The Diary of Ghost Dennis

Ghost Dennis had been at the White House a very long time, having been murdered there during the waning days of the Nixon Administration.  (It had been made to look like an accident.)  He had seen Presidents come and go, staff members come and go, family members come and go, pets come and go.  Still, he was considered one of the newer kids on the block, what with all the slave ghosts from the first century of the United States.  Only the twins, Regina and Ferguson, were younger than he was.

He was the most political of the White House ghosts, having whispered in many Presidents' ears about the Equal Rights Amendment, relations with China, OPEC, detente, the AIDS epidemic, the CIA wars in Latin America, the Environmental Protection Agency, the recession, the police state, and many other issues of the day.  He had made peace with the Portuguese water dogs, having bonded with Bo and Sunny over their mutual fear of bobble heads, but he was still discontent and restless.  Life after death just wasn't any fun.  And then an amazing thing happened.  In his own words--

Well, I've heard a lot about "moving on" and "moving into the light", but I've never seen anybody do it--not even Reggie and Fergie, and they have the least emotional baggage of all!  It's true that a few of the older ghosts have disappeared over the years, but nobody can really be certain if this was because they crossed over or just because they hitched a ride out to go haunt someplace else.  After all, we can all fly out of the White House at any time.  It's just that something usually pulls us back!  

Well, yesterday I got the shock of my life!  I was floating around Lafayette Park, just thinking about the mammoth implications if the Patriot Act actually expires Sunday night (!!!!!!), when I suddenly heard somebody calling to me!  Except they were saying "Dad", instead of "Dennis".  But I knew immediately they were calling to me!  I floated down and saw identical triplets:  three middle-aged women sitting in a circle on the grass, holding hands.  And I knew instantly they were my daughters!  Helen had been pregnant when I died, and I never knew what happened to her, but suddenly I knew!  It all flooded into me!  Helen had moved to California and joined a hippie commune.  The girls had been born a few months after my death.  She had named them Calcium, Magnesium, and Sassafras because those were what the "healer" had told her to take for the health of the babies.  They now went by the names Cal, Maggie, and Sassy, and worked in San Francisco as reiki healers.  Upon the recent death of their mother, they received a letter telling them the truth about me--that I had not been a Hollywood actor she met hiking the John Muir Trail, that I had really been a Nixon staffer who died suddenly, that Helen's suspicions had been sharply rebuked, and that she had fled clear to the other coast because she feared for her own safety.  And so they came to DC to try to make a spiritual connection with me for the first time!

Of course, I never believed in nonsense like reiki, and it's not like they're psychics, but there they were, holding hands, closing their eyes, thinking of me in unison, and I connected with all of them!  My daughters!  It was a little creepy, and I'm saying that as a ghost, but I was pretty weirded out.  I didn't know what to do!  I shouted quite a bit, and that didn't work, and then I tried whispering in their ears, but that didn't work, so then I floated into the middle of their circle and just sat there listening for awhile.  But it was like listening to the radio!  I could hear them, but they couldn't hear me.  I learned everything:  where they went to school, their marriages, their kids, their hobbies, their dreams.

Well, it turns out, they have been harboring a dream for awhile of forming a reiki circle around President Obama!  And after their mother's death, and learning about me, they were sure this was the right time to come to Washington.  How can I help them?  Not that I think a reiki circle around Obama is going to accomplish anything, but they're my daughters, and I want them to be happy!  Of course, if people are paying them to do reiki circles, maybe there's something to it, after all?  I mean, I sure didn't believe in ghosts until I became one!  And what harm could it do?  

And then it hit me:  there is more to life than politics!  I could move in with my girls!  Well, okay, they're grown women now, and I have grandkids, but still!  Maybe I should take a break from the White House!  So I hung out with them all day, followed them to Busboys and Poets for dinner, followed them back to their hotel, hung out while they chatted.  But then they started getting undressed for bed, and I was like, whoa, I can't be here!  And then I realized that being a ghost is the same thing as being a spy!  Except there's not a lot of nudity in the West Wing (ha ha!), and I don't do that much lurking in the White House residence, but I had never really thought about it much before.  Yeah, it's true I was murdered there, so it's not really my fault I'm stuck there as a ghost, but maybe I should give people a little more privacy?

So I left the hotel room and headed back to the White House, and now I've got a lot of stuff to figure out.  And I'm not talking about the new trade agreement negotiations or the new attempt to roll back financial regulations!  What if my girls move into a bad neighborhood and get murdered?

And then I remembered about Helen's being dead.  Where is she?  Can I see her?  Maybe I don't have my priorities straight.  A man can only do so much for his country, and I've been at it longer than most!

But here I am, back in the White House.  I'm going out to check on my girls soon, but it felt really weird to be away from here.  Like hearing about Dennis Hastert's paying over a million dollars to hush up some homosexual affair from his pre-Congress days, and listening to the White House staffers gossip about it--the guy was Speaker of the House, two heart beats away from the Presidency!--and you have to be in the White House to really understand that kind of stuff.  (I mean, it could have beeb me, Ghost Dennis, with President Dennis!)  Politics:  this is all I've known for so long...but there's a world outside there, too.   

And then I had a really chilling thought: not all ghosts are political!  What if my girls end up haunted by vicious ghosts?  I need to be with them, to protect them!  But I've never abandoned an American President before!  Can I balance family and career?  I wasn't that good at is when I was married to Helen, and being a ghost isn't making it any easier!  

That's all for now.  Gotta meet up with the triplets at the Smithsonian!

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COMING UP:  Political primaries and other things mad as a Junebug.