Real Ghost Story

Real Ghost Story

My best friend, Steve Gibson, was living in the Rockridge district of Oakland, California, one house up from the Chinese restaurant at the corner of College and Lawton.

The large, two story house was not exactly a commune but the door was always open. 

People came and went and it was not unusual to meet strangers in the kitchen.

The teenage son of the family that owned the restaurant next door was a regular visitor, partly because Steve had a large collection of comic books sprawled across the living room coffee table.

Steve was playing guitar one day when the kid from the restaurant ambled in and plopped down with a copy of Asterix.

Twenty minutes later, when Steve stopped strumming, his young visitor looked up and said, "Your mother was just here and wants you to know she really likes your guitar-playing but wishes you would spend more time drawing and painting."

Steve's Mom, an architect-artist, had died a dozen years earlier, victim of a car crash that resulted in enucleation of her left eye just days before she died. 

At the time, Steve was on vacation from Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio and was working on a dairy farm in West Virginia. His Mom's tragic death unfolded before cellphones and Steve had no easy way to contact his family in Bethesda.

Nor was Steve the kind of guy to spend much time on the phone, especially when out exploring the world. 

In this instance however, Steve felt irrepressible compulsion to phone home the day of the crash and so learned from his doctor Dad, Sam Gibson (who headed the American Cross national blood-banking program), of the calamity-in-process.

When Steve told me of the Chinese kid's comment, he said: "It's exactly the kind of thing my mother would have said."

***

I am rendering this account as faithfully as I can. 

My only embellishment has been giving a specific name to the comic book the Chinese kid was reading.

I also decided to designate Alice's left eye as the one that was removed. 

The Chinese boy's comment seared itself in memory and is very close to verbatim.

I recall that Steve had never spoken of his mother with his young visitor.

In the early 1990s, Steve died of lymphoma at age 38.