Saturday afternoon, I was having a moment. A bad moment. You know, one of those "I am crying so hard I can't breathe" moments. When everything hurts so much that I feel like I have to find some way to focus it all together, because my skin is on fire and unless I snap myself out of it, I'm never gonna stop.
My phone rang. It was my Aunt Linda, whom I rarely see. She lives in Pennsylvania-- I get up there about twice a year, maybe three times. The "Keep the Christ in Christmas!" aunt. That one.
"Chris?" she asked. I could hear the highway, the crackle of her cell.
"Yes?"
"I don't know why, but something told me that I should call you."
It's strange to me. Her side of the family, they have a gift. They're far too Catholic to see it for what it is, but it's a gift nonetheless. When my baby cousin Julia reported talking to a nice (invisible) lady named Lulu, they explained it off as talking to an Angel.
Lulu was my grandmother's nickname. She died when I was one year old, with a lock of my hair under her pillow. No one refers to her as Lulu anymore. She's always "Grandma Louise." But they knew, somewhere they knew. Julia's a precocious kid. She could speak more clearly at age three than most kids do at five or six. This was not just baby talk.
I should tell the story of Lulu and I some time. Apparently, I'm just like her. Stubborn, headstrong, needing to be right. I've had perfect strangers stop me on the streets of South Baltimore to ask if I was related to Lulu Walls. The funny thing is that at first, Lulu wanted nothing to do with me. My parents split before I was born. She was so scared that my mother would move away with me that she refused to see me.
Lulu played bingo at the church hall on Thursday nights. My grandfather, my Pop-Pop, would come and take me for a walk in secret. My mom always liked Pops, even when things went south with my father. So Pop-Pop would come on Thursday nights and take my stroller around Riverside park. After a few months, one day my grandmother came home to find him on the sofa holding me. He thrust me into her arms and told her to stop being a goose and look at her beautiful grandbaby, her first.
The rest, they say, was history. From that point on until the day she died a year later of a sudden heart attack, we were inseperable. I have the dolls she made for me, the baby clothes. The day my mother told me about my grandmother's death, I was ten. I made my bed, a bunk bed, that night. There was a lock of blonde hair under the pillow.
