Sightings and Signs

The summer after my father died, my mother took me to the optometrist to get a new pair of glasses. They dilated my pupils during the examination and I felt as if my eyes were bulging out of their sockets. When we left the office, the afternoon blinded me and I spent the rest of the day squinting and shielding my eyes from the sun. In the months following, I regarded my poor eyesight as an advantage rather than a disability. In supermarkets or in crowds, I would take off my glasses and let the world recede into blurred imbalance. Without the detail in faces, every tall dark haired man could be my father, perusing the frozen foods section or buying a movie theater ticket.

The fall after my father died, my mother was jogging through the park near our house in New Jersey. When she came home there was an orange cat following her. She told me that it started following her while she was running and when it looked at her she felt as if it was my father. I thought it ran like a lion, my sister started calling it by my father’s name, Seth. It stayed on our porch for a few days. I rejected the possibility that it was my father, because I was sure there was no way he could have been reincarnated into a cat that had certainly been alive longer than the four or five months since his death. The cat eventually disappeared to stray on somewhere else and we never saw it again.

During my first year of school after my father died, I had a collection of tiny vases that I kept on my windowsill. Whenever I was completely alone, I would arrange them in a circle on the middle of my floor and try to summon ghosts in our house. For me, everything was a sign or omen and so I regarded any creak or draft as a reason to attempt a meeting with the spirits. I never asked for my father specifically for fear that he would come, and for fear that he would not. After many failed attempts, one of my séances resulted in a mysterious knock that I swore came from inside the wall of my room opposite the windowsill. I decided it was my father that had knocked, and that I would never again use my vases in such a way.