The purse incident isn't the only time I thought Dad came to visit. For awhile after he died, for example, my TV, which has hit-or-miss reception anyway, would get these clearly electrical diagonal lines in it, but the picture would be perfectly clear otherwise, and while that was happening, the light would flicker, or if I was talking to Kaffy, I would get this huge electrical charge through the phone. (She remembers, because I would tell her about it as we were talking.) And sure, it could be coincidence, but my one best friend Laura, who lost her mom a little more than a year before Dad, used to talk about the same types of things happening to her and her sisters. In fact, it was Laura who pointed out that when I was giving my eulogy at Dad's funeral, the lights dimmed considerably. I didn't notice, of course, but I was hysterical at the time. And sometimes, he shows up in my dreams, but it's never a cathartic gesture as happens with some people -- at least not that I can remember, anyway. Maybe that's because we made our peace before he died.

I'm SURE he's around when I'm in the car, because of my idiot driving habits. A couple months after he died, my friend Poppy (not her real name) and I went out for the first time in, like, five years, and the short version? Two or three beers and three or four Flaming Dr Peppers later -- you know, the one where you set a shot of I-forget-what on fire and then drop it into a beer, which makes it taste like Dr Pepper -- I was FUCKED. UP. I mean, as in BAD fucked-up, like it was a miracle that I didn't kill myself/someone else/a telephone pole or tree/get pulled over for DWI. And the only way that could've happened was if Dad was co-piloting. I'm sure of it. But not one to ever miss out on teaching me a lesson in the process, the next day while I was driving Mother to get lunch, I had to pull over on the side of the road from the wave of nausea that coursed through my body, and then explain to Mother why I had to pull over. It was a toss-up as to which one was worse.