Ghosts

In our tradition, it is not the birthday of the dead that is commemorated but the anniversary of their death. The journey is complete then. On that day of the year, the Yahrzeit, you light a candle and say the kaddish, a prayer for the dead that for odd historical reasons does not mention death. Or you visit the grave. And leave a small stone behind, again for no clear reason but the most compelling: tradition. We're a people that's been around so long that we no longer remember the reason for many things we're supposed to do, only that we're supposed to do them.

And so the candle flickers its last during the night in the house that once knew her. And all the next day, the dead arrive of their own accord, for you've made no conscious effort to summon them. They just appear, like a series of bright exposures. They are perfectly calm, serene even, like the cemetery itself, that little marble city. It's not that the dead are indifferent, just removed.

Each appears alone, never in pairs or with company, the better to concentrate on you. Then they leave with no more ceremony than they arrived. Like images on an inner eye. Or scenes from the past. You never remember the moment they depart. They are just gone.

A woman lies on her deathbed, not dying so much as fading. An old friend comes to say goodbye, and tells her that she's never known her to say an unkind or malicious thing about anyone. The dying woman is honestly puzzled. "Why should I?" she asks.

I see Pa again, too. He is standing behind the flimsy counter in the pawn shop. It was the briefest of his succession of businesses at 836 Texas Avenue, Shreveport, La., circa 1934-79. The businesses changed -- shoe repair shop, dry goods, the pawn shop, furniture on Easy Credit Terms -- but not the location, or most of the customers.

He'd started out as a shoemaker and no other line of work ever gave him the same satisfaction, but he had to give it up after the cheap imports began arriving after the war. He didn't last long as a pawnbroker; he couldn't stand the sad stories.

It must have been some time in the early '50s when his customers started cashing those blue checks from the state of Louisiana with the skyscraper state capitol on them, buying a sofa or gas range that I and Henry Johnson would deliver in the old truck. I realize there is no scene from those days without Henry in the supporting cast. My tutor in all things Southern, he drank a little -- a lot on weekends. I'm sure he no longer does. Death is so much easier to take than life.

You'd think Pa would've been happy to see those checks. Instead one day he told me, with a sad shake of the head, "What will happen to the men? The women don't need them anymore. They've got the government to support them." Not to be a provider, his generation understood, was to be less a man.

I thought it was just the old man talking, enlightened young sophisticate that I was. But as the welfare state expanded and the families crumbled, I remembered his comment. Unlettered, he'd known more sociology than the experts.

Mr. Ford materializes behind the sewing machine in the back of the store. I see him, ever neat and suspendered, peering down through his glasses and carefully, slowly, precisely threading a needle, the way he did everything. He was the tailor in the shop, and the only black man with a courtesy title. I still don't know his first name; he was always Mister Ford. Why was that? Because he had a skill, a trade, a competence, an economic function, and therefore a social status.

Years later, in graduate school, I would read Booker T. Washington on the necessity of economic self- reliance if political and social equality were to be meaningful. Mr. Ford had taught me all that long before. Booker T. Washington just put it into words.

At the cemetery, a sign informs that the gates will be closed and locked every day at 5:30 p.m., though people keep dying at all hours. Gates and rules are only for the living. The dead come and go at will. They are particularly vivid this day every year, this Yahrzeit. The date flits around indeterminately on the ordinary, solar calendar, arriving when winter is gone but summer not fully here. But on the lunar Hebrew calendar, with its extra month -- yes, month -- during leap years, my Yahrzeit always arrives sharply on the 17th of Sivan, like joy, like a bright hail of bullets.

On the way home from the cemetery, squinting into the setting sun past a golf course, I hear a solid plunk. A golf ball has hit the car like a punctuation, a period at the end of the day. The ghosts are gone; the Yahrzeit is over. The rest of the year, like the highway at dusk, looms gray ahead.

To: JohnHuang2; 2sheep; babylonian; Nix 2; thinden; mancini

Instead one day he told me, with a sad shake of the head, "What will happen to the men? The women don't need them anymore. They've got the government to support them."

I haven't seen a Paul Greenberg piece in a long time. This one's a keeper.

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