Growing up

I suppose that, during childhood the unusual became usual because nothing more than the crab stands out.  We moved to New Jersey and when my parents moved back to Baltimore, I stayed behind.  Imagine, at 18 I asked for permission to stay.  Certainly something that wouldn't happen today.  Arrested development or simply fear of my mother?  Whatever it was I moved in with a friend's family and stuff started happening again.

First off there were my car lights.  This was back in the early 70's and to turn on my car's lights I had to pull a lever out and, to turn them off, push that lever in.  I had to park on a piece of unused land across the street from the house because there were already too many cars in the household.  This piece was in clear view of the mechanics at the end of the street who called regularly to tell me I had left my lights on.  First time, ok maybe I didn't turn them off.  Second time, I was certain I had but maybe....  By the fifth, sixth and seventh, I knew I had.  I'd push in that lever so the knob was flush and would come out to find the lights on, lever pulled out.  I always locked the car so I knew it wasn't some kind of prank.  I finally got fed up and sat in the car, yet again to turn out the lights and said, aloud that I had enough and it had to stop. Then it did.

Christmas came and I was helping to decorate the tree.  The little sister picked up a blue ball on a hook.  Apparently it wasn't on the hook correctly because it fell.  I watched it wondering it if would smash into dust on the tile floor when it simply disappeared.  One minute there, one minute not.  I said nothing but little sister kept asking where her ball went.  That she had a blue ball and now it was gone.  I still said nothing, only handed her a new ornament to hang.

Next came the letter.  A letter appeared on the kitchen table one day.  Part of a letter, I should say, one page talking about the D'arcy Fisks and how they were coming for a visit.  No one in the household had even heard of the D'arcy Fisks and they had been in that house for years.  No one admitted to the letter and the next day it was gone.  

Things started to ramp up then with noises and sensations and the knowledge that there was something haunting the basement.  Eventually I figured something out and managed to put an end to it.  My friend and I had made an appointment to see a well known local psychic.  The psychic was so popular that appointments had to be made months in advance and the moment we cancelled our appointment, the nonsense stopped.  There was, however, something else that occurred after the grandfather who had lived in the home with us all died.  I would hear him get up in the middle of the night, shuffle to the bathroom and back again.  He never flushed.  I guess spirits don't feel the need to flush.

I wonder now why this didn't freak me the hell out but it didn't.  I guess I just filed it in my head under weird stuff.   I mean, who else would marry a man they met at a funeral?  A man who never had weird in his life till he met me.  That, however, is a story for another time.