i don't know how important really the ghost baby that came between me and my sister is. i've just always liked ghosts and i always like the word ghost, i like my life in the bush of ghosts, and ghost in the machine, and zeitgeist, the ghost of the times. our particular ghosts are quite real, but their reality joins with all the other ghosts and especially in a culture of deathly separation like ours it's more important in fact crucial to link ghosts and not to atomize and separate. or both, i think it is important that my mom said my birth changed the rh factor or something in her body creating a hostile environment for the next child, hence the next baby was a ghost baby, though a real baby, not a viable one, due to my altering of the mother chemistry. we really don't know how significant story is, and sometimes the only way we know a story is true is by feel, and how it resonates and melds with other stories that move us. 

does anyone remember that movie about a guy in california who dies and comes back as a dog named charley? that's another story that stayed. 

 the dog as ghost.