Dear Bob

February 15, 2022

Dear Bob,

It has been about a year since I wrote you, for that I apologize. Someone so dear as yourself deserves correspondence more frequently than once a year. But here I am, another Valentine's Day, celebrating your birthday writing a letter.

It was our eldest granddaughter that reminded me, though she didn't know at the time that it was your birthday. She sent me a box of homemade gingerbread cookies and a gourmet cat treat for my new cat on Valentine’s Day. A cat? I know, we never had a cat when we lived together, three beautiful daughters were enough. O boy were they a handful after you left!

Honestly, Bob, you simply can’t imagine how stressful it was finding this new cat. I was in contact with a local animal rescue organization, of course they wanted to communicate with email as well as send photos to my cellphone, which I still haven’t figured out how to work properly. They also had some sort of “live web forum” where you could ask questions. The cats are alive, of course, and need homes, what else is there to chatter about? Anyways our communication fell through, and they ended up giving the cat I had visited to someone else! Probably someone who knows all about 5G. What is the G even for? Our daughter came through for me though and found me an affectionate 1 year old who doesn’t like to go outside. Only dreadful thing is she came with the name “Latisha.” What kind of old lady name is that?

I may as well admit, it’s not just the cat drama that has me held up in a writer’s block. This darn Corona virus keeps getting passed around like mint juleps! Half of the women’s groups I was active in shut down completely, and the rest of them require masks. For an 89-year-old born in Nebraska during the Depression who has buried one daughter and two husbands that’s a bit of a pain in the you-know-what! This whole Zoom thing takes away all the fun. They’re smart women, I want to hear them speak! And my hearing aid. Not my friend. Sometimes it pops out when I reach for my mask. Then again, as I was telling our granddaughter, most of the women I knew are either dead or housebound now, as I walk into my 90’s watching the evening news and eating cheese popcorn.

But I digress. There is a legitimate reason I haven’t written. Now, it’s rather embarrassing, and not even my doctor knows about it, but I’ve been having the most peculiar health problem, and I do wonder if somehow you are at fault. I hesitate to even mention it, as I will be joining you sooner rather than later anyways, but are you causing trouble up there missing me? Trying to hasten my departure from planet Earth? Because something very peculiar has been going on lately and I’m telling you Bob, it’s getting downright hazardous!

Here's how it all began. I was sitting out back on my patio, you know how I like that, where I can watch for the brightest cardinals. Seems they get brighter and bolder every year. I was watching the cardinals and sure enough, there was a cheeky one that just, well, to be honest it reminded me of you! It kept approaching just like you at the square dance those many years back and it wouldn’t leave me alone and I said, “Well, fine, I guess I’ll call you Bob.”

Suddenly my feet began to, well, hover uncontrollably, I really don’t know how to describe it. They simply wouldn’t stay put on the ground beneath the porch swing. The longer I looked at the cardinal and thought of you square-dancing, the more it seemed like my feet were getting into the attitude of dancing themselves! I don’t know what I would’ve done had the neighbors not let their dog out and distracted me, at which point I became concerned more with how I must look swinging my legs way up in the air uncontrollably than with remembering past dance halls. Down they came. Shaken, I said hello to the neighbor and hustled inside.

Now you know me, I don’t hold a candle to any of that heaven-and-hell stuff, for all I know you could be square-dancing on Mars. Kids these days! Did you hear about all these trips into space lately? They have us believing that we could even live up there. Anyways I’m not a superstitious woman either, so after a couple days with nothing strange happening, I went back to business usual. I chatted with my old women’s guitar group (none of us play anymore but we sure know how to gossip- harmless of course-) and even went to an in-person choir board meeting at the church. I think I chalked the cardinal-named-Bob experience up to my new medications, or something I had eaten, or both. But then it happened again, and dang it Bob if it wasn’t you in my thoughts behind it again!

My youngest granddaughter was over, the one that likes art so much, because her mom and dad came to help me fix my lighting. I was telling her how my art when I was young was sewing. You know how poor we were growing up in the plains with a single mother, and me being the only girl in the bunch there weren’t many hand-me-downs that were suitable! So of course, I made all my own clothes, including my wedding dress. I was showing my granddaughter my wedding dress, still in perfect condition. Remember how hot it was in the chapel that August? The priest put a tapered candle on the end of each pew but by the time the ceremony was ready to begin, they had all melted into puddles before even being lit. A beautiful day, nonetheless, the day I chose to be a teacher, wife, and mother by your side till death did us part. I was getting out the wedding dress and it happened again! Only this time, my whole body lifted off the carpet in the bedroom! There I was, holding the dress out to my grand-daughter, and my feet were 3 inches above the floor!

Luckily, she’s a goofy girl, and was so distracted by the lovely outfit in front of here that she didn’t notice I was hovering like a fairy godmother or had seemingly grown three inches in my old age! She took the dress, asking to try it on, and I concentrated on pointing my toes like a ballerina, so that if she looked down it would at least appear that I was standing on my tippy toes, instead of on thin air. The silly goose didn’t even notice, but happily tried on the dress, which fits her to a tee. Bob, honestly how that is possible is beyond me, she’s adopted after all! As I praised how perfect she looked, I focused awfully hard on her crazy black curls, so different from my own, and I slowly lowered to the ground.

After this experience, I had to do some reflecting, after peeking outside to make sure nobody had seen me descend from the ceiling. I remembered that every time I had tried to write you in the past few months, it had been difficult to put pen to paper. I mean, literally, Bob. You know me, I can talk till the cows come home, but my hand would shake just above the paper every time I tried to write you. I attributed it to medication at the time, but why wasn’t it happening when I wrote my Christmas cards to everybody? Another thing. I thought that it was my imagination that our old family photos seemed to float out of the albums whenever I took them out, but come to think of it, it never happened when I took out photos from my second marriage.

The third significant incident came out of nowhere, or somewhere, but I wasn’t doing anything in particular, just reminiscing about our daughter Lauri. You were the sweetest father to her before you left, Bob. She may never have learned to speak, even by age 16, but her eyes followed your every move through the room as though hugging you with every breath. Her dear soul patiently endured its existence in a body that wasn’t yet understood by medicine, until it couldn’t. You and she were my greatest gifts in this life, and your departures are losses I carry to this day. Such strange times. Who could have known that the illness plaguing Lauri would be deciphered and understood as avoidable a mere 3 years after her death, and that research about nuclear radiation would reveal incredible horrors for those exposed? Even if, like yourself, they were there with the army not to destroy, but to repair after the desolation. Construction in a bomb zone, in a country whose language you didn’t understand, with commanders who knew less than they should have. If I pray it is that humanity has become too wise for war.

I was holding such a thought in my mind when I felt a bump on the top of my head. Thinking it was the cat, I tried to swat the back of my neck, but my hand contacted a solid surface. I looked around and gasped. Bob, I was floating just beneath the ceiling, my arms being pulled to embrace upwards! The love in my heart at my memory of you with our daughter battled with the terror and elation I felt at realizing that gravity had somehow reversed – I was tending upwards, and it didn’t seem that there was any probability of me reversing direction. I remained suspended there, just like the old men in Mary Poppins, until I realized that I was getting hungry. Now, there’s no lunch on the ceiling. There may be a few cobwebs, but that’s about it. As I began to think more about food, I slowly and gently descended to the armchair I had previously been seated in.

Sitting for a while in shock, munching on our eldest granddaughter's cookies, I decided that this could be no coincidence. And I don’t think that a doctor poking and prodding at me would uncover the cause of this gravity disturbance. Furthermore, my family would certainly not be happy to hear about my lofty adventures. They already have me wearing this heart-shaped microphone device with emergency buttons that send out calls to them and to the hospital any time should I fall. Very funny, all those worries about falling, when my problem was exactly the opposite! I can’t stay on the ground!

The time has come to test my theory, Bob. Is my newfound ability to levitate somehow coming from you? I am gathering everything that reminds me of you and putting it around my chair in front of the fireplace. Your favorite plaid shirt, your medal of honor, all the photo albums with you and our beautiful family before you died, and of course my wedding dress and ring. All the letters I have written you each year on your birthday and every gift you have ever given me, although the greatest gift you gave me was lightness of heart. I have placed them all around the chair now, as I write from across the room (with heroic effort, might I add, the pen keeps drifting upwards). I have my lapboard with me so I can continue to write as a I cross the room… almost there… I am trying to sit in the chair, and I am remembering every kind look you ever gave me in those 19 blessed years, and...

RIDGEVIEW TOWNSHIP MISSING PERSONS REPORT

89-year-old Ann Bow was reported missing from her home in the Fawns Way neighborhood on February 20, 2022. All doors and windows were locked and there was no sign of any struggle. No one reports having seen any suspicious behavior.

On the floor was a pencil, a hand-written letter, a lapboard for writing, as well as family items which her daughters report were related to her deceased first husband. All her belongings and clothes were intact, the only outfit missing being her bathrobe and pair of dancing shoes.

The only thing out of place in her home was a large hole in the ceiling in the living room which may have been caused by something crashing from the trees above, except the splinters are all pointing upwards, not down, and there is no evidence of debris.

The investigation continues. Please keep your eyes and ears open for any clues about Ann or the circumstances surrounding her disappearance. Anyone who meets this woman is asked to keep her secure and call the station immediately.