my brother sent me an e mail a few weeks ago.
it stated that he was going through my fathers papers and had discovered something that may be off interest to me. i opened the attachment and started to read. it was written from my great grandmother, a woman i had only heard about and never met. 

my speech which i had made at the funeral was filled with stories describing my relationship with my dad, his bewilderment by me, the imagination he fed and the ideas that shaped me as a child. 

as i was reading the papers, my grandmothers words, i could feel her, falling in love with my grandfather as a young girl. marrying into his circus (although she describes it as a carnival. she describes the animals, the performers, giant wheels, merry go rounds, aeroplanes, singing and dancing girls, magicians and one man called jake lax who used to climb a giant staircase 160ft high, light himself on fire, jump into a pond which was also ablaze. thousands of people used to travel hundreds of miles just to watch him.

then she describes moving into a new house, which is filled with ghosts. she lists and goes into detail some of the experiences people had and how it resulted in the complete breakdown of many staff and family. her oldest children were petrified, and something my dad often spoke about was how the ghosts would drag the kids from their beds by their ankles. the kids would stop eating, shake, get terribly sick. 

as i read the stories, i connect several dots missing in my life. it's very interesting to have the past come back, it does happen a lot often filling in missing spaces.

sometimes i would tell people my history and they would not believe half the things that occurred, i guess the truth is stranger than fiction. certainly for me, which is why i seem to inhabit the strange so comfortably.