The Big White Dog

This is a dog story, strangely enough. I haven't had a pet for years. But three big white dogs have been significant in my life, the first when I was a little girl. This is the story of the first one. It's scary, so hold on tight.

When my family visited relatives in middle Tennessee, we stopped first at my paternal grandmother's house in town. My brother and father always stayed there. After a visit, my mother, sister and I would head deep into the countryside, down a narrow dirt road, to stay with the other side of the family.

In town, I had a routine. I would scramble up trees in the front yard to see whether the pennies and other small treasures I'd left in hollowed out pockets were still there. Then I'd scoot out onto a limb, hold on with both hands, ease my seat into space and roll backwards. Hanging on by my legs, crooked at the knee, I would swing back and forth. Hands and arms relaxed and dangling, sometimes I hung on with only one leg.

My grandmother fussed. "I wish you wouldn't do that," she would call in a high-pitched, agitated voice. "I just know you'll fall and break your neck," So eventually, a parent would order me to stop. "You are are worrying your grandmother half to death," my mother would say.

Eventually, I found another pasttime. A risky venture that no one knew I was pursuing -- a sheer rock bluff, a straight drop from a cliff behind my grandmother's house down to rocks, gravel and a highway.

Pleased with myself, I would wait quietly for the grownups to be distracted, then slip off, climb the barb-wire topped fence and push through trees and bushes. I would look around to make sure I was alone, turn my back to the bluff and crouch. Then I would start down, one foot first, then another, holding onto grass with fists to keep steady.

I was wary at first, but grew more confident each time. When I ran into obstacles I could not negotiate, I would climb back up and go at it from another angle.

I enjoyed the challenge of the climb. But I was more attracted to the thrill of hanging from the bluff, buffeted by the wind, watching cars go by below. I tried not to glimpse the sharp rocks that would surely be the last thing I would see if I slipped. Because I loved the feeling I got from that bluff, my body plastered on rock and dirt, embraced by the wind and the sun, suspended in a secret place.

Then one day, hanging from the bluff, it happened. A rock glanced off the cliff next to me and ricocheted to the bottom. Then another, this one larger and much closer to me. I remember being angry, thinking my older brother had found me and was pretending to try to hit me with rocks.

But the face I saw watching me from above wasn't my brother's. It was a boy about my age, someone I had never seen. The bone-thin face, slits for eyes, close-cropped hair, was grinning maniacally, and he held a huge rock in both hands over his head. He threw that at me. I ducked, it missed. He didn't have the best aim, an outcropping of rock was protecting me. I yelled at him to stop, but he laughed, a shrill, nasty laugh. Then he started moving to another position on the top of the cliff, one allowing him a better aim.

I went cold. This is it, I thought. I'm not going to lose my balance and fall on my own, this awful boy is going to kill me for fun. I pressed myself as flat as I could into the cliff face. My mind went blank. Until I heard a commotion from above. Some muted scuffling in the grass, the boy's angry voice, then finally footfalls, running.

Someone has saved me, I thought.

But still, I heard nothing from above. When I finally could force my shaky limbs to move, I climbed back up the cliff. No one was there. Nothing.

I lunged over the fence, head darting, looking out for the boy. Something had intervened and stopped him. But I couldn't see anyone.

Then I saw the white dog. He was alert, ears high, watching me from the back of my grandmother's neighbor's house, near the back porch. She didn't have a dog that I knew of, neither did my grandmother. I'd never seen this one.

He ran toward the front yard, ducked onto the porch of the big white house. So I ran after him. I got to the porch and he was gone. Nothing, no one was there.

The door opened. And Mrs. N. bid me a very warm hello. "I'm looking for a big white dog, have you seen one?" I asked, or something along those lines. She had not. No, she did not recall such a dog in the neighborhood. She knew who I was, though, had watched my siblings and me playing in the yard. She asked me in, and I accepted.

The house was full of carpets and antiques, mirrors, lace, lush curtains. She had me sit down in the front parlor and gathered up refreshments in the kitchen. These she served from a silver tray, on china, with silver cutlery.

She started asking questions, about me. Freed from certain death only minutes earlier, I talked, and talked and talked. She listened intently. A grownup listening! Interested! I was enamored, my cliff horror ebbed away.

I never told my parents about what happened on the cliff. I would have been punished and severely restricted for my foolishness. I also never saw the boy or the white dog again. I couldn't imagine the dog stopped the evil boy from throwing rocks. It seems unlikely, although someone or something did. There was one place in the fence that had been torn away and the dog could have easily maneuvered through that.

But whatever happened, the dog led me to Mrs. N., and that established a new pasttime for the visits to my grandmother's. Instead of running to the cliff, I made my way to her. After telling her my news -- silly stories about other children, teachers, fights with siblings -- she would talk. Her stories were those of a lonely old woman who needed a friend too. And she found a willing listener in the middle child from Alabama who so obviously irritated the grandmother next door with too much energy and exuberance, especially compared to the quieter siblings whose company she preferred.

Mrs. N. did not treat me as a child. She would stare into the distance, her face twisted in grief, and talk about her husband's long, agonizing death from pneumonia during a time when medicine could not save him. She could not get over this, her inability to keep death at bay, her tortured nights trying to ease his suffering. I remember her voice, specific details of his death, as though we talked only last week.

Even as a young child, I was honored to bear witness to her pain. She had granted me entrance into the carefully locked and barred world of grownup suffering. And, I am convinced, she kept me from causing more with my wild forays on the cliffs, an adventure that was certain, in time, to end in tragedy.

Mrs. N. and the white dog. The first of three big white dogs. The one who made it possible to recognize the ones who came after.

The Man With A Lion Heart

I was online studying some fetching photographs taken by a talented Englishman, a former policeman who loves spending time in Greece. And these details coalesced into a hook that dipped into my brain, bringing back a distinct image of someone I knew years ago.

At first glance, P.S. could have been a casting agent's idea of an Edwardian bank clerk in London, given the right clothes of course. But that demeanor was a disguise. Confoundingly, beneath the quiet, serious, bookish-seeming exterior beat the heart of a lion, an Alpha male of the highest order.

When I met him, P. was a foreign correspondent and I was an editor. We all worked insane hours. In the United States, overnight was often the busiest shift because of the time difference.

While most of Washington, D.C., slept, my colleagues and I powered through the night on adrenaline highs fueled by vats of coffee and bad food from a dive downstairs frequented by prostitutes, small-time criminals, the occasional beat cop and us.

I stumbled upon a website recently that revealed that P. is working for a U.N. group that feeds hungry children in Africa. But until then I had imagined him still in Beirut, where he was posted in the 1980s. That impossible place of civil war, bombs and assassinations, routine artillery shelling, warships offshore. Death and chaos. And P.S. was thoroughly, thrillingly alive there.

He was on a mission, to see and understand the madness. To write about it, share it with the world. To see it through to the end.

Western correspondents were being kidnapped and murdered. Still, P. roamed the divided city. He had a daft notion, or claimed he did, that being British protected him, that he wasn't an American, the main targets. Of being invincible.

He told surreal tales of driving through streets that war had made into tunnels of rubble, vehicles and debris flaming on both sides. To gather reports for dispatches, P. and a colleague made mad dashes through the hellish landscape in an old VW with the Doors' "The End" endlessly blaring from a tape. "This is the end, my beautiful friend."

He scared us back in D.C. We fretted and worried and insisted to our bosses that P. be pulled from Beirut, be forced to leave. We demanded, we lectured, bothered him with messages and telexes and pleaded with him on the telephone when we could get through to him. Those awful pictures of hostages being brutalized, we couldn't bear to think of P. being one of them.

He resisted. He argued. He wanted to stay. Beirut was his story.

Finally, his government ordered all citizens out of the country. We were relieved. P. spent some time in D.C. and then worked from Cyprus and other posts. Several years later I ran into him again at another news agency. He was a desk jockey (an editor), married, seemingly tamed. He looked exactly the same, but I barely recognized him. The old bristling energy scarcely contained behind a misleading fake facade of calm was no longer there.

I realized how wrong we had been to try to tamper with P.'s destiny. We were worried about ourselves, really. We didn't want to feel guilty or upset if something happened to P. Our concern was personal, and selfish.

And I learned another lesson from P. I finally understood not to judge a book by its cover, one of the oldest cliches in the history of social interaction. But P. was the living embodiment of that lesson.

He was a man of average size, bespectacled, with short hair neatly trimmed, always in a non-descript blazer and tie. And he carried himself with a quiet that kept an effective disguise over his inner truth. Because this was his real story: Beneath the deceptive veneer was the heart and soul of a being at home in jungles, both natural and man-made, that jar most of us to the bone to even think about.

I have not seen or spoken to P.S. in years. But it comforts me to know he is in Africa in close proximity to his own kind, the mighty hearts, lions left to follow their own natures, on savannahs roaming wild and free.

A House Cursed

I should have known the house was all wrong. I had a visceral dislike for it the moment I walked through the front door into the cramped dining room. But then I made a beeline for the back, to breathe, and it was there in the tiny yard shrouded in an otherwordly mist that the spell took me.

I didn't even flinch when the owner volunteered that she had a "nervous breakdown" in the little bathroom on the third floor. "Oh, the painters were here then, you know how it is when your life is disrupted," she quickly offered in an attempt at solace.

The elderly couple hadn't left for the showing of the century-old brownstone, painted pink in this case. They talked about how they fell in love with the small back yard because it reminded them of their time in Japan, the Tokyo posting. And then there was the black iron balcony framing twin French doors off the living room on the second floor. And more French doors leading from the study to a large back balcony. These doors, framed by a big clanking iron security gate, stayed open in the summer, making for sweet cross breezes.

And I have to mention the staircase that curved from the second floor to third, the one that hid the long-haired cat whose belled collar I heard every morning for weeks before I finally opened my eyes and saw his face an inch from mine. He had slipped in through the study's gated door and finally made his way up the stairs into the bedroom to stare me awake.

We had to have the house. We made an offer and it was accepted on the spot. But the cat, the breezes, the back yard didn't make up for the bad times in that house. We made the purchase in good faith after a separation, demonstrating our resolve to stay together for good, despite our problems.

But the first night we stayed there, I woke up screaming at the top of my lungs, causing several neighbors to come pouring out their back doors to see who was under horrible attack. The bedroom window was open and I had dreamed men were climbing in through the windows, menacing, evil men, intent on doing me great harm. As I screamed, these nightmare men had crawled over to me, taken my ankles and wrists in rough hands and were holding me down.

My screams finally woke me up. But I walked around in a daze for a couple of days after that nightmare. And in a way, I didn't wake up again until I left that house, and that marriage, seven years later.

One Sunday night, after a visit to see friends at their beach house in New Jersey, I was dosing on the bed. I was not really asleep, drifting really, when I heard a noise in the shadowed hallway and looked up to see a specter -- what I thought was a tall man dressed in black. He wore a tall hat. He turned his pale face toward me and I knew in an instant that this being did not wish me well and I gasped. Suddenly I was fully awake and he was no longer there.

The weekend had been so peaceful. But I was then seized with such anxiety I slept very little and during the next few months wasted away from lack of appetite. I continued to work many hours, perform at high levels, keep up a very active social life. But inside I was falling apart. Because I could not admit this, it manifested in physical symptoms. I went to doctors, who could not pinpoint a source.

Finally, a physician in the neighborhood who treated many patients from the nearby halls of Congress and the U.S. Supreme Court recognized that my problems were not physical in origin. She suggested I had perhaps had been taught from an early age to repress negative or unhappy feelings. And those situations can't always be maintained in a healthy way.

My move into an old house that needed repairs had been the trigger that caused "the pot to boil over," she surmised. She had seen it happen many times, she said, gesturing toward the government buildings. "You would be surprised. It is nothing to be ashamed of. You are in good company."

So, maybe that was it, I thought. I was relieved. At least for a while. But what I didn't tell the doctor was that my marriage was a wreck, a mistake from the beginning, and I'd known it for a long time. I was putting off that reckoning. But the walls of the house were closing in on me, especially at night, when I often awoke not knowing where I was, on my knees in the bed running my hands over the walls trying desperately to find an opening, a way out.

Maybe the marriage had spawned the menacing man in black, and the first-night nightmare.

But my personal situation had nothing to do with what happened with the elderly couple who sold us that charming rowhouse on Capitol Hill.

They told us they were moving to a house nearby that was easier to negotiate physically. The old house was three stories and they bought one that was two stories, which I thought was interesting. The husband was lame, rapidly losing his ability to walk at all when he lived in the house we bought. We did not want to pry as to the reasons and the wife was vague. She was nervous, twisting locks of hair, talking too much, too fast. She was desperate to be out of that house.

When we saw them a few months later, we were shocked. They were thriving. He was not running a race, but he was not the frail, gray, twisted man who could only shuffle a few feet. And she had blossomed. Happy, chatting with anyone who would listen, she was on her way to the hairdresser. It was as though both had found a fountain of youth.

And in a way they had. They had left that house, passed it along to someone else. A couple who suffered in silence both separately and together. I wasn't the only one with pain. My husband had been held up at gunpoint around the corner and had suffered a bizarre malady involving a debilitating pain that felt like a thick cord or band tightening around his torso. No cause was ever found. Pain pills were prescribed and eventually the symptoms went away.

Eventually, I grew to hate the house. I wanted to move. But my husband dug in his heels. He loved the house, the Hill, and wouldn't hear of it.

One thing led to another. Marriage counseling was unsuccessful. We broke up. I moved out.

Away from that house, parked on couches of friends at first, I was numb and hurting at the same time. But I was sleeping, finally, for the first time in years. And I could breathe.

Was it the house? Was it cursed in some way? Who knows. My ex moved out, remarried and by all accounts is perfectly happy.

And now and then when I'm on the Hill, I drive by that house. I slow down in the car, admire the French doors, the iron work. I remember the seductive charm of a study with a spacious balcony overlooking a hypnotic back yard that fills with morning mists and an otherwordly glow at twilight.

I almost stop, but then think better of it. Instead I step on the gas and drive quickly for the bridge over the Potomac River, another state in more than just one sense of the word. And then 10 minutes later I slow down and breathe because I have reached, with great relief, a world where the ghosts and nightmares stay away.

Wild Gratitude

Frank McCourt's death brought C's house to mind. The author's stories of poverty, about being bitten by fleas in a bed crowded with siblings, sent me hurtling back to that small place nestled in a narrow curve in the road, at the edge of a creek, in danger of being overtaken by the deep woods.

That house was a magnet.

C and I were in fifth grade when her father passed away. The former school truant officer had moved his family for a better paying job. Like my father, he couldn't bring himself to settle in the city near that job, so chose a farming village near the Tennessee line. But a heart attack struck him down as he watched his two oldest sons play football. He wasn't even 40.

He left the woman he had married when she was still a girl, five bewildered children ages 3 to 14, and no money to speak of. Relatives who could have cushioned the blow were back in Tennessee. But the new life in Alabama was their dream, and she was determined to stay. Somehow she scraped by.

The house was bedlam. C's gentle mother filled the house with pets and guests, children especially, and placed no time limits on visits. We ate peanut butter and banana sandwiches, mountains of them, washed down with Kool Aid. On Saturdays, the tall, skinny widow cooked a country breakfast of scrambled eggs, bacon, sausage, and white gravy on homemade biscuits, puffed to perfection with soft White Lily flour.

I don't know what my parents were thinking. Sometimes all three of us, my brother, sister and I, spent entire weekends at C's house. In the summer, I seemed to be parked there pretty much fulltime. We acted like other kids in the daytime, went to the pool, tennis courts at the school, played piano and baseball.

Pale and exhausted by day's end, C's mother retired early. The two oldest brothers and mine went out with a teenage pack, to town with girlfriends before coming in late to sleep a few hours. So there in the lush green Tennessee River Valley, four girls aged 10 and 7 or so, and a little blond-haired brother who would not be ditched, headed out into a night unpierced by streetlights.

We hoarded material for small boats we put together to float down the creek that ran beside the house. These we hid away until midnight. We needed solitude for the boats, no cars on the road.

Then we found an old coffee can and hid. When a car drove by, one of us threw the can and yelled "hubcap!" This was supposed to make the driver stop, thinking he'd lost a hubcap. No one ever did. Until the night someone (not ME) threw the can with such pitiful aim that it hit the car. Then the driver was mad. He stopped. And hauled his full self out of the car cursing. We scattered into the protective thickets of the woods, into places such a big man could not negotiate.

Later we retrieved the boats. C and I, small and wiry, were captains with opposite styles. She was a stern taskmaster, barking out orders. She had two brothers and more expertise in the building arts. My parents kept me pretty closely under their thumbs at home. So at C's house, the enthusiasm and imagination I kept bottled up as a matter of course, through seemingly endlessly hours in church and other obligations, exploded out of me.

Laughing and yelling, we piled kindling into the boats, old hoisery, balled up newspapers. Then out came stashes of matches. One at a time, we placed the boats on the edge of the creek, lit the contents and pushed them off, into the water's current.

We jumped up and down, danced on the creek banks, cheered our handiwork. We stared in awe as the flames curled into the sky, spitting sparks high as a burning boat drifted down the creek, through the drain pipe, and out again past the winding country road. We were mesmerized, following as far as we could on the muddy banks, feet wet, falling in at times, keeping our eyes on the boats and on the red glow from the fire. Finally, then, even the faint orange melted into black night.

The last boat offered up to the stars, the sky and the moon, we straggled back to the house. But we weren't done. We thought somehow this pagan act would draw space aliens to the property. Older brothers encouraged this. So we would crawl out a back window onto the rock ledge of the house, halfway between ground and roof. We stood out there, flattened against the house wall, staring into the night waiting for a sign from the outer limits.

The space men never came to visit.

By then the energy was ebbing in the younger kids. Little brother might be passed out on the living room floor. And our little sisters were not far behind.

So, C. and I usually moved back outside. This time with cigarettes filched from her brothers. We sat in her mother's car in the driveway into the early morning hours, listening to the radio (WLS-Chicago had a powerful signal), smoking, pretending to inhale, talking about ditching our hometown when we grew up. We planned for the time we would no longer be children. When we could call the shots and do what we wanted. A new life.

In the cocoon of night we whispered, scanning the skies for lost space aliens, our feet streaked with dried mud from creek dancing. Breathing in sweet clean air, we celebrated water, fire and earth, a blanket of dense trees hiding us from prying eyes and rules.

Eventually we stumbled into the house and slept like kittens, four to a bed, my friend and her sister, my sister and me. We woke up in the morning scratching flea bites, mosquito bites, chiggers picked up while sitting and lying in the grass, nasties that dig in deep and resist departure.

But I never wanted to leave. Because for hours, days, nights and even weeks at a time we were free. The truth is I've never been so free, not before, not since.

Yet this isn't a lament for lost youth, a wish to go back.

It is a thank you letter, an expression of profound gratitude for having been there. Bearing witness in words for a time when the life pouring from me matched my surroundings. Young, wild, bare feet running through the creek, the deep south night soaking through my pores, into my bones and my blood. Sustaining me. Keeping me. Cradling me through the rest.

My Time in the Mental Institution

In a recurring dream, I walk the halls of a sprawling mental hospital well known to me. The 19th-century institution is lined with many windows, but is dark inside. No one is trimming the old trees pressing against the building in this dream. The leaves and huge trunks crowd out the light.

But I am not caught up in a nightmare. In fact, I feel a yearning when I wake up. I would go back there for a bit, if I could. I'd like to check up on a couple of people.

After I got to college, I had a brief change of heart about my major. I decided I was a psychologist at heart. So, armed with this conviction, I signed up to volunteer at Bryce, the state mental hospital adjacent to the University of Alabama's Tuscaloosa campus.

The hospital had been named after a progressive psychiatric pioneer from South Carolina. But during the 20th century, patient levels grew and standards of care fell. In 1970, Alabama ranked last for mental health expenditures. Bryce had more than 5,000 patients living in conditions that a newspaper editor likened to a concentration camp.

It was into this I walked with great purpose -- young, innocent, full of ideals and conviction. Ready to serve.

Marching up to the imposing Italianate main hall, I saw a tiny chipmunk near some bushes. Oh, cute little thing, I thought. But then I saw the drops of blood. Did it fall? Get accidently stepped on? Then, a cat shot out of nowhere and snatched up the prey. "Stop!" I shrieked. But the cat ran with its its tiny catch to some low-lying branches and up a tree. I darted around the chipmunk's prison, lustrous with huge leaves and blooms, looking for someone to help. But not a soul was in sight.

Then reality intervened. I was a country girl. I'd seen this kind of overgrowth. I would never be able to catch the hunter cat in that thicket before it scampered up the trunk with its lair.

Calm enveloped me, like a cool wave, and I walked inside.

An assistant handed over a big metal ring of skeleton keys. She then took me through a series of hallways, unlocking and locking the connecting doors, until we reached my assignment. I was helping out in a womens wing, socializing with the patients, doing crafts if they wanted. I fired off many questions about how I could best be effective.

But there was no training. And my instructions were simple. This was saddest aspect of my time there. "The best thing you can do for them is just showing up. Just talk to them," a caregiver told me. "They are so isolated from the world."

Some of the women on the hall never spoke. I remember one, dressed colorfully, with thick, well-coiffed hair and skin a beautiful dark black. This was a woman who was cared for by someone. I sat beside her and introduced myself. Silence. No flicker of recognition that someone was speaking to her. I blithered on about myself, about her clothes, the confidence carefully banked in sociology and psych I classes trickling away, drop by drop, like the chipmunk's blood.

Then Daisy strode up, to the rescue.

A grandmotherly type, friendly, bristling with personality, she introduced herself and took me by the hand, leading me to the craft table. "Okay, what are we going to do today?" she asked. I was confused, at first. Was this a staffer?

But no, Daisy was a patient. The staffers were barely in evidence, sequestered, I thought, behind the locked doors and windows of an enclosed nurses station in the back of the room.

Daisy was out of luck. One of my accomplishments, at that juncture, had been successful crafts avoidance.

So she taught me. She laughed, talked, drew, constructed this and that out of old magazines and glue, whatever we could find. I couldn't imagine why Daisy was at Bryce. Obviously a mistake. And she did say that. She talked about being there only for a short time. Her family would be there soon to take her home, she said.

Another patient was Joyce, an artist. She was young and beautiful. Like Daisy, she was perfectly lucid. Another mistake, I thought.

She drew on planks of wood provided for her by staffers since there was no money for authentic art supplies. She talked about her family, about "being in solitary." She showed me the stark room where she had been placed, alone, for days, a small bed the only furniture. And places on the wall where she scribbled, pouring out her heart in tiny hand-writing.

I asked questions about the patients. Why was Daisy there? Why had Joyce been in confinement? I never got answers. The wing had many patients and few caregivers. I rarely saw other volunteers, or family members. Where was everyone? Where were the family members? Where were the students, a resource of thousands on the campus adjoining the facility?

Some of those questions were answered. Others were not.

One day, I was talking to another patient and Daisy began interrupting. I said, "Just a second, Daisy, I want to finish this and I'll get right back to you." Or something along those lines. The next thing I knew she was angry, rude, shouting, then rage boiled over. Before I could even process this outburst, orderlies were with us, taking her by the arms, leading her away. She wasn't there for my next visit, then she was. But she was subdued, heavily medicated.

I had failed to see that Daisy could not share me. That any attention to another person, however slight, would trigger a rage that would escalate without medical intervention.

And Joyce was not always there, either. She suffered terrible depressions. I took my childhood friend J. to see her when she visited from Auburn. They established a friendship. J., who became an award-winning teacher, the kindest soul I know, wrote to her for a good long while. She asked about Joyce for years after.

Joyce's writing and art had to do with her visions, which tortured her. She might have taken her own life without hospitalization. And sometimes she had to be protected from herself, the reason for the confinements.

Another thing I discovered: I wasn't cut out for this. The patients followed me, in a sense. They tapped ever so lightly on my shoulder at the library. I caught glimpses in deserted dorm hallways. As twilight became night, misty outlines I recognized in the distance would silence me suddenly during the long rambles K. and I loved to take all over campus. At dances, I saw patients standing in shadows. Their eyes hollow, mouths in a grimace, they watched, waited for me to come and talk to them.

I knew in my heart I could not separate, put up the boundaries that would allow a life apart. "It would eat you alive," an astute friend said. So I did not change my major. Working for my first newspaper, as a summer intern, I began the difficult process of standing apart, of not becoming emotionally involved, entangled. Of not showing emotion. Of stifling what I was feeling inside, no matter the circumstance.

I needed to protect myself, I thought.

Years later, a boss said my experience at a storied international wire agency had not impressed him. That it had been my time in the mental institution that had made me suited to dealing with the eccentric personalities drawn to the British news service we were working for at the time. He was only partly joking. And I understood what he meant.

Because any of us could step across that thin line separating the functioning from those who are not. It's really not that big a leap, or even predictable. In my opinion. Because we all have a Daisy inside -- fine one minute, wild with jealousy and rage the next. And a Joyce -- sweet and loving, artistic, but too sensitive for this world.

And if we need to kid ourselves about those matters to keep going, that's fine too.

I don't. But then I have a place I visit in a dream, as a reminder, a reality check. I walk down long corridors with a clanking set of old skeleton keys, unlocking doors all night long. I wake up and I'm a little sad.

But then I'm out in the world, where the sun shines and I can go where I want, anytime, with people I love. And that's enough. For today, that's plenty.

The Birdy Weekend: Part 2

I didn't tell all in my Birdy post. Putting everything down then felt like too much. So this is a P.S. of sorts.

But please read the previous, "Birdy's Lesson." Also, for the full meal instead of a taste, "A Boy's Long Strange Path Here" on May 24.

So, to recap, we visited Birdy only a few weeks before she left this vale of tears. She was cheerful. She whispered to me that her cherished mother, long dead, had been calling her on the telephone. Then in the dark night, in the old farmhouse where no streetlight penetrated the deepset windows, Birdy's mother paid a visit to her old bedroom.

Perched on the foot of the bed, clad in a white nightgown, the lady of the hair watched me, seemed about to speak. Then I woke up and she vanished. A few weeks later, Birdy passed away. Before she died, though, something amazing happened. One friend called it a miracle.

My son was conceived.

I had grappled with and come to terms with not being a mother. I had tried to conceive and a specialist said don't risk it, in fact, get your tubes tied. The pregnancy did not happen on the night of the Birdy visit -- that would have been, well, rude. But it happened right after the visit from the lady of the hair.

We were thrilled. But I was stunned. My doctor immediately sent me to a high-risk practice. The pregnancy was easy, except for four months of nausea, which was not the scary kind that puts a woman in the hospital. Mine required me to eat constantly. I know. Go figure.

I sailed through delivery. The obstetrician was ecstatic. "You were a champ! Let's have one more, maybe two! Come on, this was easy for you."

Hold up. Fate had been tempted once. And there was only one visit from the lady of the hair. And that resulted in what one friend called "the miracle baby," who was born right before Christmas, even. If you can stand it.

One more thing. After Birdy died, the large family gathered in Pennsylvania from all over the country for a good old Irish wake. At the graveside service, our friend D.'s girlfriend F. was speaking. She had gotten along beautifully with Birdy. They were sympatico.

Soon after, a bird flew into the circle and started to tease F. Divebombing, in a way. Not threatening, playfully. The family laughed, the symbolism not lost on them. Birdy was there, saying hello to a favorite.

And what happened the following year was even more surprising.

D. married F. Well into his 40s, a longtime confirmed bachelor, this was beyond a shock. But they tied the knot and before long they were the parents of two children.

So this is the thing. The four of us, J. and I, D. and F., walked into a portal of sorts on that cold winter weekend in Pennsylvania. Birdy was on the verge of leaving this earth. The lady of the hair was somewhere in the ether, waiting to escort her daughter home. She showed herself to me, at least in a dream, seemed about to tell me something. At least in my narrative.

My son was conceived. Birdy died. Another life. And then, in such a short time, two more. Life and death.

Can you see it? Miracles, magic, coincidence, your call. We all die. We don't know when, how, what happens next. No details or specifics. Change is the certainty, that's the scary part. I think a big picture, though, is right in front of us, playing out everyday. A Birdy weekend happens maybe once in a lifetime, giving us clues on a marquee signboard.

I see it now when I spy a bird in flight, because it takes me back to that weekend. I don't know but feel we are unending, in some way. I remember that lesson. Circle of life.

Birdy's Lesson: She Was Not Alone

My favorite uncle died last week. Truth be told, I was glad. Uncle M. was 96 and had stopped eating. In a nursing home, he didn't recognize his own daughter. When he did talk, it was to relatives long dead. Dementia had stolen his mind.

Yes, his passing gave him release from his earthly suffering. But my reasons go beyond his personal situation. Their roots are ancient, timeless, something I can't pinpoint precisely. But I'll give them shape with a narrative that revolves around a visit with an elderly woman named Birdy, some 16 years ago.

You could call this a ghost story. I call it a revelation. And it changed me to my very core.

The weekend began simply. After work on a Friday, J. and I drove out of the city into the hills of Pennsylvania. The constraining hours in the office, which had encircled us like coils of rope, faded with each mile. Our voices, strong with rich new breath, flowed freely. As we hurtled through the darkness, we grew bright inside the cocoon of the car.

Our friends waited for us beside a little store in a tiny town that had rolled up the sidewalks at twilight. They led us through winding lanes to D.'s grandmother's, a big old farmhouse. We had to drive the last miles slowly, watching for horse-drawn buggies caught out late, without lights. We were in other-worldly Lancaster County, home of many families adhering to Old Order Amish and Mennonite faiths.

D. introduced us to Birdy. He had talked about her with enthusiasm for so long and wanted us to meet her. "Before it's too late," he said. She was in her 90s, still living on her own in the big stone home of her birth, looked in on by neighbors, the parish, meals-on-wheels feeding her once a day.

She was delightful, just as D. had said. Charming, high lilting voice and laugh. I looked her straight in the eye, but also off to the side a bit, an old trick of mine that somehow allows me to imagine the young woman she had been -- sharp-featured, vibrant with energy.

Using her hands for emphasis, she directed her grandson and his girlfriend to get this and that from the kitchen and told J. to find something in a far corner.

Then she turned to me, lowered her voice to a whisper and said, "My mother has been calling me on the telephone. She calls alot. We have so much to talk about." She also told me something else. And I remember this quite distinctly. "My mother has been calling me. Because, you know, she's coming here soon."

She raised her voice again when the others drew near. She obviously did not want them to hear her talking about her mother, who had been dead for half a century. Those words were for me only. I was not surprised. People sense in me a sympathetic ear for lost causes, for what others know to be impossible.

The evening continued pleasantly, and several more times Birdy had the chance to whisper to me about her mother. She said she needed to stay close to the phone, that she was sleeping on the first floor because of the stairs. But also because she could get to the phone faster that way.

So, when we retired for the evening, J. and I went to the old master bedroom on the second floor. This had been Birdy's bedroom with her husband and the room belonging to her mother and father. It was the biggest bedroom in the sturdy house with walls a foot thick. Tired, we quickly fell asleep in the dark room.

But I woke up in the middle of the night. And I saw a small woman sitting at the foot of the bed. She had very thick, curly black hair flowing over her shoulders and down past the small of her back. She was small-boned, sharp-featured. Her frame was nearly overwhelmed by this thick mass of hair.

We watched each other for a few moments, I don't know how long. I sat up, with the idea she was about to tell me something. But J., a very light sleeper, startled awake, which scared me and I gasped. Or, I simply woke up from my dream. I'll never know. Because she was gone.

The next morning, I told D. what had happened, describing the apparition. He looked surprised. And started off through the house. He came back, finally, and said I had described, exactly, his great-grandmother, the former owner of the house. Birdy's mother. He was looking for a picture of her, to see whether I had seen it. And then conjured her up in a dream. Or something.

D. and his girlfriend were astounded. People always talked about this woman's hair. Thick, curly, black, masses of hair that nearly overwhelmed her small features. The woman at the foot of the bed in her old bedroom. And no, they had never talked about her around me and I'd never seen a picture. No one had a picture that I could have seen.

All of a sudden, my head began to pound. We were nearly through with breakfast and I just couldn't pretend I wasn't in pain. So J. gathered our belongings and made apologies, we thanked everyone and hustled out the door. I was really sick. I held my hands over my head and groaned as J. drove down the hills, alarmed.

Ten minutes later he pulled into a store parking lot to try to find something to help me. But the pounding stopped as soon as it started. The pain just lifted. I was fine. No explanation. We drove home and resumed our lives.

A couple of weeks later the call came.

Birdy had died.

She passed away quietly, at home, in that big old farmhouse in the Pennsylvania hills. She was pushing 100. She had not wanted to leave that home, ever, at least while living on this Earth. And she hadn't.

And I knew with absolute certainty that Birdy had not been alone at the end. Because she had told me so. Her mother had been calling her, on the telephone. And the mother was on her way, after all. And I'd seen her myself.

I don't know how to explain this kind of thing. I can't defend my idea that "we" simply do not end when it is time to leave this life as we know it, here and now.

I don't know how it happened or where they went, exactly. Or what they became. But the lady with the big hair came, when it was time, and took her daughter home. That much I know, in the very core of me.