Your car has a ghost!
The story of a car, a piano, a poet named Maggie, and maybe a ghost or two too.
I played piano growing up, like, a lot.
For a long time, piano was my thing: I practiced scales and classical piano pieces with diligence. In middle school, I began accompanying the choir, something that continued through college and my early twenties. I took lessons through college, walking the two and a half blocks up Tony Avenue when Mrs. Given was my teacher, and then across tree-lined pathways of my university when Professor Strong became my advisor.
Whether I was nine or nineteen, the song always went something like this: I would practice a piece to perfection, playing through it a few times more to gravitate my fingers toward memory, to solidify the knowing that comes with repetition.
But then, without a fault, when I sat down in front of my piano teacher, that which had been practiced to perfection suddenly wasn’t so perfect anymore.
Maybe my nerves took over. Maybe the ghost of practices past showed up to play. Maybe that’s just what happens when the protégé sits at the teachers feet.
The ghosts show up.
Sometimes the ghosts just won’t go away.
I suppose you could say I’ve been thinking a lot about ghosts lately — not in a spooky, haunted Halloween and cemeteries kind of way, but in the real, fleshy things our bodies remember, in the things that don’t necessarily go away with time.
This morning, the boys and I hopped in the car for summer camp drop-off. If you and I were sitting across the table from one another, I’d tell you that I applied for a lottery to get them into a free, five-week, all-day summer camp program …and, miracle of miracles, they got into that same free, five-week, all-day summer camp program. For the first time in my parenting life, I have entire days to myself.
It has been nothing short of a gift.
But when I started the car (a car that we just bought a month ago, no less), the emergency brake wouldn’t release. I turned off the car. I turned on the car. I pressed the brake pedal. I pulled the lever up, I pulled it down. I put it in Park, in Reverse, in Drive. I drove it a couple hundred yards up the street; I turned it off and on again.
I called my husband outside: I watched him do the same.
Finally, I did the only thing I could do: I took backroads to summer camp, hazards flashing and internal warning sounds beeping as I drove 15 miles per hour the whole way there. By the time I got home, a tow truck was already on its way to our house, ready to take the car to the service center.
Can you guess what happens next? When they dropped off the car, nary a light flashed a warning. The emergency brake wasn’t locked, the car wasn’t beeping incessantly. The repair guy drove the car around the block and wondered aloud why this perfectly working vehicle had just been towed to his shop.
And I found myself back on the piano bench, watching my fingers glide gracefully over the notes at home, only to butcher them in front of my piano teacher.
“Your car has a ghost!” The guy later told me. I shook my head, bewildered. I showed him the picture of the dashboard. If this hadn’t happened multiple times in the last week, I wouldn’t have believed it myself.
For now, we’ve got a loaner car while they keep our car overnight. I’m sure I’ll be back there tomorrow, swapping out the two, my head still shaking in confusion.
But for now, I’m left with the ghosts.
These ghosts, of course, sometimes feel like they’re everywhere. Our bodies remember, long after a traumatic incident has passed, years and decades after we think we should still be remembering.
We return to a place — to the place where it happened, where everything changed. Suddenly, it’s like no time has passed at all: we remember the stories, the smells, the songs.
Conversations replay in our minds, memories bubble up to the surface.
In
’s new memoir, You Could Make this Place Beautiful, she writes a “tell-mine” of her journey of divorce. It’s raw and beautiful and bitter; imaginative and poignant and lovely. And, it’s filled with ghosts.“In all of these places, I loved that person. I loved him. Where does that go?
The love is in all of these places—haunting?—and in none of them. The love is everywhere and nowhere.”
I took her book with me today, as I walked to the BART station, then rode over to the service center.
I took her words with me, acknowledging the ghosts that walk with me still.
Are there ghosts that visit you?