The second item was a heads-up that Mother's Day was coming.

The third item said that "personnel self-harm" was at an all-time high aboard submarines. It said: "Preventing self-harm of personnel aboard submarines is the Navy's highest priority." Creepy Navy-talk for suicide. Another invisible elephant.

The day I left the Kings Bay Naval Base, an officer asked me to write a good piece. I stood, looking at the sub for the last time, and he said fewer and fewer people saw the value in the type of service he valued most.

I saw the value. I admire those people and the job they do.

But by hiding the hardships they endure, it seems the Navy cheats these men out of the greater part of their glory. By trying to make the job seem fun and no-big-deal, the Navy may be repelling the people who want this kind of challenge.

Not everybody is looking for an easy, fun job.

A friend of mine lives in a «haunted» house. It's a nice white farmhouse in the country, surrounded with gardens, and every few weeks he'll call in the middle of the night to say, "Someone is screaming in the basement. I'm going down with my gun, and if I don't call you back in five minutes, send the police!"

It's all very dramatic, but it's the kind of complaint that smells like a boast. It's the psychic equivalent of saying, "My diamond ring is so very heavy." Or, "I wish I could wear this thong bikini without everyone lusting after me."

My friend refers to his ghost as "the lady," and he complains about not getting any sleep because "the lady" was up all night, rattling pictures on the walls and resetting the clocks and thumping around the living room. He calls it "dancing." If he's tardy or upset, it's usually because of "the lady." She shouted his name outside the bedroom window all night, or turned the lights on and off.

This is a practical man who's never believed in ghosts. I'll call him "Patrick." Until he moved out to this farm, Patrick was like me: stable, practical, reasonable.

Now I think he's full of shit.

To prove this, I asked him to let me house-sit his farm while he was away on vacation. I needed the isolation and quiet to write, I told him. I promised to water the plants, and he went off and left me there for two weeks. Then I threw a little party.

This man, he's not my only deluded friend. Another friend-I'll call her "Brenda"-says she can see the future. Over dinner, she'll ruin your best story by suddenly drawing a huge gasp, covering her mouth with her hand, and rearing back in her chair with a look of wide-eyed terror on her face. When you ask what's wrong, she'll say, "Oh… nothing, really." Then close her eyes and try to shake the terrible vision from her mind.

When you persist, asking what's scared her, Brenda will lean over the table with tears in her eyes. She'll take your hand in hers and beg you, "Please, please. Just stay away from automobiles for the next six years."

For the next six years!

Brenda and Patrick, they're odd but they're my friends, always hungry for attention. "My ghost is too loud… I hate being able to see the future…"

For my little house party, I planned to invite Brenda and her psychic friends out to the haunted farmhouse. I planned to invite another group of stupid, ordinary friends who aren't troubled with any special extrasensory gifts. We'd drink red wine and watch the mediums flit around, lapsing into trances, channeling spirits, doing their automatic writing, levitating tables, while we laughed politely behind our hands.

So Patrick was gone on vacation. A dozen people arrived at the farmhouse. And Brenda brought two women I'd never met, Bonnie and Molly, both of them already swooning from the ghost energy they felt there. Every few steps, they stopped, swaying on their feet and grasping for a chair or railing to keep from falling to the floor. Okay, all my friends were swaying a little. But for the sane ones it was the red wine. We all sat around the dining room table, a couple lighted candles in the center, and the psychics went to work.

First they turned to my friend Ina. Ina's German and sensible. Her idea of expressing emotion is to light another cigarette. These mediums, Bonnie and Molly, they'd never met Ina before this moment, but they took turns telling her how a woman's spirit was beside her. The woman was named «Margaret» and was showering Ina with tiny blue flowers. Forget-me-nots, they said. And suddenly Ina put down her cigarette and started to cry.

Ina's mother had died of cancer several years earlier. Her mother's name was Margaret, and every year Ina sprinkled forget-me-not seeds on her grave because they'd been her mother's favorite flower. Ina and I have been friends for twenty years, and these are details even I didn't know. Ina never talks about her dead mother, and now she's weeping and asking for more red wine.

Having reduced my friend to a mess, Bonnie and Molly turned to me.

They said a man was near me, standing just over my shoulder. He was, they both agreed, my murdered father.

Oh, please. My father. Here, let's just take a little break from the nonsense.

Anyone could know the details of my father's death. The strange, ironic circle. When he was four years old, his own father had shot his mother, then stalked my father around the house, trying to shoot him. My dad's first memories are of hiding under a bed, hearing his father call and seeing his heavy boots walk past, the smoking barrel of the rifle hanging near the floor. While he hid, his father eventually shot himself. Then, my dad spent his life running from the scene. My siblings also say he spent his life trying to find his mother by marrying woman after woman. Always divorcing and remarrying. He'd been divorced from my mother for twenty years when he saw a personals advertisement in the newspaper. He started dating the author of the ad, not knowing she had a violent ex-husband. Coming home from their third date, they were surprised by the ex-husband, who shot them both in the woman's house. That was in April of 1999.

Really, these details have been published everywhere. The whole mess has gone to trial, and the murderer is sentenced to death. Bonnie and Molly needed no special gifts to know any of this.

But still they persisted. They said my father was very sorry for something he'd done to me when I was four years old. He knew it was cruel, but it was the only way he could think to teach me a lesson. He was a very young man at the time and didn't realize he was going too far. Bonnie and Molly, they held hands and said they saw me as a small boy, kneeling beside a chopping block. My father was standing over me, holding something wooden.

"It's a stick," they said, then, "No, it's not. It's an ax…"

The rest of my friends were quiet, Ina's weeping had shushed their giggling.

Bonnie and Molly said, "You're four years old, and you're deciding something very important. It's something that will shape the rest of your life…"

They described my father sharpening his ax and said, "You're about to be…" they paused, then said, "dismembered?"

Ina's still over there sobbing. The silly cow. I pour another glass of wine and drink it. I pour another. I tell Bonnie and Molly, our guides to the ghost world, to please tell me more. I smirk and say, "No, really, this is fascinating."

Then they say, "Your father is very happy now. He's happier now than he ever was in his life on earth."

Oh, isn't that always the case? A little scrap of comfort for the bereaved. Bonnie and Molly are just the same sort who have preyed on grieving people throughout history. At best they're misguided, deluded fools. At worst, manipulative monsters.

What I don't tell them is, when I was four years old, I slipped a metal washer around my finger. It was too tight to remove, and I waited until my finger was swollen and purple before I asked my father for help. We'd always been told not to put rubber bands or anything tight around our fingers or we'd get gangrene and those bits would rot and fall off. My dad said we'd have to cut the finger off, and spent the afternoon washing my hand and sharpening the ax. The whole time, he also lectured me about taking responsibility for my own actions. He said that if I was going to do stupid things, I should be ready to pay the price.