Well, OK, this is NOT a ghost story but it starts out that way. It's a true story that actually happened to me.



Think back to your own childhood. With that creak in the closet at night. And the branches that cast the shadow like witches' fingers on the curtain. And speaking of fingers, remember that hand under the bed just witing to grab the ankle of any small child foolish enough to get out of bed at night.
Now with all that in mind, let me tell you that I lived next to a cemetary as a child. And one of my bedroom windows overlooked that cemetary. And my bed was next to the window that overlooked the cemetary. And I survived this purely as a result of a blanket and a promise. Not just any blanket, but a Lone Ranger Blanket. I pulled that blanket over my head and I tucked it underneath every inch of me and pulled it tight. Now this would have made it painfully obvious to even a monster that lived in the closet that there was a little boy under there, but this was no ordinary blanket. It was a Lone Ranger Blanket!
Now it was not just any promise either.It was a promise from my mom that as scary as that cemetary may look in the autumn, come spring it would be alive and covered with her favoritest flower in the whole world. The blackeyed susan! Well Time passed as you usually hope it will and Spring came as you always hoped back in those winters. As is often the case with mothers of small children, my mom turned out to be right! The hill going down from the street to the cemetary and indeed all around the cemetary itself were huge patches of blackeyed susans. Now something else remarkable happened over the course of that previous fall. I turned THIS MANY (5)!!!
Now five is a magical age in which many things start to happen. You can go outside and even leave the yard and go up and own the street! Sometimes if you look both ways you can even cross the street! And soon enough I found I could go down and play in that up-till-now-scary-cemetary! Well if you ever were a kid, you know it was my sworn duty to pick my mom some of her favorite flowers. This is where the plot begins to thicken. If you've ever encountered blackeyed susans in the wild, you know they have hard, woody, green, resilient stems. And they grow in patches with there roots all tangled together. Well a grownup would even have a hard time picking flowers such as these and for a little kid it was a real chore! Nonetheless, I pulled and yanked and twisted until I was rewarded with three little crushed up stems about an inch long apiece with a mangled cluster of petals on each. Well, I was about to take them home when a couple of friends came walking through the cemetary and asked me to play Cowboys and Indians. I figured that I could give the flowers to my mom when I went home to get my gun but one of the magical things about being five is you can always find a stick with a branch poking to one side in just the gunhandled manner to be a perfect toy gun. Well, I was still gonna have to go home and give my mom the flowers. Except....another magic thing about being five is that's when your jeans start to have pockets!!!! I stuck those flowers into my pocket, and I picked up that stick and we were on our way! We played for a while and decided that we deserved a treat. When you're five, you have a special way of thinking I like ti call Little Kid Logic. Little Kid Logic works in wondrous ways as long as no grownups are around. We decided the thing to do would be to collect bottles. This was back in the the days when some but not all bottles were worth money at the store. We collected the good ones and we broke the bad ones and we soon figured that we'd be rich if we took them to the store.
Well this involved not only crossing the street, but going to a different street altogether. This would have been beyond our limits even being five years old, but since there were no grownups around, we figured out that if we were each five we added up to fifteen (on our fingers) and fifteen was plenty old to go to a different street. Well, we walked to the store and we turned in all the soda bottles and collected our loot and went...to...the...penny...candy...counter. We got penny fish that were actually a penny. We got those sort of styrofoamy flying saucers with the candy beads inside. We got 7 ounce Cokes. But most importantly, we got ICE CUBES!!!!! Remember Ice Cubes, The chocolatest chocolate in the whole wide world! You put it on your tongue and it melted all the way through you. It was happiness in blue and silver foil. We had a feast to remember. We went to my friend,R.J.'s house and watched TV and divied up the rest of the candy. I made sure to get my share of the Ice Cubes and stuck'em in my pocket. We decided it was time to play kickball. (This was back when two peny fish and a Coke would give you e3nough energy to run all night.) We played three games till we realized the street lights had been on for quite some time. Now everyone knows you have to be home when the street lights are on. Well we had a conference and decided that either you were "Late" or you were "Not late". And since we were already late and there were no grownups to spoil this Logic, how could we be "more late." We might as well have fun. We played for a good while longer and then we got tired and went to our respective homes. Now, with grownups on the horizon, the logic of the day began to crumble. By the time I got home I realized that I was "More Late"! It was then I remebered my ace in the hole. I got home and my mother threw the door open and screamed "And Just where have you been?!?!? I've been looking all over!!" And I reached in my pocket for my wondrous gift of blackeyed susans, and what I found was three twigs glued together in a mass of wilted petals blue-silver-foil and chocolate fondue. Not the saving grace I'd hoped for, but my mother cleaned them off and put them in a bowl of water on the table for the customary three days, and I got out of a lot of trouble. I never tried it again, but I learned that for just once, you CAN be "More Late", but you can be less late with flowers.



Rich Rayburg