Metaphysics With Mickey

Mickey was waiting for me at the Oberlin Road Cemetery behind the YWCA when I got there. No one would ever mistake him for a Southerner. His face is not the product of hundreds of years of Scots-Irish and English ancestry. His nose is too big, his eyes too avid. He has an urban awareness of all the people in a given setting and no sense of the natural world. He once asked me if snakes pooped. “All animals poop,” I told him.
When I arrived, he was pacing slowly in the parking lot, head down, hands in his blue jean pockets. Mickey had agreed to do the Ouija board with me in the cemetery. We decided that if I was seeking ghosts, a cemetery was the perfect place to try to make contact. This particular cemetery is small, cozy, largely neglected. It was set aside for freed slaves of the Oberlin Community and their descendents. Mickey and I walked to the iron and wood bench that faces most of the graves in the cemetery. He didn’t want to weegie right away. He wanted to share therapy stories. He goes to one therapist and I go to another.
“I’ll show you mine if you show me yours,” he said, sitting on dead oak leaves on the bench. “How’d it go?”
So, I told him how it went. He had some suggestions for making my therapist better at her job. Then it was his turn. He said he had forgotten much of the session but next time he would talk for ten minutes instead and she could talk for forty minutes.
I took my sneakers and socks off. I had the idea on the way to the cemetery that being barefoot on the cemetery ground would make me a lightning rod for psychic or spectral activity. Mickey wears these kind of round-toed leather clogs. They make his feet look like paws. So cute.
“I am not taking my shoes off,” Mickey said.
“I’m not asking you to,” I told him, tucking my socks into my shoes beside the bench.
“I don’t want to walk on pine straw and sticks and stuff,” he said. Probably afraid of a snake under the leaves.
“Okay,” I said.
“I mean it,” he said in his I-mean-it voice.
“You don’t have to,” I said. “I know how you are about your feet.”
He has very soft, sensitive, pale feet. I doubt they have ever touched the ground. The therapy rehash over, I walked back to my car and retrieved the Ouija board I bought the night before from Kay-Bee Toys at Cary Towne Center. It was not the one I remembered from slumber parties. That one was printed on a board designed to look like birds eye maple and came with a planchette—the triangle that scooted around the board and pointed to letters, numbers, yes, no, and good-bye. The millennial version is black ink (same graphics) on a glow in the dark board with a glow in the dark “magnifying reader”. Mickey undid the shrinkwrapped box and put the little plastic feet in the reader. We balanced the board on our knees. He sat side-saddle on the bench and I sat in semi-lotus so my knees would be about level with his. We were out of practice.
Mickey placed his fingertips on the wide end of the reader and I placed mine on the pointed tip. In between was the round plastic magnifier with a rod like a skinny icicle to show exactly what letter was being indicated. We settled in to see what would happen. Now me, my experience has always been that you ask the board questions. It says right on the box “Mysterious Oracle”. But the reader took off on its own. That is, if Mickey wasn’t cheating and I don’t think he ever would. The reader zoomed around and stopped at one letter, then another, and finally stopped altogether. The message? “MGRDN”. We looked at each other.
“My garden?” Mickey guessed.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m going to ask a question I asked when I was a kid.
“Okay.”
“Are there spirits here?”
The reader swished toward me, then swooped up, then over, then down.
“3” was under the magnifier. Which was good because how would we get any kind of answer without spirits?
“Can I speak to James Holeman Kennedy,” I asked. “Please?”
The reader whipped around and shot off the board. Uh oh. James Holeman Kennedy is my cousin Jim who died about 8 years ago at 48. My Aunt Teeny misses him something fierce and says that, unlike me who dreams of dead folk all the time, she has never deamt about him and it would mean so much to her to see him again even in a dream. I was going to ask Jim to please get in touch with his mother. But the spirits who were present did not seem to like the idea.
“I think I pissed it off,” I said to Mickey. I was hoping this was not the end of our contact with the spirit world.
We paused a moment, then Mickey closed his eyes and asked, “Are you mad at us?”
“YES.”
“Bummer,” I said.
“Can we get back in your good graces?” Mickey asked.
The reader skated around in loops then stopped at “U”.
“It wants you to ask the questions, I think,” I said. “It’s a probably woman.”
Mickey took a deep breath and lifted his head in thought. He bent his head and closed his eyes again.
“Will some of Jane’s problems ever be solved?” Mickey asked.
I decided to close my eyes too. Obviously Mickey knew better what to do than I did. The triangle did not move. We waited. It floated to “F” then to “W”. It did not move again.
“Maybe our spirit can’t spell?” Mickey smiled.
“Shhhhhh.” I was afraid he would make it mad this time. FW. FW. “Frank and Wendy?” I suggested naming my brother and sister-in-law. Maybe they would give me some good advice.
Mickey shrugged and nodded to indicate it was better than any FW he could come up with. An oak leaf drifted down and ponked me on the side of the head and then landed on the Ouija board. Mickey laughed. He squeezed his eyes shut.
“Did you do that on purpose?” he asked our communicator.
“YES.”
He laughed.
“Whyn’t you ask something about your own self?” I said. “Ask about your life, why don’t you?”
“Will I ever be happy?” Mickey asked the Mysterious Oracle. Mickey’s mother’s near dying words to him were, “Try to be happy, can you not?” He has been on a quest for happiness ever since. He seems to think it is a destination you can arrive at and settle down in. But there is some essential grit in Mickey’s makeup that prevents him, even when he is briefly happy, from trusting it, never mind settling down and living there. But I am not a Mysterious Oracle. So I closed my eyes and only opened them when it was necessary to keep my fingertips in contact with the reader because the plastic triangle acted like a Spirograph on speed, and it was all I could do to hang on. Finally the magnifier showed the letters “G” and “O”. GO.
“GO?” said Mickey. His dark eyebrows met his white hair. “GO?” He didn’t seem to get the answer. Later, I asked my daughter Phoebe what she made of GO.
“Go be happy and stop worrying about it,” said Phoebe. “Jeez, how hard is that?”
At the time Mickey decided that to ask if the Oberlin Cemetery was “the best place for this.”
The board said, “N”.
“No,” we concluded.
“Where then?” asked Mickey. “My office?”
“N.”
“Where?” asked Mickey.
The reader fizzed around. “U,” it said. “NO.”
Mickey looked at me.
“It means you know, I think. You know where the best place is.”
Mickey shook his head. He did not think he knew.
“Could you clarify?” he asked the Ouija. He’s very polite, Mickey is.
The triangle did not move. Did not move. Then.
“CW6”
“An address?” I asked my friend. He shook his head.
He said, “Can’t wait?”
I said, “Country Western?”
We waited some more.
“A8.”
Mickey considered.
“Are you playing with us?”
Whoosh.
“YES.”
Mickey nodded.
“Are you,” he questioned, “a Southern ghost?”
Instantly, we were answered.
“YES.”
Then the triangle skimmed to the bottom of the board.
“GOOD-BYE.”
“I think we are done for today, dude,” I told Mickey. It was about 3:30. We talked a little more and it began to sprinkle. Mickey and I walked back to our cars and said good-bye to each other. I had wanted to contact a doctor who was buried in the cemetery. Mickey and I will try again, this week I hope and maybe I can contact the doctor then. If not, I will ask the spirit its name or initials. I will not ask to speak to cousin Jim. Mickey can speak to one of his dead people. Maybe that will make him happy.