57: Metaphysics

Dad believes in flying saucers and cites evidence from radar screens during his career in the Air Force— an object with no responder flying north and making an abrupt right turn without diminishing its supersonic speed. Mom believes in ghosts, having seen a pale knee at the door at the bottom of the stairs as a child in Seldovia. She believes in ghosts and reincarnation, remembering fields in Western plains like Christy’s private world in Wyeth’s painting, a world altogether different from her little home town built over piers below steep mountains at the edge of Kachemak Bay. What does it matter? No paranormal emergencies, no alien abductions have disturbed our family, no frantic jets have scrambled after objects they couldn’t catch anyway. Ghosts disappear with light; aliens escape into clouds. These things exist, but move with circumspection, as though they exist to be deniable. Even if you haven’t touched the gown of an angel, you have as much of a soul as the next person, and as much ability to realize the impossible.