That'll Do Pig. That'll Do

I'm not going to disclose several specific things in this submission because it would make me immediately identifiable to anyone who knew me that read this. I've lived in a region of Mississippi for 20 years now and I'm a lawyer. I've been with the same firm the entire time.

As I've stated and / or referred to in my previous postings, I grew up in a small town around Jackson. My parents built their house in 1964. My Mom died in 1999. In 2001, my Dad remarried a nice elderly lady who lived in the small town. When they married, Dad moved into her home, in town, and they never spent a night in the house I grew up in.

Following Hurricane Katrina in 2005, my Dad, 79 at the time, was diagnosed with a terminal illness. As they get towards the end of life, they're really helpless. My stepmother, being three years older than my Dad, absolutely could not care for him when he got to this stage. We knew that was coming, so I arranged to take a leave of absence in the Fall of 2006 when he started having difficulty caring for himself. I moved back into the old house I grew up in, cleaned it up, aired it out, and I moved Dad in and cared for him until he died in the house around the end of that year. That period of time was absolutely golden. It was probably the best thing I'll ever do in my life.

Gathering myself together, mentally and physically, I returned back to the office following the New Year's Holiday. In February of that year, two months after he passed on, I finally made partner with the firm after being there close to a decade. I know my Dad would have been very proud and I expressed to family, friends and folks at the office several times that I wished he'd been alive to see this.

Having inherited the old home place and the land that accompanied it, I ended up going up there at least once a month, and during the summers, every couple of weeks to cut the grass. This was far more time than I'd spent up there since when I was going to college 20-25 years earlier. I still keep all the utilities on at the house. Given the lifetime of experiences I've pretty much related in these stories, I must be honest and say there was a slight part of me that would not have minded receiving some sort of sign from my Dad that he was pleased with how I hadn't abandoned the place and that I'd finally made partner at my law firm. Of course, by far and away, I'd hoped that he had moved on and had more important and interesting things to do than watch over whatever trivial stuff was going on with me.

Many months went by, perhaps a year, and I'd well given up wondering if Dad would contact me. Nothing at all happened in the house. I came in one Friday night and, as was not uncommon, there were voicemails on the old answering machine. Usually, they were just robo-calls from a politician or recorded marketing pitches. I went through them, erasing them as I went, until I got to a very peculiar one. It was very garbled sounding. You could tell it was a man's voice, but it sounded like the voice itself was static. Trying to spell it out phonetically and breaking it syllabically, the voice is saying, "wan hu uh rah- u-lay you on... May-hee pah-nah". There is another voice in the background saying two words: "yeah" "yeah". Yes, it sounds like one of those EVP recordings (I will never try to make one of those). IF this was a spirit voice, I and my beautiful, intelligent bride believe it was saying "want to [con]gratulate you on making partner". We are convinced that is what the voice is trying to say. If it wasn't a spirit voice, it was a horrible, horrible connection - not even a voice box for people with trachaeotomies is that garbled sounding - it really didn't sound like what I associate with a bad connection in that the message wasn't broken up as if the call was dropping out.

I looked up the model of the Sony answering machine to see if there was any way to get the recording off the machine, but I couldn't find anything about it. I'd be happy to share it and I wanted to transfer the recording, but I don't have any idea what sort of storage is utilized by the machine or how you could access it as there appears to be only the line-in / line-out phone jack sockets and a socket for an AC adapter. I'm aware of pareidoila (or however its spelled), and of course that's a possibility.