When my mother died the typewriter was in a closet downstairs, unused for a very long time. It belonged to her older sister, whom I suspect was already dead, who loaned it to her when she was going to school. My mother was an unusual student. She entered UCLA at age fourteen, came down with scarlet fever, and then recovered for a number of years. Today they just give you antibiotics and send you back to work. She ended up at La Verne College, down the road from where her family lived. She became a teacher in a private school teaching, for what it’s worth, Walt Disney’s children.

My mother’s father, my maternal grandfather, was a Southern Democrat who believed there were basically two kinds of people: good Democrats and bad Republicans. I would call him today a rabid Democrat. He called me at UCSB from what was assumed to be his deathbed in the hospital to ask if I was going to vote. Nixon, who had lost a very close election to John F. Kennedy, had decided to hold up as California Governor while waiting for his revenge. He ran against incumbent Pat Brown, father of the current governor, and my grandfather said there would be a ticket waiting for me to fly home and vote against “that bastard.” Nixon lost, though not because of my vote specifically.

I tell this story to introduce the fact that my mother’s older sister, the one who loaned her the typewriter, married a man named Herbert Hoover. Not the Herbert Hoover, but Herbert Hoover nonetheless. A Republican. An odd man who had account books showing every penny he ever spent. His wife became a Republican.

Now my grandfather should have disowned her, not that people don’t have the right to vote whichever way they choose. But he wasn’t just a Democrat. He was, as I said, a rabid Democrat. From what I gather, my aunt wasn’t the brightest bulb on the tree, but my grandfather favored her. My mother, of course, would have preferred a public burning, a revenge killing, a final emphatic ending that allowed no reprieve. But my grandfather pretended that everything was just as it should be. He never mentioned politics around the only Republican anyone could remember in his family. So my mother did the next best thing. She never spoke to her again, and never returned the typewriter.

My mother had some very special abilities, but also some rather pronounced deficiencies. She could pull the typewriter out of the closet when needed and type without warming up or looking at the keys at roughly 50 words a minute. She just typed or didn’t type. And she did this on a clunky manual typewriter that in its day was state of the art. In college I labored over a ten page paper and asked her if she would read it before I turned it in. She poured herself a cup of tea, grabbed a pencil, circled the misspelled words, changed the punctuation, underlined and drew arrows to change the syntax, straight through the ten pages and handed them back to me. When I asked what she thought she replied, “Did you want me to read it?”

She could see everything on the page that needed to be changed without having the slightest idea what was said.

She could also see things that were too small to be seen. My father played games with her in the car. He’d ask what that white building was. She’d lean forward a bit and say, “It’s the Franklin Building.” “Oh good. I have to turn right at the Franklin Building.” But what my father and I saw was a grayish blog on the horizon. He was making up the right turn. No one could see the sign over the doorway. But my mother, who leaned forward for a moment, read the sign that was invisible to us, and as we got closer, it was indeed the Franklin Building. She did such things on a regular basis.

And she could hear things that were too small or too faint to be heard. One New Year’s Eve they were having a party at the house. The guests were scheduled to go to one or two houses before ours and then celebrate the new year with us. It was a split level house and we were having dinner in the far middle level, but my mother was very uneasy about something. “Do you hear that?” she said. There was silence at the table. Finally, my father said, “Hear what?” She threw her fork down and and said, “Listen.” More silence. She got up from the table, walked downstairs, stood in front of a wall between my bedroom and the den, and pointed. She was so agitated that my father called a friend who was a contractor who showed up in a suit and tie with a small tool chest. He pulled some furniture out of my closet and found a discoloration on the drywall about the size of a dime. He cut a six inch hole in the wall to reveal a tiny spray from a damaged copper pipe. The spray had just begun. He used a small c-clamp and a piece of rubber to stop the tiny leak and said he’d send someone the next afternoon to fix it. The leak made no humanly audible sound, but it was loud enough that my mother couldn’t eat.

There were many things like this. But there were also bizarre things. One year it rained and rained. I remember a similar time when I was four or five. The result was that the level in the backyard pool began to rise. When it reached the coping my mother became hysterical. Not upset, hysterical. If the water reached the top it would begin to overflow, and when it overflowed it would wash out all the houses beneath us and the roadway beyond. People would die.

I tried to explain to her that the only water that would go downhill would be the total rain water that fell. The pool would add no water itself. But what she saw was that when the water reached the top, and she expressed this with grandiose gestures, the pool water would surge in the air and continue surging until everything down the hill was gone. I hesitate to call this delusional, because I think it’s something well beyond that.

I walked to the side of the house, turned a valve, sent the water through a pipe to the gutter in the front, and after an hour or so of sheer panic and screaming, the pool level was once again normal. Even if I’d done nothing, the overflow would have followed an engineered walkway out to the same gutter, because the pool people thought this out in advance. My mother’s version was that she saved everyone’s life by panicking.

I told some of these stories to a spiritualist, if I may call her that, many years ago to see what she would say. She said, “Sometimes they told your mother what she understood, and sometimes they didn’t.” It was her opinion that my mother wasn’t the one who saw, heard or thought those things. She merely responded to the messages.

Never once did my mother think there was anything unusual about her life, except, of course, that one of her sisters was a Republican.