The Signs I've Seen

I keep checking the freezer for the mail key. 

It’s not there, obviously, but I’ll keep checking until I finally admit: I’ve lost the mail key. 

I’m someone who loses things. A loser, if you will. This is not an ailment for which people have particular sympathy. You’re accused, if you’re a loser, of being unthinking and careless. But I’m thinking and caring about things all the time! I think about my phone, keys, credit cards, and ID more than most people! And yet...where are they? In retracing my steps, I’ve determined the mail key must be here, somewhere in this 750 square foot apartment. But where? 

I lost one of the earrings I wore at my wedding so I just ordered another pair so I had three of those earrings until I moved and found the lost earring under my mattress (HOW?) so then I had four, but now I’m back down to two. Are these the two I actually wore at my wedding or the two new ones or some combination? Impossible to say. 

The mail key isn’t hard to replace. In fact, I’ve already done it and I actually love that part. I have great respect for the Home Depot key guy. He sits there like the 700-year-old Grail Knight from Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade just waiting for you to make your choice. “A garage door key on an officially licensed New York Mets blank? You have chosen...wisely.” The key guy plays a critical role in the loser economy. So I like that guy. That’s not the issue. Also keys are like...free basically? It’s so jarring that a key is only like $2.19. It literally lets you into your house and it costs like less than the Diet Dr. Pepper I inevitably also buy at the Home Depot self-checkout. I always opt for the print receipt because I have an issue with Home Depot email receipts. 

Well we made it to a new paragraph and at least she didn’t go off about the Home Depot receipt thing, you thought, naively. I don’t trust the Home Depot email receipts because I do get Home Depot receipts in my email, but they’re not for my purchases. A woman in the Midwest named Jamie keeps renting U-Hauls from Home Depot and I get her receipts. For a long time, I couldn’t figure out why this was happening. I Googled her and found out she also went to Indiana University, but the school has 40,000 students at any given time so that’s not that unusual. Kevin Kline went to IU and I never get his Home Depot receipts which is one of life’s great injustices. Then I realized I recognized Jamie’s phone number. I noticed immediately it was an 812 number (the Southern Indiana area code that goes unmentioned by Ludacris in his seminal piece on the topic of area codes, “Area Codes feat. Nate Dogg”). Upon further examination, I noticed her number was my phone number in college. She must have been assigned the number when I moved out of Bloomington and she moved in. So, somehow, Home Depot has my email address and her phone number linked and so we are linked. She appears to be a filmmaker. Given the distances she drives and some things I’ve learned from Google, I think she’s renting these U-Hauls to move equipment. When I see she’s renting another one, I think “I should be working more.” So I watch this woman work on her film projects like she’s a second, harder working version of me as if Paul Auster wrote an episode of Hannah Montana. 

So I bring that unique baggage to Home Depot. But even that isn’t the issue. The issue is the mail key was on a keyring which my mom gave me. And I lost that. 

When you’re a loser and your mom died, you’re on a crash course to lose things she gave you. And you can’t replace those things because they weren’t things you liked and would just pick out for yourself. They were things your mom thought you would like, which is entirely its own category: physical totems of your mom’s conception of you which was forged from equal parts one half-memory from 1998, one piece she saw about Millennials during the Today Show’s Ann Curry year, and one thing she totally made up. There’s no Home Depot guy for these. 

The key chain was a little fuzzy gorilla. It came on a purse and this purse brand’s whole thing is these little gorillas they put on things. I know the name of the brand, but this is not #SponCon. My mom would randomly send me things like that, especially when she got sick and didn’t have reason to shop for herself. The bag was gold lamé and a very weird size. It was sort of bad, but also fine. I knew when I spotted that gorilla that that’s why she bought it. “Caitlin will love this gorilla!” she thought to herself. I was fine with the gorilla, but every time I looked at it I thought about my mom thinking she had a big win with the gorilla and that I did love. 

I keep looking in weird places, like the freezer, because I feel like I just placed it somewhere weird and it will show up again. The freezer is unlikely, but I have an association with freezers and weird things. 

“Hammers don’t go in the freezer. That’s just where I keep it.” My mom would say as she hammered a bag of ice. “In case that’s on a test at school. Hammers don’t go in the freezer.” But she kept a hammer in the freezer to chip off ice from a bag that had formed into one big block. She was picky about ice and, accordingly, she bought her ice at the 7-Eleven that later turned into a Moose Lodge that then turned into a Mexican restaurant that turned into nothing, but people still go in and out of there (we see you!). It’s the kind of building that if it were on the Jersey Shore or in Freeport, Long Island there would be a six-part Gimlet podcast about why this building keeps housing radically different businesses because some New York-media-type noticed the building when they were visiting their grandparents. But when a building like that is in the Midwest there’s no one telling the story. It’s just one person saying “didn’t that building used to be a Mexican restaurant that used to be the Moose Lodge that used to be a 7-Eleven?” and another person saying “I think you got the order wrong.” And that’s the end of the investigative reporting. The Midwest is losing its history. When you’re from the part of the country that’s basically Phase 2, you’re less precious about it. It’s like how there are always fewer pics of the second baby. I mean, Ludacris already forgot 812. 

The gorilla is still not in the freezer. 

My mom used to send me a lot of clothes from what can only be described as Amazon’s dark web. It was like getting a package of a fun house mirror of your own personal style made of fabrics that look and smell flammable. There were some winners though. I have a pair of navy shorts that I’ve worn so much they are starting to fray. I don't know what to do about that. I guess this is why you never get handed down the family shorts: shorts aren’t not built to last. 

She did send me one last batch of clothes...six months after she died. It was one hot pink tie-dye jumpsuit and one pale pink and blue polyester triangle top. These are exactly the kinds of things she would send. There was no receipt (typical of the strange online shops to which she willingly gave her debit card number). I would never question that it had been my mom that sent them, except for the fact she’d been dead for, like, a while. I asked other friends and family members if they bought these clothes. They didn’t know what I was talking about. I scoured my gmail to make sure I hadn’t bought a pink tie-dye jumpsuit in an altered state. I had not. I told my grief counselor Deb (callback!) that I thought my mom sent me these clothes. She wasn’t convinced. God damn it, Deb, let me have one thing. I just...you guys, I think my mom sent me these clothes after she died. 

That was one of three signs my mom sent that year. 

The first happened when I went to London to see Gillian Anderson in All About Eve on the West End which I saw twice because -- and you know this because you’ve read this far -- I’m not well. My mom and I loved The X-Files. We often answered the phone with “Scully”! I transferred a lot of my feelings about my mom to being obsessed with Gillian Anderson, which they say is a better way of dealing with grief than abusing drugs, but not by much. I bought the tickets in a fugue state at 5am probably 10 days after my mom died. The same day, I met my friend for lunch and threw up outside the diner and then made her explain to me what was the deal with Brett Kavanaugh (I’d missed the news in the weeks leading up to my mom’s death! And Brett Kavanaugh’s deal? It’s not good, folks!). I miss the salad days of grief when no one questions anything you do. Spending hundreds of dollars on seeing the same play twice, throwing up on a tree in Midtown East, being vaguely unaware of government-appointed rapists. Losing it! But in a way people understand and accept. 

Gillian looked me straight in the eye when she was performing which I thought was cool, but that wasn’t the sign. The sign came the next day while my husband rested in the hotel room and I decided to go downstairs by myself. That’s already not characteristic of either of us. So you get the feeling there’s gonna be a reason! I got a drink at the Savoy’s American Bar, named in honor of the country with the iconic defunct Moose Lodges and Home Depot email mixups. I was sitting there alone when I heard a man at another table say “meet [insert name I don’t remember], he’s a guest of Dolly’s.” What. He was a guest of who. I don’t know why but I got up right then and walked outside. The hotel is in a courtyard it shares with the attached West End theater which, wouldn’t you know it, was premiering 9 to 5. I pushed past the revolving doors and just walked right up to her. To her. She was right there. Dolly Parton. Was right there. Fans were behind barricades, but because I was a hotel guest I could just be there. She was right there. I was right there. That was the sign. 

In modern times, when you lose someone, you have to deal with all their online accounts which can range from such fun activities as scanning a death certificate to prove to Instagram they should close the dead person’s account to full on becoming a hacker and taking over their online identity with brute force. When I had to make a password for my mom’s accounts it always involved some combination of two words: Scully and Dolly. 

And that’s not the weirdest one. 

Later that year, I hiked Kilimanjaro, which is a thing I’d put off till after my mom died because I didn’t like being out of contact when she was sick, but something I wanted to do by the time I was 40 (and still 11 years to spare winky!). Hiking Kilimanjaro sounds impressive because it’s a brand name thing, but precisely because it’s a brand name thing, it attracts a lot of half-wits. The Tanzanian guides, who’ve hiked this mountain literally hundreds of times, certainly earn their tips in physical labor, mental energy, and just dealing with people. I heard a British tween explain to her guide the entire plot of Lady & The Tramp. “There’s one dog that’s a lady, you see, and another--” You get it. A lot of the tourists are annoying, but I brought the lived experience of banging a hammer on ice from that New Albany, Indiana 7-Eleven and throwing up outside that diner that one time, so I think the guides really were learning more from me than I was from them. 

People drop out as the days go on due to injury, altitude sickness, and just not feeling it. There’s tension at all times on the mountain, that you might be one of those people, one of those people who let down their groups, their travel partners, and themselves. (That’s not how anyone frames it for others and how everyone frames it for themselves.) I found most of the days fairly moderate, but the last day I can only describe as...bad. The hike goes through different terrains every day, but you’re mostly walking on, like, the ground. The last day when you wake up at 11pm -- not a typo: PM -- you start the ascent on ice and snow to the summit. This day you’re in a line not just with your group, but with hundreds of other travelers, pushed and prodded by your guides in the dark. If your shoes come untied, a guide -- possibly now armed with knowledge of the Bella Notte spaghetti scene -- will rush to tie them. You’re not trusted to do this in the wind at this altitude. If you need food or water, you’re rushed to do it quickly and made to feel a burden to the group (which, like, you kinda are). You are cold and you are hungry and you did this to yourself. 

The guides sing songs to keep you motivated and moving. Songs like “Jambo Bama (The Kilimanjaro Song)” and “Hakuna Matata” (but not that one). It’s nice that they sing, but also you’re in hell so the soundtrack is kinda besides the point. Except when they stopped as a group, one guide from our group named Andre started singing by himself. I have a dream, a song to sing/To help me cope with anything. It could not be. I could not be. Andre wasn’t just singing an ABBA song. He was singing an ABBA deep cut. He was singing “I Have A Dream,” a song that can only be described as, stay with me, cheesy for an ABBA song.And it was me and my mom’s favorite ABBA song. And it’s about angels, a thing we certainly never discussed believing in, even once. 

I believe in angels

Something good in everything I see

I believe in angels

When I know the time is right for me

I'll cross the stream, I have a dream

I have a dream, a fantasy

To help me through reality

And my destination makes it worth the while

Pushing through the darkness still another mile

So. That was a sign. I got to the top. 

On our second day of descent when you’re basically on a flat dirt road that feels impossibly far from the icy top of the mountain -- or maybe it just feels exactly 19,341 feet away -- I ran into Andre. As I am someone who overshares, I told him this same story you just read. I’m not sure he understood the whole thing because his English wasn’t perfect and my Bantu, um, needs work, but he said “I was watching you the whole time. You were always going to make it” and walked away. Well, shit. 

That was the last sign she sent. Those were the three and there hasn’t been a new one since 2019. The gorilla mail key is my first anti-sign. I lost it. I lost her. We’re in Phase 2 now. You can’t be precious. 

Maybe I don’t believe in signs really. If you believe the signs are loved ones trying to communicate with you from the other side, then what does it mean when they stop? No, I agree with you: it just can’t mean that. 

I wonder if Jamie is driving around Indiana getting signs meant for me. Fuzzy gorillas fall in her path and she doesn’t know why. ABBA songs come on and she hates ABBA. Can this woman not make films in peace? And she can’t even blame the Home Depot corporation’s disturbing disregard for customer privacy! Jamie’s got nothing, except ambition and work ethic.

(Her name isn’t really Jamie. His name isn’t really Andre. His name isn’t even really Ludacris. It’s Christopher Bridges.)

I have to admit to you I bought a replacement gorilla keychain on Poshmark. So now I have the key and I have the keychain so it’s like it was before, but now when I see it, I don’t see my mom. I see how I lost the first one. I could still find it though. Maybe it’s in the freezer or under the mattress. Wherever it is, maybe that will be a sign. 

But maybe I don’t need signs. Maybe I was gonna make it the whole time.