Premonitions and strange encounters

For the past couple of years, I have had such strong thoughts and memories of people from the past that I have searched for information on them via google. One was my cousin Susan Atmore. She was 3 years older than I and we grew up near one another in South Philadelphia. She lived on 10th Street and I lived on Warnock Street. She and her older sister, Lavinia, seemed so exciting to my childish girl mind, so sophisticated! Her sister, Lavinia was 6 years older than I was. I remember them in high school and the high school girl friends coming over, the make-up and the clothes and the boys they were dating. They seemed so sophisticated and I was thrilled and grateful to be a little drab mouse on the periphery of their colorful and grown-up world.

We had lost touch years ago, despite my best efforts with Christmas cards and so on. Susan and her sister moved a lot and eventually they didn't send their forwarding addresses and I lost touch. When I began to think of her and remember things so intenseley, I looked her up and found she had died and was buried in Gloria Dei, Old Swedes church Philadelphia, our family church in my childhood.

Eventually I tracked down her sister, also dead, in Texas. Same thing for a man I was once engaged to, and a couple of boyfriends. Even a couple of male friends from the 1980's cropped up in my memory and I searched them out to find they had died as well. That isn't too surprising since I am 80 and to my shock I often remember people and think, "Holy Cow, they are probably dead too as they were alder than I am!"

A male friend of mine from the early 1980's, Dave Brier, was kind enough to build a tree house for my daughter when she was about 4 in our back yard in the house I had just bought in Mt. Ephraim. He had also given me a forsythia he had removed from a yard where he did landscaping work. That forsythia that he saved and planted in my yard had 30 years of flourishing sunny life until about 2 or 3 years ago when it died.

DAve and I used to send one another Christmas cards and we seemed to run into one another on an almost annual basis. He frequented The Station Cafe', the train depot converted to coffee house and art gallery where I show work in the group exhibitions seeral times a year. We ran into one another in Knight's Park in Collingswood where I used to walk regularly with my dog and he bicycled regularly from his home in Haddon TWp.

Dave used to work as recreational director at the YMCA in Philadelphia and he worked a lot of races, so we knew one another from the Edward Payson Weston 6 Day Race that used to be held at Cooper River where I lived. My sister and I had worked a race with him at Byberry Institution in Pa. before it closed (he supplied timing equipment and banners and accessories to races).

I guess we lost touch, like so many other people, around the time of the Corona Epidemic. I still sent Christmas cards but he didn't send any back. I knew he had a housemate named Margaret. He invited me and a friend to his house once when he had received from an aunt a large reproduction of a painting of a famous race horse. Dave gambled on the horse races. His dining room table was literally covered by prescription medications and when I remarked on them he said they were Margaret's. I said, "Is Margaret your girlfriend?" And he said, "She thinks she is."

He was like that, kind of roguish and also cynical and leaned toward depression. He always used to say "I am an angry man. I have a lot of anger."

Still he had a boyish charm and a friendliness that was engaging. I had met a couple of his best friends too, Arnie, and Michael. There were a couple of other friends who called Dave on the phone regularly and Dave talked to them in a kind of therapeutic way according to DAve. He also had a son struggling with mental illness. Who at some point was in residence in a group home in Merchantville and dAve met his son, Chris, at the Station (in Merchantville) for coffee regularly.

Once when I had met Dave in the park, he told me he'd had a heart attack and had gotten by-pass surgery. He was doing pretty well though, as he had bicycled to the park. He was still smoking cigars though, and I mentioned that but he countered by saying he didn't smoke them so much as he chewed them.

I got to know a lot about DAve's life, his father, his brother, and his former wife, also his problems with alcoholism, which he had miraculously conquered and had been sober for decades. I admired that.

When he popped into my mind, I searched google for an obituary as he was 5 years older than I and had suffered heart attacks so I thought he might not have sent a Christmas card because he was dead. Nothing about him anywhere. I metioned this to my sister and she said, "Call his best friend, Michael." I hadn't thought of that so I looked up Michael Tearson.

Michael Tearson is a regionally famous dj, radio personality and also musician, singer, and performer. His e-mail was easy to locate and I wrote him. He responded very quickly and gave me Dave's phone number and said he would call Dave and tell him I was going to call so that he would answer the phone and not hang up on me. He warned me that Dave was declining and didn't answer the phone or go out places.

When I phoned DAve, he answered in the creaky voice of an old rocking chair. Despite that, we had a fairly cheery conversation of about 15 minutes or more. We talked about all the marathon runners we had known from the 6 Day RAce, most of whom were dead, and he told me he stayed indoors on the sofa now with his cats watching horse racing on rv. He had lost touch with Arnie after Arnie married, but Michael Tearson phoned him every day.

Dave said sadly, "No one visits me or calls me or even sends me a birthday card." I said, "I will send you a birthday card, when is your birthday?" And he answered, "I don't know, but I know I am 85." I chided him, "Come on Dave, you know when your birthday is!" And he answered "Novemer? maybe?"

It was heartbreaking to think of him curled up in his sofa cocoon all day wqatching tv and not getting out or seeing people. I told him that when the weather got better I would come over if he would make the effort to come outside and sit on lawn chairs for awhile. He said he didn't know if he could do that."

Afterwards, I fell into my habit of trying to fix things and I thought, maybe if he had a ramp down the front steps or the back steps to the yard, and a wheelchair, he could get out a little. He was pretty adamant that he didn't want to get out. So maybe I was barking up the wrong tree.

Meanwhile, Michael Tearson, his best and most loyal friend still phones him every day. And Michael Tearson still has a flourishing career dj'ing all the summer concerts for the Camden County Summer Concert series and he is about to be honored for his extraordinary career in the next two weeks at a local concert venue. I need to get the date and put it on my calendar.

I sent them both some of my postcards made from my paintings and I will periodically contact each of them. Michael has had his own life altering tragedy in the death of his wife, and his soul mate, from cancer, just a few years into their happy marriage. But he is not crushed into despair. He still participates in the carnival of life.

Happy trails - and don't get sucked into the sofa!

wrightj45@yahoo.com