Improbable

 Improbable - by Hugh Tayler 2022 November 1st

My next door neighbor was a documentary photographer and I collected cameras, but we always ended up talking about something else, usually bicycles. Four years ago, I gave him and his wife a lift to the hospital. He needed tests for something potentially serious, the kind of thing that happens to a lot of people our age.  The next morning my wife Joan and I loaded the station wagon and drove to California for a couple of weeks. We were a thousand miles away when we got the news that my friend and neighbor had died suddenly. I never really got to say good-bye to him.

This year I was out on the sidewalk in front of our place getting ready for Halloween, sweeping leaves and picking up around the local Free Table. A woman who regularly tidies the free table was there, organizing the donated items. We happened to get talking about how this was a time of year to remember people who had passed away. According to the Old Traditions, the evening of the last day in October is a special time when there is not much barrier between the spirit world and our regular world. I respect the traditions, but don't believe any of that supernatural stuff. We chatted and I looked at the things on the table, but there was nothing interesting among the kid's books and housewares.

She took a sweater and a couple of decorative items from the table and walked off up the street and I went back to my leaf removal and tidying. A couple of people may have walked by, but I paid no attention. I finished sweeping the sidewalk  and did some work in the front yard. Then for no good reason, I came back out to admire my sidewalk cleanup. I happened to look at the free table, and there in the middle of the table, set aside from the other clutter, was a book that I had not seen twenty minutes before.

It was a large hardcover book of photographs.  The author and photographer was my next door neighbor. I didn't have a copy, so I picked it up and put it inside.

I went back out and finished setting up the twinkle stars and the pumpkin light and the candy chute and then I went inside. Joan was cooking and I told her the story and showed her the book. She said, "Look at the title - Coming Home. I've got goosebumps."  

Then the phone rang. It was my son, so I told him about the book. He said, "Maybe his wife has extra copies so she put it out."  I said, "Not a chance. Right now she's on a plane, returning from a visit with his brother."

I told this little improbable story to people a few times that Halloween evening. I was surprised when some of them thanked me sincerely for sharing it with them. Maybe people want reassurance that the dead are still present in our lives, and that we have a need to remember and acknowledge them.       
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