We are always having “things” happen in our building. Not terrible, horrible “things”, just “things” we can’t really explain. Like stuff that comes up missing and when you find it you have no earthly idea how it arrived at that particular spot—or footsteps coming down the hall and doors that sound like they’re opening when no one is around but the person doing the hearing.  There are all sorts of little events that we try to explain away . . . even if we don’t always completely believe our explanations.

On this particular evening I was the only living person in the building. There had been no visitations and I was preparing to leave the front office and head toward the back. Generally, as I’m locking the office door, I will glance across the foyer toward the curio cabinet at the far end. It has a light inside the hutch which will come on when the top hinge on the right hand door is touched. And it seems to get touched on a fairly regular basis. So I will walk across the foyer, touch the hinge, and turn off the light. But on this particular evening, as I was locking the door and glancing across the foyer, my eyes were drawn to the chest against the wall rather than the cabinet at the end.

This chest has a lamp on it that stays lit 24 hours a day, seven days a week. I don’t know why. We’ve just always left a lamp on in the foyer, and when we bought new furniture—and new lamps—we continued the tradition even though we changed the lamp location and had to install an outlet. And we added a second one; this lamp and chest have twins on the other end of the foyer, backed up against the opposite wall of the entry. We leave that lamp on, too. After all, I wouldn’t want one lamp wondering why the other one gets to shine all the time or the other lamp wondering why it has to do all the work.

These lamps do not sit in the middle of their respective chests. They sit to one side. Except for tonight. Tonight the lamp on the chest that I can see is sitting squarely in the middle. And I have no idea why. Everyone in the building knows where that lamp belongs so I’m fairly certain none of us centered it so precisely. Out of curiosity, I walked around the entry to the other side of the foyer and, lo and behold, that lamp was also sitting squarely in the center of its chest. It reminded me of the time my parents came to our house to babysit while my husband and I went somewhere for something. I came home to find that the end tables in the living room had been moved to the exact center of the windows to each side of the sofa . . . even though that meant they were about three feet away from the couch. My father was obsessed with balance and could tell you if something was off by as little as a sixteenth of an inch without ever touching a tape measure. This led to some terrible predicaments during his lifetime, including but not limited to almost having to re-lay the brick corners on the building at Savannah because one side was off by an eighth of an inch . . . and he could tell that while standing in the parking lot.

So on this particular evening, I found myself wondering if perhaps he was responsible for moving the lamps to the center of the chests. It is exactly what he would do but, since he had departed this earthly plain several years before, I could only assume it was his ghost roaming the building and “correcting” my obvious mistakes—like putting a lamp to one side of a chest.

We all have ghosts in our lives, though not the kind that jump out and go “BOO!” or walk through walls. There are those ghosts that haunt our memories, magically appearing when some event calls forth their spirit. A lamp in the center of a chest will remind me of all the times my father moved a stand of flowers half an inch so it was an equal distance from the others, or stood for hours contemplating a wall because there was no way to balance the lights on it since there was a door in the way . . . or moved my end tables to a terribly unreasonable position so they were centered on the windows. Those we have loved and lost are brought to mind by small events in our daily routines. And we find ourselves wishing for happier times when they were close by, when a phone call would be answered or we could visit them someplace besides the cemetery.

I returned the lamps to their appointed positions then walked back across the foyer and into the service hall, turning to lock the door behind me. It was then I decided that, even if my father’s ghost did roam the building where he spent the last 30 years of his life—and where he died—it was not his spirit that had moved the lamps. Frugal person that he was, he would also have turned them off.

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