We’re approaching the season now, here in Mexico, when the dead are remembered in a big way. In fact, according to Mexico’s Day of the Dead tradition — which is said to date back some 3,000 years — as long as one is remembered, they never really die.

(Photo above, taken yesterday: Already the mojigangas [oversize puppets] in the Jardin here in San Miguel de Allende are dressing up for Day of the Dead)

Unlike today’s Halloween, this tradition is not child’s play. In Mexico, the spirits of loved ones who have passed on are invited back every November 2 for a special celebration. Families erect candle-lit altars to their dearly departeds, along with their photos and some of their favorite things, including actual food and beverages. The message is: You are gone but not forgotten. You live on in our hearts and minds. We love you still. Here, have a drink….

If you’ve lived in Mexico, or if you’ve seen the delightful, award-winning, animated movie “Coco” (2017) set in Mexico, you’ll know what I’m talking about. In “Coco” the dead (skeletons, all) live on in fantastical mansions in the sky. (Remember Jesus’s purported words, “In my Father’s house are many mansions”?) They’re immensely happy, having a great time – zipping around in airborne trolley cars, getting all dolled up for huge musical events and such.

But of course, as the movie shows, there’s a catch:  To be happy in the afterlife, you have to be remembered by the living in this earthly one. Those who are not remembered disappear altogether. And then they’re truly DEAD.

When little Miguel, the hero of “Coco,” sees one old, woebegon, and clearly forgotten codger shake and glow – as if being electrocuted or something, then POOF! disappear — he asks his new, skeletal friend Hector, “Where did he go?!” Hector shakes his bony skull, shrugs his bony shoulders and admits sadly, “Nobody knows.”

All of this has led me to suspect that sometimes, especially at this time of year, the spirits of the dead tap us on the shoulder and whisper, urgently, Remember me!  Writers, I know, will have little trouble agreeing with me because we’re able to chalk this experience up to “the muse” and not necessarily to being un poco loco.

Recently “my muse” has urged me to write about a woman, a neighbor in my hometown, whom I knew as a child and adolescent, who played a pivotal role in my life. Until now I’d never written about her, but this seems urgent. I feel her spirit whispering now, Please remember me.

So I’m sharing the essay I just wrote about her here for you. Perhaps you’ll find it haunting. Please let me know what you think:

Alice

“Look at those legs!” Alice said to her friend Mac, pointing to my legs as I stood at the end of her backyard swimming pool’s diving board and raised my arms readying myself to take the head-first plunge. I’ve never forgotten that moment, those words, coming from a woman.

(Stock photo)

I was about eleven then, already fully grown and developed — way before my classmates at school — and I was becoming accustomed to strange men’s wolf whistles and “Hey, Babe!”s on the street. They made me want to run and hide myself, my newly curvy body, somewhere out of sight. They made me want to grow wings and fly away.

But Alice was my neighbor. Her big white house was just diagonally across the county road from my family’s red-brick house in this small suburban northern New Jersey town. I’d known Alice most of my life. She lived alone, except when her friend Mac came to stay for long stretches – that is, until the two women had a raucous fight and Mac left in a loud huff. We neighborhood kids waited for this drama. Their fights were like our parents’, but Mac was freer to leave and then  return when they’d patched things up.

Alice was a tall woman, about our parents’ age, with ivory white skin and short, straight, black hair. Irish, she said, from Boston. She’d served as a nurse, a Wave, in World War II on a ship in the Pacific and had since formed her own, small publishing company, Nursing Publications, in our New Jersey town. As such, she was an entrepreneur – highly unusual for a woman in our conservative little world. And at a time when women only wore skirts and dresses – this was the late ’40s and into the ’60s after all – Alice wore pants. I saw her as a trailblazer. I looked up to her.

Throughout New Jersey’s stiflingly hot and sticky summers, we neighborhood kids on summer break from school considered Alice’s backyard pool, the only swimming pool around, as our private oasis. We would gather together after breakfast – there were about five of us girls (our brothers were older and otherwise occupied) – and, gripping our bathing suits wrapped in bath towels, work up the nerve to bang on Alice’s front door to ask permission to swim. I guess you could say I was the ringleader. Eventually, Alice would come to the door in her big old bathrobe, looking groggy and grouchy, and loudly scold us for waking her again. 

She’d tell us (again) that she’d worked late into the night, writing, so she needed to sleep late in the morning. She hated to rise before noon. But there we were, on her doorstep, looking up at her with pleading eyes. I knew she’d never refuse us. Despite her gruffness, she had a soft spot for children and animals.

Her beloved standard French poodle, Cocoa, was like her child. She took him everywhere when she went out. He sat up straight beside her in the front seat of her old car like a vigilant passenger bracing for a crash. The interior of this car always smelled of mildew because Alice often forgot to roll up its windows before a rainstorm, so Cocoa’s curly chocolate brown coat usually smelled like mildew too.

Yes, Alice was forgetful. We kids saw her as the proverbial absent-minded professor. She was bookish and not at all practical – just the opposite of my mom. My mom called book-reading “lazy,” but she could use her able hands to make or fix anything. If our oil burner broke down, as it often did, for example, she wouldn’t bother to wait for my father’s help (which would have been a long wait in a cold house); she would grab some tools and go down to the basement and fix it immediately. 

In contrast, Alice could barely open a jar.

Alice had large, white, puffy hands and long, tapered fingers but zero manual dexterity. She could, of course, use her hands to write and edit articles for her company’s monthly nursing journal, which was her highest priority. But when it came to practical, domestic life skills, such as cooking, which my mom excelled at, Alice was all thumbs. 

So I began to worry about her. How did she eat if she couldn’t cook? Was Mac the cook when she came for long visits? Is this why Alice kept inviting her back? 

One summer, when I was in my early teens and the fat, fuzzy, luscious peaches for which New Jersey is rightly famous were in season, and out of pity for Alice’s obviously questionable eating habits, I made her a peach pie, from scratch, to thank her for all the summers she’d allowed us kids to play in her pool. My mom was an outstanding pie maker, and I, her acolyte, had learned the how-to at her side. So baking a pie came easily to me. When I presented this golden, fragrant, nine-inch, double-crust pie, still warm from the oven, to Alice, she clutched her chest and proclaimed it was the best gift she’d ever received. It was as if I’d given her a sweet-smelling new car.

After her old-and-ill mom died, Alice had no family. She’d been an only child, gone to Catholic schools (“filled with nasty nuns,” she told me), was married (“briefly,” she stressed) during the war, and never had children. So it made sense to us kids that Alice clung to her friend Mac as if they were family. We never got to know Mac when she reappeared because she didn’t seem to like kids much. It was as if she resented our presence in Alice’s life and the way we intruded on their privacy.

My father mocked their relationship, of course, calling them ridiculous  names I never understood. But he had a habit of mocking everyone, even when he was sober. This  was his “sense of humor,” he said. I paid no attention. To him Catholics were “Mics,” Jews were “Yids,” Japanese were “Japs,” Italians were “Wops,” all females over the age of sixteen were “over the hill,” and elderly people, “old farts.” He even mocked my pretty mother, calling her “Hatchet Head” because he thought her nose was too big. She tried to laugh it off. I ignored him.

Finally, when I was in high school, my parents got a long overdue divorce. Living through the runup to it, like my own private World War III, I’d become nervous and stick-figure skinny, which, strangely, made me grateful to lose all the curves that had caused so many men to whistle at me and call me “Babe.” 

My warring parents didn’t seem to notice my severe weight loss. But Alice saw me. She took note and took me under her wing. She asked me to work for her at her publishing company every day after school and during summer vacations, so she could keep a closer eye on me, I guess. In this sense, Alice became my savior. And after that, my mentor.

Her office was in a small, stand-alone building that had once housed an insurance agency, on a corner near the center of town between my high school and home. Alice had one room in it and I the other. My job at first was to answer the phone and take messages, make fresh coffee (Alice kept the electric coffee maker on all day, until the dregs smelled and tasted like poison), attempt to tame her wild filing system, and type up the manuscripts she’d heavily edited. 

By some miracle I was able to decipher her illegible handwriting, which on first glance looked like a series of long and short meaningless squiggles with small tight knots in them that crawled up the sides and between the lines of the double-spaced typewritten sheets. She was amazed. She told me I was the first person in her life who was ever able to read her writing. (But what did she do before me? I wondered.)

She attributed her shockingly awful handwriting to the fact that the nuns in her Catholic grammar school forced her to write with her right hand, even though she was a natural lefty. Left-handedness was of the devil, they’d told her. She really hated those nuns.

Alice’s company published a monthly journal, roughly the size and shape of Reader’s Digest, containing serious articles by experts and scholars about the nursing profession. Working closely with Alice in producing each issue, I was never tempted to pursue a career in nursing. But I did fall in love with publishing.

Alice taught me how to proofread and make editorial marks: insert, delete, close up, indent, capitalize, move flush left…. It was like a thrilling board game to me. And she taught me how to edit: how to read a submitted article with the editor’s cap she’d placed on my head, always asking, Is this as clear as it could be? Does it need more explanation or examples? Or fewer cluttery words? Does the meaning shine through?

Best of all, she took me with her to the printer each month to check the issue’s proofs. There in that dark and dusty building, amid the clanking old machinery and the smell of grease and ink, watching the huge rollers crank out the freshly printed broad sheets of paper, I fell in love with the printing process. These were the words that Alice and I had worked on together in her office, and now they were being stamped forever onto paper that would become pages that would be read by thousands of subscribers all over the English-speaking world. The whole thing seemed miraculous to me.

When one of the old typesetters showed me how he worked, then set my full name, BONNIE LEE BLACK, in solid caps in heavy, lead-based metal and gave this to me as a gift — “Here’s your future byline, Honey,” he said — I knew I’d found my calling.

My mother was thrilled that I had this part-time job with Alice, not only because she liked Alice, and not only because I was earning enough money now to buy my own necessities, such as clothes and shoes, but also because she thought I was following in her footsteps as a secretary. She’d become a private secretary after her divorce, and she wanted the same career path for me. Secretarial work offered job security, she said. “Men will always need secretaries,” she said.

I, on the other hand, didn’t see myself as a secretary. Although I was only about sixteen when I started, I saw myself as Alice’s editorial assistant. And one day, I knew, maybe far into the future, I’d become a writer and editor like Alice.

Alice, like my mother and all of the other adults in my hometown neighborhood at that time, eventually  contracted and died of cancer. Alice once told me she thought cancer was in the drinking water in New Jersey – from all the industrial waste that seeped into the soil and ultimately its waterways. She advised us kids to leave New Jersey as soon as we could, which we all managed to do. But wherever I’ve gone since then, whenever I’ve worked in publishing, and whatever I’ve written for publication, Alice has been with me. When I’m quiet, I can hear her ask, “Does the meaning shine through?”

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ 

NB: If you’d like a copy of my new book, THE OTHER SIDE, simply e-mail me at bonnieleeblack@yahoo.com, and I’ll be happy to send it to you. Let me know whether you’d prefer it in PDF or Word.doc form. It is free, a gift. I’m not interested in making money on it. I’m only interested in readers and reader-responses.