GHOSTS AND PHYSICS: episode 2 of who knows how many episodes....

          The eight-year-old version of myself stared dubiously out her bedroom window.  The ten feet between ledge and ground were much scarier at night than they were in the daytime, and it was such sights that made me long for the real-life existence of transporter beams.  Normally after a fun-filled Halloween evening of candy gathering, hoarding, and devouring I was ready for sleep, but not this Halloween evening.  Tonight my friends and I were going to find ghosts.  What we were going to do with them once we found them, we didn’t know.  We just liked the glamorous idea of looking for them because, odds were, we’d run screaming into the opposite direction should one actually appear. 

Having changed out of my Lt. Commander Deanna Troi costume and into something more clandestine yet teeny-bopperishly stylish, I clutched my Hello Kitty bag crammed full of trick-or-treat chocolate bounty while intently watching the driveway leading up to our house.  He was late.

            “Katie!”

            I jumped at the sound of Mick’s nine-year-old voice unexpectedly coming from the side of the house instead of the back.  “Up here!  Did you bring the ladder?”

            Mick clunked his way to my window, dragging the modified ladder he’d just “invented” along behind him.  “Yeah, I just finished it today.  Do you have any extra chocolate?  I didn’t have time to go out and get any myself.”

            That was his code for “I was too busy combining uncombinable chemicals and blowing up stuff to remember today was Halloween and we were supposed to go candy-gathering and ghost-hunting tonight.”  Even at age eight, I had accepted this about Mick’s personality.  “Plenty.  I got extra just in case.  Where’s everybody else?”

            Mick quietly and carefully leaned the ladder against my outside wall as I tentatively made my way onto the ledge.  It had a bizarre configuration, but even as I stepped onto the top step, I knew it would be the sturdiest ladder ever.  Mick was a brilliant and nice kid like that, always making sure he didn’t inadvertently murder me.  As I slowly descended, Mick replied to my previously asked question.  “They’re not coming.”

            I stopped mid-ladder.  “What?  The big sissies, are they really that scared?”

            Mick stood at the base of the ladder helping to hold it steady.  “No, they got caught toilet- papering Principal Dooley’s house.  They barely got away before he smacked ‘em all with that paddle of his.  Anyway, now they’re hiding out.”

            I couldn’t help but laugh at the thought of my friends being chased down Rosewood Avenue by an irate Principal Dooley armed with his monogrammed paddle.  “Then I guess we’ll just have to do this ourselves and make fun of them later,” I said as I hopped off the final step.  Together he and I dragged the ladder behind the house until it was sort of hidden in some tree shadows.  “You ready?” I asked him.

            Mick dug around in his pockets for several seconds then pulled out a compass, map, notebook, and a pencil whose use I could only assume was for taking notes.  He spent several more seconds aligning his compass with magnetic north as I rolled my eyes.  “We’re only going a few blocks away.  I don’t think magnetic poles are going to flip in that length of time.”

            He looked at me, surprised.  “How do you know about magnetic poles flipping?”

            “I decided to read my science assignment this month.  Now let’s go.” 

            “Candy, please?”

            I handed him my Hello Kitty bag.  He was less than pleased.  “Really?  You want me to carry this thing?”

            “Did you want the chocolate or not?”

            He finally took the girly accessory from me, his lust for candy overcoming his manly sense of shame and embarrassment.  A walk that should’ve taken fifteen minutes wound up taking half an hour due to the “unusually bright and defined appearance” of Mick’s favorite constellation at which he decided to stare for the additional fifteen minutes.  And he took notes.  Copious notes.  They even had equations in them.  Never trust someone—especially a nine-year-old—who uses words and equations on the same sheet of paper.

            “Stop it with the math already!  We have a mission, and it has nothing to do with the dimensions of the Snickers Galaxy.”

            “Milky Way.”

            “Whatever!  Don’t talk about it, just eat it!”

            We spent the rest of our walk in relative silence, relative because anytime Mick ate caramel, he smacked it like a gum-chewing cow with TMJ.  As we reached the front gate of our destination, Mick was excited in a scientifically intrigued sort of way.  I was bloody freaking terrified.

            Mick yanked out his pencil and notepad again then grabbed my hand.  He was in “unparalleled discovery” mode.  “C’mon, Katie!  Let’s see what we find!”

            He may as well have been attempting to coerce an antelope to play in the lion’s lair.  “I can’t.  I, umm…I have to pee.”

            “No you don’t, you’re just scared.”

            “Scared people have to pee all the time!”

“You can hold my hand, and I promise I won’t let go.”  He meant it.  It was sweet.

            Still, I continued to resist his insistent tugging at my hand.  Suddenly an old white, lacy curtain wafted from one of the supposedly haunted house’s front room windows and into my line of vision.  The ghosts wanted my soul!  “No, I really do need to pee now!  I think I’ll run over to Rosewood Avenue for some toilet paper.”

            And with those words, I ran fearfully in the direction of my house leaving a poor, bewildered Mick standing on that forlorn sidewalk all by himself. 
--COPYRIGHT 2013--

And so it begins: GHOSTS AND PHYSICS

          Long, long ago but not so far away, I was born.  Okay, so it wasn’t that long ago, but considering the story I’m about to tell, it could be interpreted as such.  It all depends upon your definition and perception of time: is it linear or layered?  For most of my life, I assumed it was linear.  You’re born, you exist, you die, and there’s no going backward…or forward.  But the more ghost-hunting shows I watched (stop laughing), the more I started to wonder about the linearness of life.  Of course, now I’m giving away the story before it even gets started and must therefore shut up about it.  Where was I going with this?

            Oh yes!  I was born.  I was born in the mid-70s to a typical Central Texas farming-and-ranching couple.  We lived in a modest two-story house on the outskirts of Austin, just outskirty enough to have an open field behind our house bordered on all sides by trees of various levels of attractiveness: oak, pecan, sycamore, cottonwood, and a smattering of those annoying mesquites that are only good for flavoring barbecue sauce, apparently.  There was a creek at one end of the field that generally had running water in it except for the summertime when rain decided not to grace us with its presence overly often.  I particularly loved that spot until one afternoon when I unwittingly sat down on a piece of driftwood…and noticed that a four-foot rattlesnake already occupied the space.  My Discman and I removed ourselves in short order.  When not cavorting in the great outdoors listening to music and singing at the top of my lungs to reptilian audiences that likely wanted to bite me, I loved to read and write stories which transformed me into the biggest daydreamy English nerd ever.  Add to that a penchant for all things sci-fi and fantasy, and you’ve got a quirky personality.

When I wasn’t enjoying my favorite pastimes, my parents used me as free child labor in the cotton fields.  Okay, so it wasn’t that bad, but I never want to chop up another sunflower again.  Where was I?  Geez, I’m lousy at narratives.  Anyway, we always had a dog and a few cats that kept inbreeding and producing imbecile kittens which, of course, meant that they inbred themselves out of existence.  The dogs fared much better (because they were big man-sluts who spread their canine seed far and wide) and provided adequate “a stranger’s here” alerts over the years with their voluble barking.  My Dad also kept chickens, but I’ll tell you more about that nightmare later.

            From little girlhood I’d always been fascinated with the supernatural.  Most people seem to be, but I was one of the unusual ones (unusual for back then, anyway) who took said fascination to the next level by organizing community Halloween ghost hunts for all the local kids.  There was this creepy old broken-down house a couple of neighborhoods away from ours that simply begged to be investigated, so every year I conned my best friend Mick into accompanying me as co-leader…well, protecting me would be more accurate.  Why nobody ever tore that sagging wooden remnant of a building down was beyond my comprehension, but as things turned out, it was a darn fortuitous thing that they didn’t.  So now that you have a bit of backstory, we’ll get to the actual story.

 

Tune in next week when we hear Katie say, "We have a mission, and it has nothing to do with the dimensions of the Snickers Galaxy!"
--COPYRIGHT 2013--