If you see me sitting in my car talking to myself, don't rap on the window. They'll go away. My ghosts, I mean.

Yes, I talk to ghosts. Not Mamie Eisenhower or James Dean. I mean, I'm not nuts. It's just a family thing. There are things we learn as children that stay with us all of our lives, even when we grow old and get smart and know better.

Talking to ghosts is one of them. My sister, Rita, loved cardinals, not the ball team, the birds. She said they were souls in transition. This was a grown woman, mind you.

We grew up in an age of ethnic crazies, Irish cops and firemen, Italian grocers and Cuban cigar makers, the children of immigrants who, like their parents, went to church every morning and talked to dead people, if not their own dead, then dead saints like St. Jude, patron saint of lost causes like playing the lottery.

When you listened to them at the church picnics, the fish fries and bingo games, you knew they weren't kidding. Mrs. Pisciotto talked about how St. Joseph cured her husband of hair loss. Mrs. Diaz spoke of talking to the ghost of St. Rita and asking her to take her daughter into the convent.

My own mother mesmerized an entire card party full of women with her story of Jesus appearing to her in a feverish dream to tell her my sister would recover from scarlet fever.

"He was right there at the foot of my bed," she would say.

She told that story over and over until even I believed it.

Now here I am, an aging writer talking to ghosts, just like Mrs. Diaz.

It works like this. I'm hanging a screen door and the screw breaks and I cut myself on the wire. I ask my brother Matt who, in life, was good at all those things, for help, and help always comes.

I talk to my sister Eileen, who was a gifted artist, about problems with a painting, and the problems disappear. I can even smell her favorite Beech-Nut gum.

I know when my brother Jimmy is floating around me. Jimmy was a natural stand-up comic, the funniest guy in the neighborhood. As I was watching John McCain standing next to Mitt Romney on a stage, I could hear Jimmy as clear as day.

"It's a bad team. They look like Batman and his old chauffeur, Alfred." Jimmy is right.

My mother and father and my three brothers and two sisters, who are all now on the other side of the veil, are in my bedroom at night listening to my prayers. Unlike God, I have my family's undivided attention. We talk about money and politics and the constant rain. They listen.

They ride in the car with me when I'm driving, like guardian angels keeping me alert, finding parking places that I didn't know were there, hitting all the lights. I've come to count on them. It never fails.

I actually had to think twice before buying a Toyota Prius. I could hear Matt, the smartest kid on the block, assuring me that they could all fit in.

"We're ectoplasm," he whispered. "Shape shifting."

I swear, I'm not making it up.

She who sleeps with me smiles gently and nods approvingly when I tell her these things, but I know she's thinking, "Should I call someone?"

She grew up with sane people -- quiet Republican Catholics who didn't believe in ghosts.

I don't care. They're real to me.

And now this craziness has passed on in my own blood. My oldest daughter, when seeing a cardinal sitting on my windowsill staring at me says, "Look Daddy, it's Aunt Rita come back to talk to you." This is an educated woman who believes in talking cardinals. It's a family thing.

J.P. Devine is a freelance writer who lives in Waterville.