Ghost In The Machine

I refer, of course, to the washing machine. You see, my mother has been haunting me.

Go ahead, Gentle Reader, laugh. But you didn't know my mother, and if anyone could figure out how to come back and play practical jokes on the people they'd left behind, it'd be Hildegard.

She had what you might call an... interesting sense of humour. Sense of irony, to be more precise. In truth, she had no sense of humour whatsoever, at least not in any traditional understanding of that attribute.

My mother died four years ago, on a warm evening in May, the day before her 62nd birthday. Which means, if you consider the concept of the 365-day calendar, that she lived for exactly 62 years. My mother taught me many things, but I didn't learn any of them until after she died.

She taught me to love reading, and to love magazines, and to treat magazines as though they were books. Keep them forever, but you may cut them up for school projects. Keep them even after you've ripped pages and cut articles out. But never, ever, write in a book, unless you're getting it autographed by the author.

I have a great many books, and a great many of them are autographed. Gloria Steinem, and Mordecai Richler, and Russell Smith and Thom Jones. I once had an email conversation with Michael Chabon, but I've never met him in person. And I have an autographed copy of Steve Martin's first novel, Shop Girl, which I bought that way, off the shelf at the Border's in Santa Barbara.

My first autograph was Pierre Berton. My mother took me to a reading, back in the 70s, when I was so little I didn't understand what a reading was, or who Pierre Berton was, but when my mother said maybe we can go backstage afterwards and get his autograph, I was so excited it was all I could think about during the reading. I don't remember which of his many volumes he read from that evening, but I have it, and it's autographed.

At least one member of each of the three sets of movers who moved my household possessions last month asked me, "Are you a teacher?"

"A professor," I replied, "How'd you guess?" You see, 54 of my 137 boxes were labelled "books."

My mother was a teacher, and she gave me that yellow t-shirt, the one that I'd used to wrap up some small breakable items years ago, and that had been packed in a box since the last time I moved. Or maybe even since the time before that. This time, I swore, no more packed boxes stashed in the backs of closets. If it was important enough to me to pay by the pound to move it 3,000 miles, then it deserves to be unpacked.

I had forgotten that t-shirt. I had forgotten how insanely proud my mother had been, when I told her I was planning to go to teacher's college. I insisted, to myself, that the fact that she was a teacher had nothing whatsoever to do with my decision. After all, I'd been telling her since I was six that I absolutely, never, under no circumstances, no sirree was I ever going to grow up to be a teacher.

So I decided I'd keep that t-shirt. I decided I'd wash it. I did a load of laundry consisting of several pairs of white socks, four or five of my mostly white but with something printed on them t-shirts, and it.

Can you tell from the photo that all my white t-shirts are yellow now?

In the next story, Jack takes Sass to Wonderland again, this time, California style.