Is that Jimmy calling?

Sunday, January 26, 2020

I keep waiting for some sign from beyond from Jimmy the way we all got signs from beyond when Frank Quackenbush died and the way I got that year old email from John Richie the day I got back from his wake or even all those signs I got from my mother that day of the great power outage, the cross of light on the wall, finding a pair of rosaries just like hers on the ground and then seeing her favorite picture of Christ on my way to the office only to return home later to find our house one of the few in the region that still had power.

Jimmy firmly believed that Frank had come back to say goodbye through a series of aberrations we all experienced me, Jimmy and even Garrick.

Frank always threaten to come back, so I was not surprised that a day after his burial there's a pigeon with no legs plopped into my lap while I was eating breakfast in a park and insisted on sharing my bagel with me.  A moment later it completely vanished it didn't fly off it didn't fall to the ground it just vanished.

That same morning Jimmy heard a ruckus outside his door in an old haunted house he lived in at the time up from where he worked at the Mount Arlington Library.

When he opened the door, he found a bat hovering in the air at eye level.  Then Jimmy did what he always did when he thought Frank was intruding on his privacy, he slammed the door.

Garrick experience was perhaps the strangest and most revealing. A freak bolt of lightning hit his house traveled down into his apartment and fried his answering machine leaving only one message on it and that was from Frank from when he was still alive. If that wasn't enough this was an almost exact duplicate of what happened to Frank a year earlier when a lightning bolt struck his parents’ house in Haledon and fried his answering machine.

So, I keep expecting Jimmy to make the same kind of effort to reach us and it is possible he already has.

 It is very strange to me that I went back to my journal from 1980 on Tuesday and typed out an entry that involved Jimmy and his perception of getting old. He had just turned 31 and yet seemed to think that he had already transitions into old age and maybe even death. Since most of my journal entries lately have been about mortality this seemed to fit in with the mood I was in, but the eerie part is that I posted on my blog just about the time Jimmy was dying.

 I am hoping that if it was a message from beyond that it is only the first part of an extended conversation.  Jimmy firmly believed in the afterlife and the ability to reach from beyond and so if anyone can keep himself alive in us through these ghostly occurrences he can.

 I do not know whether I believe or not I want to and I that I need to because surviving is not always the great thing, we all make it out to be because we have to mourn those who pass.

Jimmy hated wakes and funerals and it took every bit of convincing to drag him into Frank Quackenbush's back in 1995.  Perhaps Jimmy is pleased that he was cremated as quickly as he was with no wake no morning no parade of parishioners like us who want to glimpse him one last time.

There's a reason why he isolated himself in that trailer out in that remote neck of the woods, reaching out to us via phone or email or internet rather than in the flesh.  In some ways he was already become a spirit haunting us from beyond.

I hope he continues these remote messages because I miss him intensely.