Manao tupapau

The Spirit of the Dead Keeps Watch
Paul Gauguin

I live surrounded by ghosts, by the spirits of my past. People I've loved, decisions I made, experiences I've lived. November always seems a good time for remembering all sorts of things.

Every time I make a cup of coffee in the morning, I remember my grandfather who would offer me coffee when I was a kid. It was a joke between us. "You want some cossee?" he'd ask. He called it cossee because he said that's what I called it when I was just learning how to talk. I'd laugh and make a face, telling him "It's not cossee, Pampaw, it's coffee!" He'd laugh and say "Oh, really?" Then he'd pretend that he was shaving my face with his electric razor. It was our game. He ate fried eggs with lots of black pepper on them. He wore a felt Stetson hat every day that I ever saw him. He smelled like cigars and the oil field. He was a gauger...the guy who checked out the pump jacks and the reserve tanks. He'd strap me and my brother into the front passenger seatbelt together and we'd roar down the gravel roads with him, out in the middle of West Texas nowhere. I loved him so much...still do. The last thing he ever did as himself before the stroke trapped him inside his own body was to take us to get ice cream. He went into the hospital that day and the man I knew never came back. He was in there, but he couldn't get out anymore. I didn't eat ice cream for years after that. I don't have much of a taste for it still. The last time I saw him before he died, I stroked his cheek like I was shaving him and asked, "Hey, you want some cossee?"

My grandmother smirks right back at me in the mirror when I catch myself at a certain angle. I miss her most of all and talk about her almost every day. We were connected, she and I...we always understood each other. Always. Her name was Billie and she was tall and dark headed. We have the same face in a lot of ways. We have the same temper and the same soft hearts...a combination that sometimes gets me in trouble. She was a beauty operator and loved to dance. She used to dance with me in the kitchen at night. She met my grandfather at a house party back in the thirties. I didn't find out until after she died that she'd run away to Mexico and gotten married when she was sixteen. Her dad went and got her. No one ever talked about it. My grandfather paid for her divorce some years later. She loved to watch birds and fish. She was the first one to put my hair in braids. "You can see the Dutch in that little face," she'd say. She rolled her own cigarettes and wore Max Factor lipstick. She died in the same town that I was born in...it was the closest one to the mountains where she and my grandfather had been camping. She was terrified of lingering in a nursing home or a hospital. This way she just went camping and never came home. After she died, my grandfather told me, "You know, your Mema's sister Gladys was a pretty woman. But Billie...Billie was just beautiful to stop your heart." My grandfather has since remarried and he's almost 90 years old...still going strong. He doesn't talk about her much...because it still makes him cry. I wear her wedding bands on my right hand and my greatest regret in this life is that she didn't live to see my boys...because I know she would've been loopy for them.