there's a ghost in (that) home (watching you without me)

I'm headed back to the house on Borton Mill Court for the weekend. Off the Route 130, a couple of blocks back from the K*Mart, the Arby's, the McDonald's, the Taco Bell, and the high school I attended in Delran, New Jersey, where I spent my formative years. My father turns 60 soon (the same age, weirdly, to me, as the recently deceased Syd Barrett and our, unfortunately, very much alive asshole of a president).

This will be a small family reunion and gathering that culminates in my father's wish to go with all of us (my sisters, my mom, my nieces) to the Philadelphia Zoo on Saturday. The excursion is a nostalgic reenactment of the time, when I was in the fourth grade, that my dad took my sisters and me out of school and into Philly for the day to battle a severe case of what he called his Spring Fever.

I will be staying, for the first two nights, in the room where my grandfather lived (and died) in the 1980s. (The room I grew up in, alas, was long ago transformed, first, into a storage room, and now serves as a kind of "office". But still, on the wall next to where my bed used to be, I will find the small message: "Why, God?" I carved it there in a moment of adolescent fright.)

Every time I sleep in my grandfather's old bed, I dream about ghosts. I'm ready.