I used to be _________, but now I'm _________.

I've been reading the book Spook, by Mary Roach. I love Mary Roach's books, they're fascinating, funny, and often a little bit twisted. So, Spook is about what people believe about the afterlife. The first chapter is about reincarnation, in which Mary travels to India to follow up on some cases of possible reincarnation. Most of the cases seem to involve little boys who remember previous lives, wives, and events. Mary states that many of these cases are reported every year in India, which has a majority reincarnation-believing Hindu population. In the United States which has a majority non-reincarnation believing population, the reports are much less frequent.

I don't believe in reincarnation, but I keep an open mind. None of us will know what happens after we die until we die, and maybe even then we won't know anything, because maybe what happens after we die is simply cease to exist. As a teenager, and like many young people, I was curious about reincarnation. I felt drawn to certain periods of history, and thought maybe that was because I had lived then. I wondered if I had been strangled or hanged in a previous life, because I hated (and still do) the feel of anything around my neck, like turtleneck shirts, scarves, or collars - if something was tight enough for me to feel it, it produced little tingles of panic. Sometimes I would spend significant lengths of time gazing at photographs from the Victorian period, convinced I recognized faces. Okay, so I was a little weird. I still like to look at old photographs.

And I could tell Mary Roach about two stories from my own American circle of family and friends that point to a possibility of reincarnation.

When I was about 13, my stepdad, Jack Hafner, told me a story about his best friend, Ernie Eineman. I knew Ernie. Before Jack and my mother married, Jack and Ernie shared a house.
Ernie was a devout Christian, and my mother's supervisor. My best friend at the time was Ernie's niece, Evelyn Eineman, who also told me the story. So Ernie wasn't a friend of a friend of a friend of your second cousin's neighbor like you hear in urban legends. This was his life, his family and it really happened. I don't remember all the details, I don't even remember the names of the little boys, so the story won't sound as spooky in this telling, as it was when it was told to me by people who were personally involved with the family.

Ernie and his wife Rachel had a son. This was in the 1950s. One day when the son was still quite young the family drove to San Diego from Oceanside, a distance of 35 miles. They were riding in a car with "suicide doors" - I'm not sure what kind of car, I think a Mercury? The rear passenger doors were hinged at the back of the door, instead of at the front, so the doors swung open toward the rear of the car. I guess there is a flaw in that design, and if the door is accidentally unlatched while the car is in motion, the windstream will pull the door open all the way and the occupants may fall out of the moving vehicle. Seat belts were not common in cars in the 1950s, and little boys like to lean on doors to look out the window. During this drive down the highway, the door swung open, and Ernie's and Rachel's little son fell out of the car and was killed.

Some time later, another son was born to Ernie & Rachel. When this little boy learned to talk, he spoke of people and places and events, that he didn't know, had never visited and had not participated in. Ernie & Rachel listened as their son related memories that shouldn't have been his own. Memories of people and places and events that belonged to their first son. How could the second child remember things that happened before he was even conceived?

A few years later this son became very sick and was diagnosed with leukemia. Ernie & Rachel often heard their son chatting with someone when they passed his bedroom. When they looked in, their son was alone. He explained to them that he was talking to "the man". One night as they sat at his bedside, their little boy suddenly brightened and smiled at a space near the foot of his bed. "I have to go," he explained to his parents, "the man says it's time for me to go. I have to go with him." The boy did not seem unhappy about this. Later that night, Ernie's and Rachel's little boy died. The second son died at the same age the first son had. I think it might have been six years old, I don't remember exactly.

That story left a huge impression on me. It wasn't until I had a child of my own that I understood how profoundly sad the story is. I don't know if Ernie was a devout Christian then, or if he became one later in life. As far as I know, he didn't believe in reincarnation. I imagine that both Ernie and Rachel felt responsible for this child's death, had they locked the car door? Should they have watched him more carefully? Should they have seated him between them on the front seat? The kinds of questions any parent might torture himself with when a child dies. So maybe it was a comfort to Ernie, maybe he believed that God was trying to show him that his first child was still alive, not lost after all. And when the second child told him about "the man" - was this an angel, or Jesus beckoning to him? Maybe it helped him through his grief to believe that his boys were happy and he would hold them again someday.

My second reincarnation story is short and sweet, a favorite family story. When my daughter Catherine was about 2 1/2 years old, she looked at me one day and said wistfully, "When I was an ant, I was so black and so shiny." And then she went off to play.

And then there is this - do we remember our previous lives in our dreams? Several months ago my youngest daughter, Merry, had a dream in which she was a spider. When she woke up after the dream, she looked at herself and panicked, "Where are all my legs????"

P.S. Here's another book by Mary Roach you might enjoy (or be repulsed by):
Stiff : the curious lives of human cadavers

Semper Fi

In memory of Sidney H. Hilliard, Jr., Capt., USMC, ret.
October 4, 1918 - August 14, 2010
My father

I wrote this in 1987 and gave it to my father for Father's Day.
It is not good poetry, but the sentiment is sincere, and he was touched by the poem.


For Daddy

This is my father,
tall and straight and strong,
who sheltered me like a spreading tree
when I was very young;
who held my hand on moonlit nights
as we walked beneath the palms,
and tucked me in his raincoat
away from jungle storms.

This is my father,
an accomplished man,
who built my bike and playhouse
with loving, able hands;
who read me poems and sang to me
old songs of sweet romance,
who gave me books and tender looks
and taught me how to dance.

And this is my father,
the proud Marine,
who fought in war to keep me free,
the model of the macho man
that others dream to be:
tough and dashing, brave and bold,
in the air, on land, and sea.

And yet this is my father,
this macho Marine,
who dandles his grandbaby on his knee,
who strokes silky skin with rare delight,
who grabs and tickles and pretends to bite.

This is my father,
who on his chest wears eagle's wings,
who with his heart
pulls my heartstrings,
this is my father,
my hawk and my dove,
this is my father,
who taught me how to love.

Playing with Fire

I hate it when I'm cooking eggs, how it sometimes smells like burnt hair.

I once caught my hair on fire, in my college dorm room. I had lit several candles in an effort to
create a romantic atmosphere. As I leaned over a candle to pick something up, my long braid fell over my shoulder and into the candle flame. Remarkably I didn't notice this. Milliseconds later I smelled burnt hair. Hmm, I thought, I wonder why it smells like burning hair? Oh! Panic as I slap my hair between the palms of my hands. Charred hair remnants littered my bedspread. So romantic.

Once I tried another romantic effect - tossing a scarf over a lamp to give the room a soft rosy glow. Again with the stench. Scorched scarf is not a romantic fragrance.

And speaking of scorched, I once put eggs in a pot of water to boil, then yawned and lay down for a nap. Did I mention I am not a good cook? When I woke up, there was this really odd smell in the house - burning metal, and something else, uh, scorched? Burnt saucepan and blackened popped eggs. You won't find that in your Betty Crocker Cookbook. Now, whenever I boil eggs, my husband leans over the pot and says, "Pop Eggs?"

One Christmas Eve I was frying tortillas to make taco shells and the oil in the pan caught on fire. I raced outside and threw the pan in the snow. I didn't fry tortillas for about ten years after that. But I finally got tired of preformed tasteless taco shells and began frying my own again. My husband calls them "Tacos Flambe."

My church decided to have a bonfire in a pasture. Beautiful harvest moon night, clear cold air, glittering stars, picture-perfect pasture with tall grass, a creek, a few gnarled oak trees. And a humongous pile of firewood, enough to torch about 20 heretics. And that was on my mind, as we made a brave attempt to roast hot dogs. The fire was so hot, so intense, we had to wear jackets, gloves, hats, and lay face down on the cool grass, completely stretched out, arms extended with the longest roasting sticks we could find. Even then we could barely stand the heat long enough to get one end of a wienie roasted. My heart went out to Joan of Arc. Later we asked one of our group to lead us in a sing-along. She started singing All God's Creatures, but slipped in a Freudian way and sang, "All God's creatures got a place in the fire..." and stopped suddenly with her hand over her mouth. I couldn't resist, and continued, "some scream low and some scream higher!" And then immediately sobered, thinking of all those poor people burned at the stake.

I don't really have any good ending to this post. This was just a few random thoughts on a random day, and I have no idea what made me think of these things. Oh yeah, I was cooking eggs.