Upside Ann

Months ago my auntie lent me a book she really enjoyed "Ghost Riders" by Sharyn McCrumb.  As a consequence, I decided "Hey, I think I'll read all of her ballad series" and requested this book from interlibrary loan.  This is the first book in the series and I really enjoyed the story.  It is a mystery...but unlike later books, it is totally free of ghosts.  Dead people ghosts, that is.  Much of the story focuses on ghosts of one's past as Martha is planning her class of 1966 twentieth class reunion and the recently arrived, formerly-famous folk singer Peggy Muryan seems to be harrassed, if not hanted, by her former boyfriend and singing partner who went missing in Vietnam almost that long ago. Two quotes:  They were not yet old enough to treasure acquaintances not for their own virtues, but just because they were people who remembered one's youth. Yes, I'm old enough.  I miss my family not only for who they were, but also for the part of myself they ...

  Before drifting away entirely, he found himself reflecting--not for the first time--on the peculiarity of adults.  They took laxatives, liquor, or sleeping pills to drive away their terrors so that sleep would come, and their terrors were so tame and domestic: the job, the money, what the teacher will think if I can't get Jennie nicer clothes, does my wife still love me, who are my friends.  They are pallid compared to the fears every child lies cheek and jowl with in his dark bed, with no one to confess to in hope of perfect understanding but another child.  There is no group therapy of psychiatry or community social services for the child who must cope with the thing under the bed or in the cellar every night, the thing which leers and capers and threatens just beyond the point where vision will reach.  The same lonely battle must be fought night after night and the only cure is the eventual ossification of the imaginary faculties, and this is called adultho...

How much sweeter life would be if it all happened in reverse, if, after decades of disapppointments, you finally arrived at an age when you had conceded nothing, when everything was possible.    I've become a collector of stories about unlikely returns: the sudden reappearance of the long-lost son, the father found, the lovers reunited after forty years.  Once in a while, a letter does fall behind a post office desk and lie there for years before it's finally discovered and delivered to the rightful address.  The seemingly brain-dead sometimes wake up and start talking.  I'm always on the lookout for proof that what is done can sometimes be undone.