A few months back my friend Kim decided it would be great fun if we all went to a seance. It was scheduled for Dia de los Muertos at 11 p.m. at the Olivas Adobe, which is this really old rancho from the 1800s -- what passes for historical in California. I was game, even though I had to talk Rob into it. "You're scared," I said. "It will be lame," he countered. We sucked up the $40 per person fee for the spooky event, which was conducted by our local historical raconteur.
I've lived in a number of communities over the years, and each one has a self-designated guy -- it always seems to be a guy -- who's rather rotund and has a whole schtick about the history of the area, complete with ghost tales. I'm not sure why the rotund part, but it seems to go with the whole dramatic effect. Ventura's local guy specializes in Perry Mason stuff and ghost stories that seem to revolve around Ventura's City Hall and the adobe.
He wasn't the medium for the seance, though, the medium was his wife. Their daughter, who appeared sad and lonely, also was along for the ride. We showed up at the adobe at the appointed time and were given the standard lecture about the place. We went over how the Olivas family had 24 kids -- take that Duggars -- born from the same woman. Our local historian talked about how the family made its money supplying beef to the Gold Rush speculators to the north.
It was all stuff I knew already. One thing I do when I move to a new place is try to find out about its history. I love old historical stuff, and I'd put together a talk that I gave about the history of food in Ventura County awhile back, so I'd studied a lot of this before.
We were then given tours of the adobe and were allowed to go upstairs, but not all at once because the floors aren't very sturdy. Lindsay had been wrangled at the last minute to come along after someone else canceled, so it was Kim, Dennis, Rob, me and a friend of Kim's, Teresa Rochester, a reporter for the Star. We all agreed afterward that the tour, especially late at night, was the best part.
The seance itself was laughable. I'd gotten into it with the medium right before the seance about a local park that had once been a cemetery, but had been bulldozed years ago. Now it's a dog park, where hundreds of people a day come with their dogs to enjoy the sunshine and let the dogs frolic and socialize. There is a small, vocal group of fanatics that's all up in arms about "dogs defecating" on the graves of the people buried in what has become known as Cemetery Park -- it's actually named Memorial Park.
Frankly I don't give a shit about the old moldering bones (yup I did it, I had to go there). When I'm dead and gone and my remains are decaying I pray someone will have the sense to allow picnics on my grave. I hope lovers fornicate on my grave and certainly hope the entire dog population makes its doodies on top of me, with a few tinkles sprinkled in. I want life to happen on the earth. I want people to be happy frolicking in the grass. I'm dead. Gone. Every time a baby laughs and every time a dog wags his tail up there, it's a salute to my life, or at least what I want the memory of my life to be. After all, that's really all that's left after you die, the memories of your life. I want my memories to be happy ones.
The medium was of the dogs-defecating-on-the-graves side of the argument and when she started going on about it, I had to say something (Seriously. Some of the most dangerous words in my lexicon are "I had to do/say something.") The seance was held shortly after that.
We were led inside and sat in a large circle. There were a bunch of people there, maybe 35-plus. I wondered how many of them believed, really believed, in this stuff and how many were skeptical curiosity seekers, like us. I'm not saying I don't believe in afterlife or spirits, because I believe there are a lot of things we don't understand and that there is an essential energy that makes us all who we are, so it's possible. But, as Dennis said, if there were any energy from the otherworld, it wasn't in that room.
The medium did her schtick, which included some lovely displays of, by turns, phlegmatic clearing of the throat (dubbed by Theresa as Lugie boy), simulated childbirth, which seemed especially creepy given that pants-clad legs of the medium were splayed, and I kept thinking if I see a wet spot, I'm outta here. Then she popped up and looked with pop-eyes at Lindsay, who was giggling uncontrollably by now. She tried to catch my gaze, but I was having none of it, and peered intently at the rug pattern. We were all tempted to throw our hands in the air because she'd warned us that if we broke the circle, she could go into shock and die, which sounded really interesting.
"Respect me," she rasped, all dramatic and spooky. I thought Lindsay was going to leave a wet stain, she was laughing so hard. This went on for a while. Then the medium tried calling out random names of people who could be close to any of us. No dice there. She spoke in what she said was Chinese, but sounded like what I would have made up if I were pretending to speak Chinese. Good thing we didn't have any Chinese people there.
We were all glad when it was finally over with some really silly "readings." The medium talked about Lindsay's sex life, probably to embarrass her to get back at her for giggling.
After, we all talked about the experience. We all agreed the tour was the best part. Before the seance, during the tour of the house, we went upstairs into the bedrooms the Olivas family used. In one of the rooms was a box covered with seashells. We were told that the box was probably made by one of the Olivas daughters.
I was transfixed by the box. The seashells had been carefully collected and separated according to size. Then, whomever had made the box glued the shells on in very careful patterns. It was the coolest thing. The shells are exactly the same kinds of shells I find when I go to the harbor for my daily walk with my defecating dogs (Yes, we clean up after them). When the anonymous Olivas girl had made her box, all filled with the romantic yearning that absorbs the adolescent girl psyche. She had to have walked the same beach I walk each day. Of course, in her time, there was no harbor and no jetties.
Now when I walk along the beach I try to imagine how it looked back when some attention-deprived middle child of 24 children would run down the road to the beach, where she'd chuck her shoes and stockings and wade by the Santa Clara rivermouth. I wonder if she was as enthralled as I am by the dance of the pelicans as they drift under the breaking waves in patterns that evoke the theme from Apocalypse Now when the copters flew over the rice paddies.
Of course shellgirl would never have thought of rice paddies and helicopters, so I wonder if she had a crush on a handsome ranch hand and if she was collecting the shells for a box to put her dowry in. Not her official dowry, but the dowry of young girls of that time, which would have been the little knick-knacks girls collected back before we were inundated with plastic crap from the mall. But then I realize the box is still at the house, so whoever made it never made it outside the home with her dreams. That makes me a little sad.
While we were touring the house, we stopped to look for ghosts. We all stood there in the dark peering as hard as we could. But there were no ghosts that night, except perhaps in that shell box, glimmering in the streetlights by the front window of the Olivas Adobe.
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