I feel like a ghost.

I feel like a ghost. Maybe it's because of the fact that I was listening to "The Lovely Bones" through thirteen states, and so I've had the afterlife on my mind. But more likely it's because in all those places I have a history as a different person in a different body. I guess that's true of everybody every day, but somehow when you flit around and are in the early autumn Berkshires in the morning and at the still summer Jersey Shore by nightfall, the memories and sensations are not all in sync. So I feel a little off balance and out of my body. I feel as though I'm watching myself from somewhere not here.

Reunions, like the one that brought me North, bring up a lot of things. One of the nicest things that was said to me is also one of the things that has not meshed. Phil D remembered that when we walked down the aisle at our ninth grade graduation, I wore flats because I was a lot taller than he was, although he remembered it as his being a lot shorter than I was. I guess whoever is doing the remembering gets to make it about himself or herself. He remembered me as being kind for choosing the flats. Maybe. But knowing myself as I do, I'm thinking that at fifteen I was more concerned with not looking like a stringbean geek. The thing is that he's now taller than I am, and is in fact one of the best looking 68-year-olds I've seen. What's weird, though, is that in my mind he's still short. We get these ideas in our heads and they don't always go quietly.

And then there's me sitting at The Fireplace, so happy that it's still there and that the burgers are as good as they always were and that the music is familiar, and I am completely forgetting that I did not drive there in my father's 1950 Chrysler. I am oblivious of the fact that I am not wearing 22" waist Bermuda shorts and that the old lady hands that are playing with my soda straw are wrinkled.

And along the way there was me driving past the apartment I brought my firstborn home to and me taking the same route I took with my late lovey and people asking me about my brother and my parents and all these loved ones are gone. Except that they're really not gone because I remember them and they're with me as I travel around. So with their spirits close by and my sense of a self that doesn't really fit this time and place, I feel as though I am every age and free to roam the world untethered to it. It's not a bad feeling, being a ghost.