Rainy Ghosts

Did my best to stay indoors tonight, the rain is coming biblically down. But I had to go out and toss my trash and recycling, anything that makes this dump even a little cleaner is worth the effort. Threw it all in the cans as fast as I could, then stood in the doorway to watch the deluge....

Ghosts are floating in the rain tonight, ghosts awakened because the Anniversary is coming this Sunday. But they aren't the only ones....I swear I just saw Walt Whitman's ghost swagger by, thumbs hooked in his belt loops, following a young sailor lad on his way home from the docks. And across the street I just saw the ghost of a fourteen year old girl who died from polio in 1950, when I was just one year old. She was wearing pedal pushers and smiled at me as she stubbed out her cigarette on the sole of her Keds sneakers. Up at the corner of Hicks Street I saw the ghost of a man who died in France, in the Argonne Forest, in 1917. He believed the company line that the War To End All Wars would be over by Christmas and he'd be home to marry his already pregnant sweetheart...

But the oldest ghost I saw was the soul of a man who died about the time that Shakespeare was born, in 1564. And he told me not to worry, and he told me not to salute, and not to believe, until I saw a man who seemed real to me.

Well, I'm still waiting for that man....