Jacob Marley

Not that I saw his ghost.

Today at five I walked out of my workplace with an associate who has a specific visual style. He's young but he's got the shaved head thing going on and his head has character. That's not code for anything. His head isn't smooth. You can imagine his mental processes by the map of his cranial exterior.

He normally wears a ballcap outdoors, khakis and simple shirt, blue.

I wished him a good evening, headed in the opposite direction and started toward my bus (which I caught in perfect time today!). As I scanned for the bus, I looked up in front of me and saw him in profile, waiting on the corner where he shouldn't have been.

His appearance was a bit strange. When you see someone in a different setting, you notice different things. Wow, I never saw all that extra weight. He also looked a bit more beaten up at a distance. As I got closer, I noticed that his ear was far more cauliflowered than I remembered. All of these differences were scary in the glowing light of this extraordinary Seattle day.

Then I saw. It wasn't him. It was an uncanny rendering of him 40 rugged years in the future. Thankfully, the guy didn't see me gaping at him. But I had to confirm that there wasn't any kind of Dorian Gray action going on. Nope. Just a guy, very similar. Same ballcap, pants, shirt, baldness, height, etc.

I was glad that my friend wasn't with me. It was a bit unnerving. My hesitation here is about my own fear rather than his delicate state of being. These kinds of ghosts, my slippery selves, visit me often enough and I am unnerved.

A while back, a relative who lived at a distance visited my family in Ohio. He was an Uncle of my dreams since I can't recall ever meeting him. His life in the extravaganza known as California was tantalizing during my isolated Ohio boyhood. A simple comment after his visit got under my skin. It was a natural one to make, probably reassuring to most.

The observation was that this Uncle was a time-lapsed version of me in some decades forward. As much as I had always held him as a symbol of a good life, I was truly disturbed at the idea of meeting him, seeing him. Foolish, disappointing cowardly behavior on my part. A loss.

But honestly I didn't want to see me with the fast forward button pressed. Maybe I was upset because I didn't have visual memories of my father, Peter, aging. Maybe because my Grandmother cried as I became a young adult because I looked just like Pete. Maybe I'd wake up the next day and I'd be suddenly old. That's already how many describe the process of aging. I don't know if there is a good reason for this jagged evasion.

Ha!

NPR just advertised The Picture of Dorian Gray from Barnes and Noble. What that coincidence means is opaque to me, but it seems like a bit of a cosmic joke on me. Unbelievable. I do know that Jacob Marley and his chains frighten me more than Dorian's portrait. Just like Scrooge, I want more time.