I am not a fanciful figment of Samantha Mozart’s imagination. I am a real phantom. Demonstrating that, Samantha has just written and published a book about me. It contains remnants stories of our conversations and experiences. And further proving my existence, here is a photo of me on the book cover image above. Not a very good one, I admit. I wanted a professional, glam shot, but Samantha snapped this when I was unaware; I was trying to make it clear to her why I lost the blog keys again and therefore couldn’t get in to find the snow shovels and the stuff was getting deep.
A book about me! I am elated, tripping the light fantastic all around the blog and singing. Samantha has a recording of me singing. You should hear it. I’m so chuffed and excited I gave my black, fluffy dog Dickens a bath to celebrate. He likes to roll in the blog spam, you know. Samantha has done all right. Wait’ll I tell my friend Erik—The Phantom of the Opera. He can make Christine sing all he wants. He’s got nothing on me now. Here is a link to Samantha’s book: The Phantom of My Blog: And the Afterlife of Caregiving on Amazon. You can look inside. Amazon offers a generous sample. Wait … I think one of my cousins is on their staff. Amazon probably wouldn’t notice him around. His name is Specter, Mycroft Specter.
My favorite reminiscence is of my friend Poe and me sitting in the blog cupola drinking red Zinfandel at twilight and telling each other creepy stories. Every time I think of that waning afternoon, I start sniggering all over again. We drained all of Samantha’s bottles of red Zin and then there were none. All that was left for her were corpses of bottles and corks. She wasn’t happy. It’s a wonder she even put this story in the book. Poe says he’s bringing a cask next time.
You know, in the afterlife of caregiving, everything’s a phantasm. The whole illusion you’ve been living has changed. Everything familiar to you is a ghost now. Who are you? What do you do? What about all the loss? How do you account for that? How do you replace that? Did you even do the right thing to begin with? Should you have made that decision to become a caregiver? Will anyone understand? Because, as Samantha says in her despairing down times, caregiving to them means caring for themselves: it’s all about them.
I was trying to help Samantha clean up the detritus, you know the debris from the fallout left from caregiving. I was up in the cupola. The breeze through the open windows felt refreshing. I stopped to gaze out and then I spotted the blue deer down in the meadow by the stream; that’s when I dropped the blog keys. I don’t know what happened. They disappeared. Did they fall out the window? They’re lying there in the weeds, maybe. Maybe a raven flew off with them. I don’t know. She had to have copies made.
Well, I’m going to bake some salmon for Samantha when she comes in here shortly. If we sell enough books, we can buy a grill, and then we can grill the salmon. We’ll have a nice dinner, though, tonight, of the baked salmon with brown rice—or quinoa, maybe—and artichokes with some really good dip. I went out and got some new candles for the magic candle wine bottle with the colorful drippings on it that sits in the center of the round table—bright colors. Maybe I’ll use yellow tonight. I cleaned up everything around the blog, even up in the catwalks and the cupola, my reward to Samantha for writing a book about me. And now a nice dinner and red Zin I picked up earlier. I didn’t dust, though. I don’t dust. Everyone knows that.
I hope you’ll buy her book. Get to know us better. Come to the blog, sit, share a glass of wine and some cheese with us. Bring some treats for Dickens, though, unless you want him to eat your food.
Samantha will be so pleased when she comes here and sees this that I’ve written, me promoting her book about me. About me and her. H-huh-huh-CHOO! H-choo! Uhh. It is kind of dusty in here. Excuse me. I need a hanky.
~Moriarty
Overseen by Samantha
For some reason the images no longer show here, but when you click on the question mark, it links to my books on Amazon.
