Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, October 31, 1994                   TAG: 9411150002
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-5   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: MONTY S. LEITCH
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

DRIFTING BACK

Nevertheless, I'll tell you, too: One night a ball of blue light sat for a while in our wicker bedroom chair. I stared at it, blinked, stared, and then it was gone.

I've always wanted to see a ghost. Maybe because I live with so many of them. Crowds of relatives, from both sides of the family, are still discussed at the dinner table, as if they'd pointedly refused our invitation or would have been here with us if something more important hadn't suddenly come up. Some of these relatives have been dead for more than a hundred years.

And then there are the drifters: individuals who once touched my life, and then disappeared. Are these not ghosts, haunting my memory as they do?

For some reason, I remember with peculiar clarity a woman I saw, 20 years ago, wearing a short red coat on Kirk Avenue. I have no idea who she was, and wouldn't recognize her again. But the way she leaned against the wind, the way her coat swaddled her neck, these details keep flashing back oddly.

And lately, a girl I knew briefly in grade school has been whispering around my edges. Her name was Gloria. She was wan, a thin-nosed blonde, angular, and nearly as tall as I. She wore organdy dresses and insufficient sweaters buttoned at the neck. Her legs were always splotched from the cold.

Every day, in second grade, she borrowed my eraser. I gave her a packet of amusing animal-shaped erasers for Christmas, thinking that would help. But apparently she lost her gift, for she kept asking to use my fat, efficient Art-Gum. I must admit, I didn't like her much. But I tried to be polite.

Gloria had been to Cuba on vacation, and that was particularly exotic in 1957. Fidel Castro had only just launched his war against Batista, and Cuba was not any longer the kind of place where anyone vacationed. But the real Cuba, Gloria insisted, was not like the one then depicted on the evening news.

Perhaps Gloria was Cuban. (I don't remember her surname.) Perhaps her vacation had been not a vacation at all, but a visit to her grandparents. Perhaps she'd fled with her family (her aristocratic family?) from the revolutionaries; perhaps that's how she'd ended up coatless in a county much too cold for organdy dresses.

I don't remember Gloria at all after the second grade, so I suppose the family moved again. And I can't account for her haunting me now. Unless some mysterious dendritic thread has looped her together in my mind with the ghostly Cuban refugees who've landed in Florida by boat and by miracle over the past few months. None of these people look like Gloria looked. Except that they carry the same burdened expression in their eyes.

Florida is so far away; Cuba so much farther. I try not to think of these things. And yet, I think of Gloria. And of her eyes.

Could any ball of blue light, any transparent figure lingering at the window or drifting up the staircase, even any headless horseman haunt as fiercely, as fretfully, as genuinely as does Gloria? I'd prefer a filmy, light-shot ghost to this palpable one any day.

Monty S. Leitch is a Roanoke Times & World-News columnist.