beneficent presence who was very concerned about me, who was watching out for me. I felt it when his spectral attentions began to focus on other matters, as he slowly withdrew his attention. It felt like an abandonment.

So anyway -- Lucius. He uses the public computers at the Adriance Public Library. He shops for breadfruit at the weird Jamaican supermarket. He leers at me affectionately from the other end of a parking lot, standing near one of those ancient black-crusted mounds of dead snow. He's not mad at me at all. He gets the joke, the cosmic goof. He's riffing on it. He wants to create one of our old screamingly funny comic routines. He catches my eye from the corner where he's crossing the street, shrugs helplessly, shakes his head and beams. He mouths words that I can't hear but then, I don't have to because I've heard them before: Ya gotta be cruel, Patrizia. Cruel to be kind.

He draws out the word "cruel" in a fake English accent: cr-r-r-uel-l-l. He throws back his great leonine head, and he laughs and he laughs and he laughs. And then though I don't hear him laughing, and nobody hears him laughing, a guy driving a car comes to a screeching halt just in front of the pedestrian walkway even though the light is clearly in his favor and there's nobody on the street.