Tinfoil
©2010 Craig Ashby
Digital Photograph

Tinfoil is a series of that stuff you wad up and put under your hat. Just like my Aunt Pauline used to do. That funny old schizophrenic Aunt.

I am not sure if I have recounted my crazy old Aunt. Here is the short version. She was convinced that all my dead relatives were with dead President Kennedy. The CIA had sequestered the lot of them. The stories were so ahead of the moment.

She really kept tinfoil in her hat. She thought that her thoughts were being monitored by the government. This was way before the Internet. Way before these ideas were mainstream.

They were so terrifying to my mother and her other sisters that it shook them to the core. Aunt Pauline would tell her stories and you could see the words detonate like bombs. I don’t know if it thrilled her more than it did me.

Apparently she became addicted to opiates during her run as a nurse in the Korean War. Something broke. She was never okay again. Sound familiar?

I still think of Pauline Bailey to this day. Fondly as an ancestor that gives me an honest connection to my own brand of crazy and conspiracy. Those moments when we would visit her will forever be burned into my memory.