What Were They Thinking? 

 

Perhaps it happened in the early evening of a sweltering day in the month of August when the dog star Sirius and the Sun rise and fall together. Known around the globe as “The Dog Days,” this weather-related phenomenon was noted by Homer in his Iliad:

On summer nights, star of stars, Orion's Dog they call it, brightest
Of all, but an evil portent, bringing heat and fevers to suffering humanity.

 

            For the six million souls traversing the asphalt canyon of New York City in August of 1947 it was just another hot, humid day to get through. The heat would become so oppressive, the city would open fire hydrants so children could cool off in the spray. The entire island of Manhattan would slow to a crawl as the The Dog Star radiated through the urban bodies on this bed-rocked island thirteen miles long by two miles wide.

 

            In August of 1947, as India and Pakistan were becoming nations, and Thor Heyerdahl was navigating the Kon-Tiki from South America to the Polynesian islands, Malvina and Solomon Hellman of New York’s Lower East Side were to have a romantic encounter that would produce me. My best estimate is that this exciting and creative act (one that I will always be grateful for), occurred between August 8 and August14^th during the month the Romans originally named Sextilis, until Julius and Augustus knocked all the months out of order. I have a very strong feeling that neither Molly or Sol were thinking of either the Julian, the Gregorian or the Roman calendar at that moment. 

 

            What were they thinking?  What were they doing on the day they created me? 

 

Black Narcissus and The Bishops Wife were playing at the local cinema and Brigadoon and Finnian’s Rainbow were the plays to see on Broadway. However, going uptown was a big deal for my parents, as the air seemed too thin for them once they got north of 14^th Street. They might have been watching a Brooklyn Dodger game on their black and white Dumont Television, checking out that exciting new second baseman named Jackie Robinson, however as much as I love baseball, I would hope for a more romantic setting for the day I was brought into existence.

           

 Knowing my father Sol, I imagine he ordered take out from Wah-Kees – Chicken Chow Main, Egg-Foo Young with a side of egg rolls. Meanwhile my mother Molly prepared herself for an evening of Chinese food, a nip or two of Scotch and then an intimate encounter. 

As my parents were never ones for air conditioners, I’m sure there was a sound of two old black fans creating a sort of calming white noise as the small machines did what they could to cool the air from another long day of Dog Star humidity. 

 

            Malvinia Hellman, the granddaughter of Rabbi Joseph Kanet from Czyzewo, Poland, was 30 years old. Solomon Hellman, the son of a carpenter from eastern Germany, was 34. And I was soon to become a diploid cell resulting from the fusion of two haploid gametes; a fertilized ovum, a Zygote. 

            Interesting to consider who I might have been before I was a Zygote. A passion, a twinkle in the eyes of Molly and Sol, or a spirit from one dimension about to bout to be “sired” into a new reality. I am certain my parents were not thinking in these terms. 

 

They were probably not thinking at all.  I would hope they had a moment of deeply fulfilled desire on that warm summer evening, when their respective gametes were joined. But if anything were going through their minds, perhaps my mother, being a classical pianist, was hearing one of Beethoven’s Nocturnes. My father might have been thinking about a sandwich, a really good sandwich, hot brisket of beef on caraway seeded rye perhaps with a touch of horse radish.

 

            There’s a strong possibility that the balmy summer evening might have drawn Molly and Sol to venture out afterwards to their favorite café for something special. Their destination would undoubtedly have been Ferrara’s up on Grand Street for an exotic coffee and a sweet desert. 

A perfect first night of existence for me. I was already smiling, already enjoying the ride in my mother’s fallopian tubes, my cells now dividing and dividing and dividing again at ever higher speed, warmed by the heat of a hot New York night and showered with a sweet rain of café au lait and chocolate cannoli.

 

The Tin Ceiling

I was always captivated by it; its beckoning luminescence held me in awe. 

Each time I raised my head and gazed into the silver tin ceiling I saw something new. Within its many designs and textures I’d imagine worlds unknown and places that were so secret no words could describe them. There were many tin ceilings in shops and homes on the Lower East Side. Some were painted white so they looked like plaster, and occasionally a combination of colors was used. However, the ornate silver ceiling in my father’s store was always my favorite. It was divided up into squares and within the squares were all these patterns that told stories to me. Or perhaps the wonderful raised ceiling designs and I created the stories together.

            In the corner of the ceiling facing the front of the store my grandfather Joseph had embossed his initials, “J.S.H.,” and the year he installed it — 1939.

From the tin ceiling hung four glass pendants with grapevines spread and circling around a translucent milky globe. The back wall was covered with ten racks of Singer sewing machines, arranged a dozen to a row, standing black and stately with their golden raised lettering shining into the shop. There was a walnut roll top desk, a six-drawer Coats & Clark oak cabinet to store the thread, and an old swivel wooden chair, all of which rested quietly on a well-worn dark oak floor — a surface that, when traveled upon, would creak in various tones, all of which seemed like music to me.

Handcrafted pendulum clocks ticked away on each side of the door and chimed in unison on the quarter, half, and full hour. The entire facing of the store was glass with green carved wood frames. The words “Hellman Sewing Machine & Motor Company” spoke to the street from the window. It was my father’s store and his father’s before him and it stood at 19 Pike Street in the Lower East Side of New York for over sixty years.

            I would walk to the store each day after leaving my fourth grade classroom at PS177. It was an easy two-block stroll down Madison Street; the store would come into view as I made my way through the large oval tunnel that was part of the Manhattan Bridge.

And it was there that I would do my homework or just sit and dream. I loved its musky old smell of wood, machines, and motor oil as I worked away on addition and subtraction. My father would sometimes leave me there when he went out to repair machines.

            I was never alone, because in the back of the Hellman Sewing Machine & Motor

Company sewing away were my father’s mother, Sarah, and her unwed sister, Miriam Rosenkrantz. Though I knew that Sarah’s last name had to be Hellman, I thought of both of them as the Rosenkrantz sisters. I never met Sarah’s husband, Joseph, as he had died many years before I was born.

            Sarah and Miriam dwelled in the rear of the shop like ghosts from another era. Their respective heads seemed always to be bowing in reverence to their work. They spent most of their time sewing industrial-strength zippers on cases and parcels.

            They spoke to each other in German and Yiddish and when they spoke to me it was in an interesting form of broken English. “So the numbers they are doing well for you? Maybe are you hungry a little? You want we should make you a sandwich?”

            Sarah’s husband, Joseph Hellman (my grandfather), migrated with Sarah to America in the early part of the 20^th century from a small town called Parchim, which was somewhere east of Hamburg. Joseph was a master carpenter and machinist and quickly saved enough money to open the Hellman Sewing Machine & Motor Company. I was told it was Joseph who put in all the fixtures and the glorious ceiling, which I loved to wonder in. No one in the store ever talked about my grandfather and when I asked my mother what had happened to Joseph she would say, “Oh, he had a some kind of illness.”

            To which I would reply, “Was it a bad flu or a disease?”

            My mother would take a breath and say, “It’s not important, he just got real sick and he passed away. Does it rally make a difference how he died?”

Sarah was quiet and brooding and dressed in dark colors to match her mood. Her silver hair always seemed to be in contrast to her black work clothing.

Miriam was lively and very kind to me. She played the mandolin, the same one she had played in a mandolin orchestra in Germany. Sometimes she would show me her fingers and say, “You see, you see all this work with sowing and machines and now I can’t play the mandolin as much anymore.” Her new love was opera. On Tuesday nights she would stand in the back of the Metropolitan Opera House for fifty cents and enjoy classics such as Othello, La Traviata, The Magic Flute, and her favorite, Turandot. She would collect the playbills and show them to me at the store. I would sit at my father’s desk as she explained what these great musical epics were about.

            Miriam was the light of the family and loved New York, while Sarah seemed to have left her heart in a small town in eastern Germany. And there we were, the sisters in the back sewing, my father repairing a machine or doing his books, and I sitting at the roll top desk gazing at the patterns on the tin ceiling and occasionally doing my homework.

            One day Miriam and I took a walk to the corner to look at the beautiful stained glass windows adorning the Pike Street Temple. Inside the windows were scenes from the Old Testament. On one of the windows was a depiction of King Saul falling on his sword. I told Miriam that this picture was very frightening to me. “Why would this man do such a thing? Why couldn’t God save him from the enemies that were surrounding him?”

            Miriam paused a moment and replied, “Oh well, you see, even though he was a king he still had to have faith and listen to God, and he didn’t. He also betrayed the trust the great prophet Samuel had in him.” As she spoke about Saul, the color seemed to disappear from her face. The lines on her brow and cheeks were pensive and she was slightly stuttering.

            Still confused I asked, “Why couldn’t God forgive him? After all he was the king of Israel. Surely the Lord of the Jews could forgive a great leader like Saul.”

            Miriam took my hand and replied, “Well this is just my opinion but I think when Saul realized what he had done he could not find a way to forgive himself. You’ll understand this story better when you’re older.”

Many of the Old Testament stories seemed mysterious to me, but they did have the power to make my eight-year-old mind wander into places that I had never been before. Those, along with stories I heard my relatives tell over Passover and other high holy days, were part of the folklore I grew up with.

Around 5:00 my mother would come by to pick me up. For reasons unknown my father’s store seemed to make her uncomfortable. There was some serious bad blood between my mother and my grandmother that I could see only in the prickly way they eyed each other. If there was an exchange of words it might be my mother saying, “Did he eat?”

And my grandmother would reply, “He had sandwich, big sandwich.”

To which my mother would shake her head, gather me up, and make an exit.

It was easy for my parents to keep secrets from an eight-year-old. If the subject were serious they spoke in Yiddish or German. I had picked up some words, but not enough to comprehend exactly what they were talking about.

My mother’s domain was elsewhere, namely our ninth-floor apartment at 40 Monroe Street. It was one block from the East River, and from our living room window I could see both the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges. I would sit on the top of our sofa and watch all the many types of ships moving north and south on the river.

I’d see freighters, ferries, tugboats, occasionally a destroyer, and sometimes a great battleship traveling north to the Brooklyn Navy Yard. My father had told me the story of the HMS Hussar, a twenty-eight-gun British warship that sank in the East River a long time ago. It was carrying millions of dollars in gold to pay the British soldiers. I’d sit on the edge of that sofa and pretend that someday I’d be the one to find the golden treasure of this lost legendary vessel.

One morning as I was getting dressed I overheard a conversation in English between my parents. My father was upset about something. It almost sounded like he was crying. I opened my door and as I did my mother said, “Sol, please, 1939 was seventeen years ago. You’ve got to stop thinking about it.”

My father replied, “Every time I look out the window it’s there, it’s always there.”

To which my mother said, “So stop looking. It’s not going to change anything.”

The next day as I was lost in the maze of the tin ceiling I once again noticed the year 1939 and my grandfather’s initials. I asked Miriam why my grandfather put his initials and the year 1939 in the ceiling. “Well, he was proud of the work he did and so yes, that’s why.”

I lifted my head and replied, “Didn’t he die in 1939?”

A moment of silence, then, “Well yes, that’s why we always light the Yahrzeit candle every October 15th. But this is not conversation for young boy.”

Something in me persisted. “Did he know he was going to die and is that why he put his initials in the ceiling?”

Miriam stood up and shook her head. “Such questions. Not to ask such questions. Where do you get such ideas from?”

My first experience with death came that year when we found one of my beloved parakeets at the bottom of the cage with his little feet up in the air. Each member of the family had a different reaction. My mother said, “It’s only a bird,” and my father told me I still had two left.

Sarah commented, “Everything dies, so what is big deal? It could have been worse.”

Miriam was the kindest. “Your bird has flown to heaven to be with all the other birds that have died.”

I replied, “Miriam, tell me what happens when you die.”

“Well it’s simple. You just go back to the place where you were before you were born.” 

           “Is that where my grandfather is? And all the other people in our family who are dead?” 

            “Yes. Joseph is there with his parents and his parents before them and maybe your bird is with them as well.”

            Most family truths were revealed to me when I overheard my mother on the phone. One spring afternoon as I was leaving the apartment to play baseball I heard my mom say, “You would have jumped too if you were married to that German witch.” 

All at once everything seemed clear to me and I understood how my grandfather died. 

I now knew why my father never drove over the Brooklyn Bridge. For some reason he’d always take the Manhattan Bridge even if it took us out of our way. That bridge spanning the East River was the ghost haunting Solomon Hellman each time he looked out our ninth-story window.

            On October 15, 1939, as war spread in Europe and The Wizard of Oz was playing in theaters around America, my grandfather Joseph Hellman decided to jump off the Brooklyn Bridge. I never told anyone in my family that I knew. For the first time in my life I had what I would later learn was a feeling of compassion for my father. I wanted him to know I knew and how sad I felt for him, but I couldn’t tell him.

            I continued to love the tin ceiling, as it was probably the last thing Joseph created before he took his life. I’d gaze at all the designs and look at his initials and wonder if it were his way of saying hello to a grandchild he would never meet.

            Or perhaps it was just his way of saying goodbye.

Apparition

Apparition

On a rainy afternoon in December of 1988, UPS delivered four parcels to my office door; a dozen music books from Mel Bay Publishing, a stack of Celic CD’s from Narada Records, a carton of bubble wrap mailers and a securely wrapped box from The Pensacola Mortuary containing my father’s ashes.

As I signed for the shipment I wondered if I should have paid the Mortuary in Florida the extra $50.00 to have the last little bits of Solomon Hellman dropped into the Gulf of Mexico. In the end I elected to have his remains shipped to me, reasoning that in the near future I could take his ashes back home to New York.

After I racked the books and the CD’s I opened the parcel from Florida and wondered where I should keep the urn. It was a little terracotta sculpture with his name embossed on the side. I held it for a while with both hands. I then decided to place it by the postal scale where I could both reflect on Solomon’s life and lean my outgoing mail on it. So for a short time my dad would be part of my daily life at Gourd Music.

As the first few days passed I would gaze at the urn and think about the man who was my father for 40 years. Not a demonstrative individual but in his shy and quiet way, loving and kind. I remembered with fondness how my father would walk around our home on Sunday mornings. Dressed only in his boxer shorts, an old button shirt, a well worn fedora on his head, and an unlit half smoked cigar in his mouth he’d amble around our home with a coffee in one hand and part of the Sunday New York Times in the other. This will always remain one of my favorite images of him..

He was extremely dedicated to his work and it broke his spirit when he had to give up The Hellman Sowing Machine and Motor Company. A business and a way of life he had inherited from his father which stood proudly on New York’s lower east side for over 60 years.

We had our own funny language. When I said I had to leave he’d say, “Go, Man, go”. He’d usually finish a sentence to me with “ok bub”. He had this funny habit of counting the number of my friends I would have over. We would be upstairs playing board games; my father would enter and then just silently count the number of bodies in the room by pointing his finger at each of my friends.

Sol only made one visit to Santa Cruz but he was impressed. He was fascinated by the number of people who would sit behind The Bookshop Santa Cruz and drink coffee all day. As we’d pass through the Café Pergolesi he’d say “it’s 2:30 in the afternoon, how do they make a living?” “Dad”, I’d say “this is Santa Cruz and it’s sort of a laid back community.” To which he’d always reply in his New York way “well bub, nice work if you can get it. Maybe I can retire here and drink coffee in back of the book store, too.” “You can dad” I’d reply “ You can start right now with a double latte.” And then we both would laugh.

After a few days of contemplating my father’s urn the happier memories faded and the reality of his last few years took over. A series of operations, two failed suicide attempts, and then a brief rally as he pulled what remained of him together, and rented a small condominium on Pensacola Beach.

Just as he attained an island of sanity, the years of poor eating, alcohol and depression caught up with him and he found himself living from procedure to procedure at Pensacola Baptist Hospital.

In the last year of his life I began flying between Santa Cruz and the panhandle of Florida every few months. The doctors would always call at 4am and say if I wanted to see him before he went on I should hop on a plane as soon as possible. My father somehow kept himself breathing but with each flirtation with death he grew weaker. Then they moved him to a smaller facility where they put individuals who are about to expire. The hospital was antiquated and extremely disorganized. Two of the three times I visited my dad, they sent me to the wrong room. My father once had another patient’s chart hanging from his bed.

His skin had a yellow cast from a liver bombarded for decades with Scotch. His heart was giving out and he had colon cancer as well. Half of his teeth were cracked and there was a musty putrid smell about him. Scales were spreading across his scalp among the last strands of his thinning white hair, and crooked red lines crisscrossed through blue gray eyes.

During my last visit to the Pensacola Baptist hospital I made plans for my father’s imminent demise. I contacted a local funeral home and signed all the papers to release his body after he passed on. I never saw his body after he died

On November 5^th 1988 I spent my last morning with my father. He was in and out of consciousness but we managed to exchange a few words. He asked me to hold his hand and as I did I knew that we both were accepting the fact that his time on this planet was coming to an end. I hadn’t remembered ever holding his hand. I promised to come back but I knew this was the last visit.

“Well dad I have to go back to California but I’ll be back in a few weeks.” He uttered out a faint but audible “Go, Man, go.”

Two weeks later as I was working on a paper in my family student-housing apartment at U.C.S.C. an attendant called me from Pensacola Baptist to let me know my father had died of a cardio pulmonary collapse. He suffered so much that I felt a sense of relief when I was told he was dead.

At least that’s what I thought.

On the fourth night following the arrival of my father’s ashes I dreamed of him. We were in a rowboat in a small lake in the Catskills in upstate New York. It was a beautiful day and the sun danced on the water creating a cathedral of broken light. We were fishing for perch somewhere near Bear Mountain. In my dream I hooked a large one and when I turned to show my prize to my father he wasn’t there. I was alone in the boat. I could feel my heart beating rapidly in my chest as I searched the water around the boat but could not find him. I heard his voice calling me from the dock, and ordering me to row the boat in. I grabbed the oars and rowed towards the shore. Just as I got there he disappeared. I then heard him say “hey bub” and there he was sitting behind me in the middle of the lake.

The next morning I gathered all my business correspondence, Which I neatly stacked between my fathers urn and my Pitney Bowes postage meter and climbed into my car to take it all downtown to the post office. The day presented itself with my favorite Santa Cruz weather— bursting sunshine but a little cool and a sky filled with towering cumulus clouds. After mailing my packages I stopped halfway down the post office steps to speak with a friend about a music project he was doing. As we said goodbye I felt a tap on my shoulder. In all the years I’ve been alive very few folks have ever tapped me on the shoulder to get my attention. It’s usually an “excuse me” or some eye contact, maybe a hand on the side of my arm but hardly ever an actual tap on the very top on my shoulder.

I looked left and then right and saw no one but felt the tap again. Whoever was trying to get my attention was standing behind me two steps up. Figuring it was one of my friends having fun with me I turned around with my hands on my hips and said in a joyful but somewhat loud voice “yeah, what’s up?

I wished I had never turned around. I felt like Scrooge seeing Marley’s face in the doorknocker, however this face didn’t fade away. It simply stared, and frozen to the steps I stared back.

Just two steps up me stood a replica of my father, looking exactly as he did just before he went into the hospital for the last time. He also smelled that musty old man smell that I remembered from our last visit. He wore a gray fedora hat tilted towards the back of his head

He smiled and I quickly noticed he had the same two cracked front teeth dangling from his gums. Lifting his head up towards the blue sky he said “What do people do around here? This is really some town you have, it seems very interesting.” His smile was so bright it almost seemed like his entire body was dancing.

As I listened in bewildered silence the only reply I could muster was “You want to know what people do?” As I spoke I could feel my self being split in two, like the lyrics of the old blues song, “The Two Trains Running” Well now there's two, there's two trains runnin'Well ain't not one, (ho!) goin' my way.

The first train was my rational self, saying “Ok Neal, he’s got those cracked teeth exactly where Sol’s were, he also has the blood shot pale blue gray eyes and yellow skin and the smell. He’s Sol’s height, and his voice is the same timbre. Take a breath, take a breath, I’m sure there are many old Jewish males of German extraction who would look a lot like your dad once they have reached his age. It’s just an amazing coincidence. It’s probably just the smell of him influencing your other senses. That must be it.

The old man continued to grin and said, “Well, what kind of things go on here?” And as he spoke he bobbed ever so slowly as if he was following a melody somewhere in his head. I licked my lips. “Well” I said “A lot of talented artists live here and there’s the beach, a giant roller coaster and many places to get a cup of coffee.”

He smiled and as he did he never let go of my eyes. I felt frozen as if I was captivated by some beam of energy coming out of this, out of this, of this what? Who is this man?

As I was forcing words out of my mouth the second train took off and said “you never saw his body, you haven’t heard from the mortuary, remember how that hospital put the wrong clipboard on his bed? What’s more, the nurse who called you did not once mention his name and the State of Florida has never sent you a death certificate.

The specter then said, “How long have you’ve lived here? What do you do here? Are you one of these artists who hangs out and drinks coffee?”

Now my mouth was completely dry and I felt like I was getting off on some kind of mind-altering substance. I too wanted to yell out like the Dickens’s character:

Mercy…Dreadful apparition, why do you trouble me?

The first train spoke again: “Come on Neal, breathe, this is not your dead father coming back to haunt you. It’s probably just another old man with a liver condition that for some reason looks like your father. Just relax, look at your watch and tell him you have to leave. Tell him any lie just go.”

I couldn’t leave. It was alarmed but at the same time entranced. He then said what to me was his coup de gráce: “Those folks in back of the bookstore, don’t they have jobs to go to or do they just sit, read and drink coffee all day?”

The second train whistled, “They might have gotten the charts mixed up, perhaps he went into remission and then just got dressed and left the hospital. He wouldn’t be the first person to do that. He then hiked over to his bank, and withdrew his remaining money. After all it was his dough. He probably got a hotel room, rested up and then he flew to San Jose and presto, here he is.”

The first train then asked the second train “Well, why didn’t he call?” And the second train replied, “He’s probably not being very rational. After all the last time he saw his son, he was leaving him for dead in a run down hospital in Pensacola, Florida. I then announced to both trains that I did what I could for him and I don’t feel guilty.

I wanted to bust out of myself and say to this ghost, this spirit, this eidolon “Listen, man, I just lost my dad and you look a lot like him and it’s really starting to get to me so, please enjoy your visit here in Santa Cruz but I have to leave now, OK? Goodbye.” I wanted to say it, but I didn’t.

Just then the old man started pointing towards the street and began silently counting. “What are you doing?” I anxiously asked. “Oh I’m counting the number of people who are drinking large cups of coffee in those take out containers.” All I could do was nod.

“Hey Neal,” a voice called to me. It was my friend Elise, leaving the post office. Just seeing someone I knew was a relief, “Thank goodness” I thought, a friend. Elise made a beeline for me and immediately gave me a hug and said she just heard that my father had died and how sorry she was for my loss. “So how are you holding up Neal?” I was tempted to say, “Well Elise, I’m somewhat faint and approaching a massive anxiety attack but before I collapse I want you to know that my father has come back from the dead and by the way he’s standing right next to you.”

What I did say was, “well I’m ok.”

Elise glanced in the direction of the old man who politely nodded to her. Could she see him? Did she feel a presence? For three seconds there was a deafening silence. Elise dropped her car keys, she quickly retrieved them, reached out to me and said “I’ve got to run, call me, let me cook you dinner.” She made her way down the steps to her vehicle waved and drove away.

The old man then said: “Is she your girlfriend? She’s very pretty. Do you ever sit in back of the bookstore and drink coffee with her? What kind of coffee does she like, do you both like the same kind of coffee?”

“Were just friends but yes sometimes we have coffee together.”

He smiled and nodded and then lifted his head up at the sky and said, “What a beautiful day. Nice day to be out on the water, what do people fish for here in Santa Cruz?” “Oh sand dabs, cod, albacore and sometimes people like to go out on the water to look for whales.” “Have you ever seen a whale?” the friendly apparition asked?” “Well yes I did. I once was on a boat out of Moss Landing and I saw two grey whales.” “Moss Landing, what’s that like? Are there green and grassy banks there?”

Oh Jesus I thought he busted my chops when he was alive and now that he’s dead he’s still toying with me. Perhaps he just showed up on his way to the next dimension to say goodbye in his own weird Sol Hellman fashion.

I then realized what day it was, December 21^st, the Winter Solstice, the day of the longest night. A day that ancient cultures viewed as the time when the veil between worlds becomes translucently thin, a time when a deity would escort the dead from the underworld.

I didn’t notice any deities standing with my father. The idea of some type of Drudic spirits leading an old Jewish man form Florida to the next level of existence somehow just didn’t work for me. However the resemblance was so strong, I could only look at his face for a few seconds at a time. It was like staring into the sun. I was now convinced that this was my father’s spirit saying goodbye to me. I had an urge to heave logic to the wind and just embrace him. But I didn’t.

I finally mustered up enough courage to say “ I really have to go” and he replied, “Well, go, man, go” and sort of saluted me. I sort of saluted him back and said, “Enjoy your time here in Santa Cruz” and began to descend the steps. After I crossed the street I turned around figuring as in most ghost stories he wouldn’t be there. But he was, and he waved to me again. I waved back and smiled, he waved back and called out in a raspy voice, “Take care of yourself bub, and buy that pretty girl a latte for me.”