Today's missive from the spirit world

To make a long story short, last year a dying musician sat for a bunch of interviews with me, telling me his (fascinating) story for an article I proposed to write. For reasons of my own - tangential to the slygrogging, although at this point the slygrogging may be central to each of my shortcomings - I didn't follow through. He died.

I went to his memorial service this fall. The most moving tribute was from his oldest friend, who shared with the mourners the song he sang to the musician on his deathbed. Playing the autoharp, the friend sang I song I hadn't heard in maybe 25 years or more,  Randy Van Warmer's late-70s dreck rock classic "Just When I Needed You Most" (here lip-synched with strange dancing).

His rendition, so pure, so loving, broke all our hearts and, given that this was a guy I intended to speak to, but hadn't and in my laziness maybe never would, filled me with guilt.

Skip ahead a few days, I'm eating breakfast in my local diner, when "Just When I Needed You Most" suddenly comes. Now not only am I guilty, I'm convinced the musician is communicating from the grave. Not only that, everyone I tell about the coincidence agrees, because they know I believe and it gives them pleasure to see me not only as tormented on Earth, but in all possible modes of being.

Skip ahead to today, to the supermarket where I'm shopping after a long drive. Next to the canned tomatoes, the daily guilt over still not having done anything about the story burbles to the surface and I think of the musician and of the song. At that very second, the song begins.

Let me say this succinctly and without hemming, hawing, or qualification - I believe that a dead person is sending me messages from the Great Beyond. Understand that in saying this I am asserting as true several propositions that many will find dubious, among them - that there is a Great Beyond,
that the dead can breach the border and communicate with the living, that a dead person is either angry with me for abusing his trust while he lived or through my laziness I am tormenting the soul of someone recently departed. I believe all of this to be somehow true, not just possible. Why I didn't instantly fall  to the linoleum of the Big Y in Pittsfield, MA, shamed by my uselessness and awed by the majesty and mystery of the universe that had been revealed to me, I can not tell you. I should have been rolling on the ground and speaking in tongues, but instead I kept going, wondering where they kept the fresh-baked onion rolls.

In the past, I would have tried to come up with an answer. Now, I leave it at this - I don't have an answer.