My video thoughts on pushing ourselves through our hurdles.
Yesterday, I spent the morning with the Standing Stone Trail Club (in Central Pennsylvania). These are some of the toughest "Old Timers" (their name for themselves), who routinely clear paths on trails, that I have ever seen. They do this...
1) Because people need 18 inches of space to hike the trails.
2) Because they have the skill, alone or in groups, to do this.
3) Because they have the time to do it.
4) Because they find it to be fun.
As a person who lives 2-3 hours away, I can't get up there often, nor can I find time to get up there now to help them (especially now that I have Parkinson's), but they are among a group of great people in every area who do this for the benefit of all outdoor type people.
Trails don't clear themselves. Someone has to do it.
The top group is a typical work crew. By the way, the lady in the middle and the gent to her right were celebrating their wedding anniversary that day. The next picture is a typical path clear. Maintainers haul equipment uphill, over rocks, back trails, and make their days count. On many sections of the trail, a hike could take 30-60 minutes a mile depending on ability (and that's not carrying power tools and fuel for them). These people do all of this routinely, and they do it after using rock pry-bars to set stepping stones / stair stones in place. This is just one reason why they won Trail of the Year in 2016.
Many of them are humble, so I won't say who's who, but in that last picture, you will see men who represent those who created the trail, led the trail group, created maps, maintained land, promoted its use, protected it for preservation, raised + maintained funds for it, and made the signs that take you through it.
A youngen' like me is in awe of how they spend their spare time!
Oh, and there's one guy in that picture who did the 1,000 Steps 7 times for his 70th birthday. At his best, he was doing 10 minutes to the top on the monster half mile (850 feet, .52 miles - my best in 2014 was just under 26 minutes). Why not? If you can, make it happen! Even as life and its calamities happened and he got older, he kept doing it. Why not? At some point, we all go on our last ascent. We just don't know when. Until then, we still do our things in full or in degrees or make it possible for others to do it (and then we live vicariously through them).
That's what it's about.
For me, after a winter of pneumonia and hypoxia wrecked up my breathing, I've been itching to get out in the fresh air. Unfortunately, to get myself in motion Saturday, I really had to motivate myself through Parkinson's apathy (hidden symptoms) to start the hike on the 1,000 steps as opposed to somewhere flatter and less scenic (and to think I'm only in stage 2 of 5, so this will get more prevalent as my UPDS numbers go up), but when I pulled over into the parking area and put the Sorel boots on, I was off like a herd of turtles! However, I was off!
After about an hour of ascent / talking to hikers / taking photos, I made it through the snow and ice. I'm glad I did. The view was beautiful, but the feeling was even better as I let out my Ric Flair style WOO! to the world. As I stood there staring at the mountains of Mapleton, Pennsylvania, I talked to another guy who was up there despite being on chemo. His positive nature was humbling, and his strength and drive was contagious.
There's a lot of those people out in the world, but not enough.
Here's to all of us being one of those people, whether in the mountains or valleys, for someone else!
And here's to all of us, as well, who conscientiously do our best to place one foot in front of another to get down safely after enjoying the trip out..
Up until immediately after my Avalanche Day on September 27, 2016, all I knew about Parkinson's was:
1) tremors
2) Michael J. Fox
3) Muhammad Ali
4) I felt pretty uncoordinated doing the tests in my neurologist's office.
5) Being given 90% odds of having it made my wife cry. Having it made her cry again.
Since then, I have learned a lot more.
1) Despite waking up the next morning filled with strength and confidence, which are essential, I was very naive to be thinking that would be enough. There are still a lot of things that are coming down the pike to be afraid of (freezing, aspiration pneumonia, "bridge out" signs in my brain, more trips into a CAT Scan), but I have learned that life is a choice. As long as I can, I'm going to choose it in whatever form I can and keep doing the things that make me Dan (and I'm going to celebrate them! Besides, if I don't, who will?!).
2) I have learned to use People First Language for myself, and as time has gone by, I feel more conscious about talking about what I can still do in Stage 2 when some people who are in later stages and the same stage have lost the ability to do a lot of things that I might appear to be bragging about (I am most definitely not). However, I'm not going to stop doing or pushing myself to enjoy them, but I am working on empathetic understanding in writing so that I can promote positive enjoyment of life and not "I can do this; look at me! I am the most wonderful person ever!" (that said, there is a picture of the Hawk Mountain wall I climbed last summer in my bedroom to remind me about what I can push myself to do).
3) There are many great support groups out there. Unfortunately, in Stage 2, I don't have the ability to talk about things like DBS, any interest in talking about medical marijuana, or experience with where I'm going other than I read about it (in a book), which seems like what many questions online are concerned about (I'm glad there are people out there to share answers with and get them from). I do like the articles and updates people post, but with being a teacher, I have access to some serious databases as well as a wife that knows her medical information to keep me informed of what is what when my neurologist doesn't "keep it 100" in our visits. I do follow posts, but I don't always join in on the 50 people respond to a question posts. All the same, I do find them valuable. That being said, I enjoy being able to share with you and see what's going on with my fellow Parkies. When the DBS days come, I'm sure I'll learn more from others who will help me with that decision in the same way I have learned about the bad effects of some medicines.
4) I have learned about the UPDRS (Universal Parkinson's disease rating scale). After hospitalization, I went up from 4 to 37. Personally, 4 seemed like a good medicine day, but now I'm in stage 2 for realsies. Yep... here's to the gift that keeps giving. Those next 30 points are going to be a ride of fear, compensation, and adjustment.
5) I've learned that almost every symptom I have is "normal" to a Parkinson's life with its medical "gifts," stress, and depression, and yes, that sucks. Sciatica? Check. Hearing? Check. Not being able to smell my own gas? Check. My big toe hurts? We'll see.
6) My biggest sadness is how my condition affects those close to me. However, I'm not going to die tomorrow. Yes, I do like being asked how I am and offered hope and well wishes. I like people knowing that they can joke with me. I'm not going to take offense. Really. I have a strange sense of humor. I like when people can understand that and still enjoy it. There's a difference in wishing me dead and calling me "Shakes the Hiker." That said, I'm happy for the family and the love. Without them, it's a lonely world. Besides, if I accuse someone of a hate crime for calling me clumsy, it's not for real. It's just how I take seriousness out of the situation.
7) Hyperhidrosis - That extra sweat / really thirst thing, which I get really bad on the trail (and while sleeping in bed). It has a name, and it's connected to PD. I wrote about that in detail HERE.
8) I found out that getting Lyme disease at the same time as Parkinson's was not as fun as getting a free toaster with a purchase. Lyme is the great imitator, by the way. It's nasty stuff, and you can learn about it HERE.
9) Bradykinesia - I've learned that anything that can go slower on me will... except for frequent urination. I'm as confused as you. That said, this leads to #10, which is my second biggest fear (by the way, #3 is my tremors going nuts when I'm having to deal with a serious issue with a student).
10) Parkinson's Mask - I wrote about this really well HERE. Nothing like being accused of having resting bitch face / being a moody bastard when it's not true.
11) Dystonia / Restless Leg - I wrote about this a lot more thoroughly HERE. Important note: My left foot is pretty messed up and I visually walk "oddly," but with tight shoes + hiking boots, I manage a lot better. Other people's dystonia is much more severe. These solutions won't help those people.
12 ) Cognitive Issues - My only experience with this was the side effect of a medication I quickly quit. That sucked. Additionally, it scares the bejesus out of me to think more is coming, someday. My mind is important to me as a writer / teacher / human. I'd like it to function well for a while.
13) Lethargy / Apathy / Depression - All those great plans... yep. If only I don't feel too tired to make it happen. It's "normal" for Parkies, so know that we have to motor through it.
14) Substantia Nigra / dopamine / Lewy bodies - Without all of the technical terms, I learned about how the body makes dopamine, which is a WD40-type pathway protector / happiness maker. Sometimes, the body's defense mechanisms (genetics) are messed up and the body goes after these dopamine neurons like they were zombies. Interestingly enough, after this attack takes place, the body is filled with zombie-type cells (Lewy bodies). In a way, we could say they go wild and mess up their prey, leaving zombie-nastiness in the brain. I wonder if this is how The Walking Dead will end.
15) MAO Inhibitor (Monoamine Oxidase Type B) - Azilect is my go to medicine, and it works, but it's expensive without insurance. Nevertheless, without it, I'm toast. All that stuff in 14 is pharmaceutically dealt with by this.
16) Dopamine Agonist - Ropinerole (fake dopamine) is what keeps my tremors under control. So far, it's doing well. All that stuff in 14 is pharmaceutically dealt with by this.
17) Livedo Reticularis - not a pretty side effect I had from one of my meds. Because of this, I had to stop it. This isn't my legs. It can look worse than this. Mine were just beginning to turn purple.
18) Aspiration pneumonia - the number one killer of Parkies. Really. A story in 2 parts, which begins HERE and ends HERE. Knowing what will most likely take us out is damn scary. As I go for more doctor visits for sleep apnea and a real deal swallow study, I'll be talking about this and dysphagia a lot more.
20) The best is yet to come, even if there are some rough things to come, too. Guys like Jimmy Choi are living proof of Muhammad Ali's attitude when he said, "It ain't bragging if you can back it up." Choi still runs marathons and competes in American Ninja Warrior despite his PD.
This is the same attitude that baseball great Ted Williams had when he didn't sit in the final game of the 1941 season to preserve his .400 season batting average. Instead, he went "Beast Mode" in the final doubleheader to take it to .406. Here, all of us Parkies can raise our game a little bit and find ways to enjoy life, even if we can't do a lot of this.
If you choose to enjoy the following video of the Baseball Project celebrating Ted Williams, remember it's NSFW.
21) My whole body is super-warm these days EXCEPT my toes. Go figure. Here's to wool and heavy hiking socks to keep me warm.
22) Man, I hate the feeling of being overloaded mentally. When things are out of synch in a cacophony or flashing world of lights, I go out of control with them quickly. Ugh. Not fun or my favorite at all! I wrote about this feeling HERE.
23) You'd be surprised what you can give up if it means being alive while staying on the straight and narrow world of what Parkinson's and its meds take from you. I know there are things in my identity, which I will lose someday; however, until that day comes, I'm going to choose to experience them if I can. In the meantime, I wave goodbye to alcohol, sleeping in the same bedroom, clipping my own fingernails, going shooting with my dad, the speed of my typing, sleeping at normal times, not needing a disclaimer, not having to worry about what things to avoid, not worrying about the Parkinson's process on pretty much every one of my body's functions, not knowing that my condition will cause people sleepless nights, and holding a camera steady while shooting video, to name but a few. Obviously, the list above is an iceberg, but you get the point. In the end, happiness is other things.
24) Speaking of disclaimer explanations, HERE'S MINE.
25) That whole thing about a big vacation bucket list...
A) San Francisco is up next with the Yosemite waterfalls.
B) The Great American Petroglyph Tour to see the Great Gallery before dystonia ends long walks for good.
C) Italy
D) Washington / Oregon
E) Yellowstone
Of course, there are other vacations and trips with people that don't involve walking like those will, and they're on there, too, but yeah... there's something about sharing beautiful images with people we love, especially if the bomb inside that went off before is going to go off worse in the future, but for now, there are things to do and "miles to go before I sleep."
Thank you for reading the last 99 posts on my blog. In honor of 100, I thought I would list 10 of my favorite simple pleasures of life. These may include aspects of my favorite things, but they won't include the normal things that we would go to.
For instance, of course, our spouses and significant others are usually our favorite things (as are vacations and the like). That's obvious. Family is in there, too. For me, I am a music aficionado, writer, reader / knowledge accumulator, photographer, traveler, hiker, baseball fan, and supernatural enthusiast, so listing things like my favorite historical baseball players as a Top-10 is off the list (though I will give a shout out to Nick Hornby's High Fidelity for its love of Top-10 lists - and yes, I prefer the book to the movie).
1. After a long travel day / hiking day, getting a shower is a marvelous thing.
2. Getting a haircut after my hair has grown so long (!) that I feel like a hippie. When I was young and in the Air Force, I wanted longer hair. Now, I want my wife to let up on her no "Bruce Willis" edict.
3. Holding a book that I wrote in my hands for the first time. Other people have held my new book!! (this is my cousin David), but I haven't. T-minus about 1-2 weeks!
4. The planning stages of creativity are amazing. All of the free writes and rough drafts are great, but typing that first word to putting creativity in motion.... priceless. For that, I'm over 40 pages into the new book already.
5. Learning something new every day / Helping others learn something new every day!
6. Making mix CDs. It was more fun to make mix tapes because it was an all-day act of love, but arranging music to enjoy later... awesome!
7. Looking at old pictures / assembling photos into collages and thinking about the memories of those moments! This picture was after my first plane ride to NYC. My aunt Toot worked there, and her company hooked us up with a limo!
8. Looking at pictures that other people took and thinking about how, someday, I'll go there (why my wife and I get along so well!)!!
9. Living vicariously through the happiness of others! Be it Dylan and his snakes, Amanda getting birthday presents, or the images of Lydia in photos we see of her, how can I not be happy seeing how happy others are?
10. Not letting my Parkinson's get the best of me! We all have down days. We notice our abilities slipping. We fear the future. However, when we don't let that get to us and we do what we can anyway... ROCK ON!! Choose to live life tougher than our antagonist.
Thanks for 100 acts of support through 100 posts! Here's to 100 more! Keep being great!
As we get older, we see our lives change as we lose some of the people who meant the most to us. Some are families, and others are friends. Additional people in the form of co-workers and other people who we knew from our day to day life vanish as well. Other times, we lose the people who were such good friends to our family that they become close to us.
No matter who we lose, it hurts and it leaves an empty space.
Unfortunately, in going on without them, all that we have left is memories of who we once were, but if we play the game right when it comes to those reflections, we get to think about what those stories are and live happily knowing that these people were and are always a part of our lives.
One of these people, Marie Setley, passed on Thursday. She is pictured to the left of my dad. Her husband Dave, pictured to the right of my dad, told me the sad news on Saturday.
Unfortunately, she lost her battle to cancer when it boomeranged back at her after seeming to loosen its grip. To this, co-workers were shocked when they reflected on talking to her recently, and then... well, this happened.
Marie is pictured here at my wedding reception in 2009. Since that time, I have known her as a co-worker and friend for the last decade. Additionally, my parents went to their Maine vacation resort several times and spent friendly time with her and her husband.
To get the phone call of what happened was a humbling honor. To lose her is a sadness.
However, in listening to all of the happy and kind words about her, I am at least glad that she made her life count to so many people.
Remember, we never know when King Kong and Godzilla are going to rampage in our towns or in our bodies. Life is short. In fact, it's too short sometimes. That means people need to take action immediately.
The answer is simple (whatever way you're living now): Live your life so that people remember your awesomeness when the time comes to say "toodle loo!"
This is a continuation of the story
of feeling my grandmother come to me prior to her 100th birthday
this year. That was a powerful moment, and you can re-read about it HERE.
After writing about the feelings gained from the moment of connection to my Gram, this brings me back to real life. Here, I remain willing to believe in an afterlife (religious or ghostly), cryptids, aliens, and evil forces, but I need reason to believe, and I don't believe in every situation down the pike. Even those in my own house, which I will describe experiences of, I need objective or empirical proof. Just like Fox Muldur on the X-Files (which was a great show until the last 2 seasons of its resurrection, though truth be told, I didn’t watch the last season before its death), I am also skeptical because that's what any research requires.
As I wrote in the story of my Gram, I felt a strong feeling she was communicating with me to see her to talk about the family and me. I feel, just like my wife said, that her Alzheimer’s is connecting her to protect me in my days of Parkinson’s.
However, something in me wants to believe in the same way that I want to believe that the ghost torching I filmed at Chadd’s Ford was also real (though my students, even the paranormal believers, have given me reason to be skeptical).
So what’s the deal? What is real and true? I’d like to say I know my truth, but I’m not sure. I know that later in my house’s history, we had more weird things come back after we thought we had fixed them (more about the earlier things later). My wife experienced these, and we feel that it could have been her mom. However, on her moment's command, we also brought a friend’s husband at the time in so that he could sage the place. It worked since we’ve had nothing since then. We were thankful, and they got dinner for their trouble.
But what of my other experiences?
On November 5,2009, my Heather
and I were given the keys to our new house. While we wouldn’t sign the papers
for it until the following Tuesday, we were able to start moving stuff in on
that day. That day, we transferred our things into the house in an attempt to
make the house our own. However, it wasn’t until the following weekend that we
were able to sleep in the bed overnight. That night, Friday the 13th,
we went to bed knowing that paying $150,000 plus interest would make the house
our own – or so we thought. Instead, the blind on the bedroom window right
beside us flew up into the air at 2am.
We both
woke up startled; however, we went back to bed.
The next day,
Heather looked at the blind and found nothing wrong with it, but she threw it
away all the same.
If it was
broken, we didn’t need a scare like this again.
If it was
ghosts, then we just needed to play dumb to whatever he or she or they were
trying to do to our stay in this house on Park Avenue.
A few
months later, Heather had been redoing large sections of the house. I had been
working a lot, so this was her project to keep busy. For those who don’t know, renovation
is something that is said to stir up the memories of a house. By this time, she
had reworked 1 bathroom, the room that became my office, and the laundry room
downstairs. We were also in the process of tearing down the wallpaper in the
dining room and the hallway up through to the second floor as well as the wrap
around hallway that exists in the upstairs. Unlike actual home repairs that
take skill, we found that I was pretty OK at tearing down wallpaper, so that
became my job.
Let me just
say, it was some God awful wallpaper.
Together, we had also begun to tear
out the wallpaper in the upstairs bedroom as well, so it’s clear that we
definitely were in a major house renovation mode. Maybe it was the painting and the fumes (another scientific conclusion),
but one night in early February, I woke up half awake / half asleep and thought
I saw ghost cats on her pillow. When I told Heather about it at our early
Valentine’s Day hibachi dinner a few nights later, she had confessed that she
thought she saw someone standing over on the same night.
There was
now a very real fear that something was going on in the house. We commenced to
praying for our safety and a peaceful night’s sleep each night. Maybe this
finding God in the midst of conflict seems like the last refuge of a scoundrel
(as Lisa Simpson would say), but there was something unsettling in whatever was
going on. As a result, we prayed for our happy lives from that moment forward.
Whether it started out of desperation or true faith, we have never stopped
praying since we began this act over 2 years ago, so it’s now a ritual and an
important part of our lives in that it has brought us to be in a place that is
more spiritual and right with the universe.
That said,
we weren’t going to chance that it was just paint fumes affecting us. We were
completely acknowledging the reality that this could be a very real ghost that
was choosing to live with us. That said, we did try to ventilate the house a
little better, even though it was winter, to ensure no fumes might hurt us.
It’s
important to go scientific when possible.
Nevertheless,
we also responded by writing a Bible
verse to bless this house on one of the walls we were about to paint over.
While we heard creaking noises in the house since then, it is an old house, it
was a long time before we had any incidents.
From my
time as a kid, I have always been interested in certain science fiction,
monster, and hero movies. For this, it’s no surprise that I traverse the line
of believing in ghosts to being skeptical of what I see. In my top 5 movies, I
would place Carl Sagan’s Contact in
the same way I would declare his Demon
Haunted World and its “Baloney Detection Kit” one of my favorite works of
literature, which I excerpt in part here (his work is in red).
My parents died years ago. I was very close to them. I still
miss them terribly. I know I always will. I long to believe that their essence,
their personalities, what I loved so much about them, are—really and
truly—still in existence somewhere. I wouldn’t ask very much, just five or ten
minutes a year, say, to tell them about their grandchildren, to catch them up
on the latest news, to remind them that I love them. There’s a part of me—no
matter how childish it sounds—that wonders how they are. “Is everything all
right?” I want to ask. The last words I found myself saying to my father, at
the moment of his death, were “Take care.” Sometimes I dream that I’m talking
to my parents, and suddenly—still immersed in the dreamwork—I’m seized by the
overpowering realization that they didn’t really die, that it’s all been some
kind of horrible mistake. Why, here they are, alive and well, my father making
wry jokes, my mother earnestly advising me to wear a muffler because the
weather is chilly. When I wake up I go through an abbreviated process of
mourning all over again. Plainly, there’s something within me that’s ready to
believe in life after death. And it’s not the least bit interested in whether
there’s any sober evidence for it. So I don’t guffaw at the woman who visits
her husband’s grave and chats him up every now and then, maybe on the
anniversary of his death. It’s not hard to understand. And if I have
difficulties with the ontological status of who she’s talking to, that’s all
right. That’s not what this is about. This is about humans being human. More
than a third of American adults believe that on some level they’ve made contact
with the dead. The number seems to have jumped by 15 percent between and 1988.
A quarter of Americans believe in reincarnation. But that doesn’t mean I’d be
willing to accept the pretensions of a “medium,” who claims to channel the
spirits of the dear departed, when I’m aware the practice is rife with fraud. I
know how much I want to believe that my parents have just abandoned the husks
of their bodies, like insects or snakes molting, and gone somewhere else. I
understand that those very feelings might make me easy prey even for an
unclever con, or for normal people unfamiliar with their unconscious minds, or
for those suffering from a dissociative psychiatric disorder. Reluctantly, I
rouse some reserves of skepticism. How is it, I ask myself, that channelers
never give us verifiable information otherwise unavailable? Why does Alexander
the Great never tell us about the exact location of his tomb, Fermat about his
Last Theorem, John Wilkes Booth about the Lincoln assassination conspiracy,
Hermann Goring about the Reichstag fire? Why don’t Sophocles, Democritus, and
Aristarchus dictate their lost books? Don’t they wish future generations to
have access to their masterpieces? If some good evidence for life after death
were announced, I’d be eager to examine it; but it would have to be real
scientific data, not mere anecdote. As with the face on Mars and alien
abductions, better the hard truth, I say, than the comforting fantasy. And in
the final tolling it often turns out that the facts are more comforting than
the fantasy. The fundamental premise of “channeling,” spiritualism, and other
forms of necromancy is that when we die we don’t. Not exactly. Some thinking,
feeling, and remembering part of us continues. That whatever-it-is—a soul or
spirit, neither matter nor energy, but something else—can, we are told,
re-enter the bodies of human and other beings in the future, and so death loses
much of its sting. What’s more, we have an opportunity, if the spiritualist or
channeling contentions are true, to make contact with loved ones who have died.
J. Z. Knight of the State of Washington claims to be in touch with a
35,000-year-old somebody called “Ramtha.” He speaks English very well, using
Knight’s tongue, lips and vocal chords, producing what sounds to me to be an accent
from the Indian Raj. Since most people know how to talk, and many—from children
to professional actors—have a repertoire of voices at their command, the
simplest hypothesis is that Ms. Knight makes “Ramtha” speak all by herself, and
that she has no contact with disembodied entities from the Pleistocene Ice Age.
If there’s evidence to the contrary, I’d love to hear it. It would be
considerably more impressive if Ramtha could speak by himself, without the
assistance of Ms. Knight’s mouth. Failing that, how might we test the claim?
(The actress Shirley MacLaine attests that Ramtha was her brother in Atlantis,
but that’s another story.) Suppose Ramtha were available for questioning. Could
we verify whether he is who he says he is? How does he know that he lived
35,000 years ago, even approximately? What calendar does he employ? Who is
keeping track of the intervening millennia? Thirty-five thousand plus or minus
what? What were things like 35,000 years ago? Either Ramtha really is 35,000
years old, in which case we discover something about that period, or he’s a
phony and he’ll (or rather she’ll) slip up. Where did Ramtha live? (I know he
speaks English with an Indian accent, but where 35,000 years ago did they do
that?) What was the climate? What did Ramtha eat? (Archaeologists know
something about what people ate back then.) What were the indigenous languages,
and social structure? Who else did Ramtha live with—wife, wives, children,
grandchildren? What was the life cycle, the infant mortality rate, the life
expectancy? Did they have birth control? What clothes did they wear? How were
the clothes manufactured? What were the most dangerous predators? Hunting and
fishing implements and strategies? Weapons? Endemic sexism? Xenophobia and
ethnocentrism? And if Ramtha came from the “high civilization” of Atlantis,
where are the linguistic, technological, historical and other details? What was
their writing like? Tell us. Instead, all we are offered are banal homilies.
I love the archaeological search
for treasure of Raiders of the Lost Ark.
I also am enthralled with the aliens of Close
Encounters of the Third Kind and Independence
Day. Weird movies like Altered States
and Jacob’s Ladder are fantastic.
I grew up a Star Wars kid (so I never
felt anything for Star Trek). I
watched Creature Double Feature at my
Gram’s house. I moved on to the action movies of the 1980s, and experienced
lots of exciting movies, eschewing the bloody gore porn for movies like Signs,
Avatar, and The Mummy (the one without Tom Cruise). Now, I live on Destination
America, Ancient Aliens, and the
James Wan Conjuring / Insidious
movies. In between, I also got my degree in teaching English, so I read many of
the classics. For this, I need character building. Here, origin movies like the
first Captain America, Wonder Woman, and
even Ant Man work well to give the
character life and purpose instead of just showing up. The first Rambo and Jaws also do this well.
Comic book action like the first
Avengers movie is a lot of fun. However, by the time we get to Civil War, it’s fighting for the hell of
it. Nobody can be shuffled off this mortal coil, so why bother? For a while,
Walking Dead has been the same, though they did send Carl to college after his
zombie bites. I’m not saying we need to go Game
of Thrones because the blood and nudity just overshadow what I’ve seen of
it (I quit at the beginning of Season 2), but characters just need to be
expendable in that battles against evil create suspense.
Writing with purpose is good, too,
and I hope that I have done that in my own books as the characters of Blackrock
Canyon take on a life of their own. For as much as I extol the virtue of the
serious and academic while I teach, I also like books, whose pages turn
quickly. I hope I’ve been able to mix them up well in my own works of fiction, which I share HERE(2 of which are out already in complete form, and one more is out today).
On a night
in early October of 2011, I woke up at 530a.m. to the sound of the ornaments on
our Halloween tree singing Rockwell’s “Somebody’s Watching Me.” I had no idea
what was going on. Had the motion sensor picked up an intruder? Was there a
ghost downstairs? I went downstairs to check on the situation and I found
nothing. There was no open door. There were no people in the house. I even went
to the basement, which is theoretically the scariest place in our abode.
This is a fact because our house
used to belong to an elderly woman named Hazel, who fell down in the basement
and died. Apparently, her body gave out from either a stroke or a heart attack,
and she was found a day or so later by her daughter. I can imagine how scary it
must have been for her since she too had Alzheimer’s. Life can be cruel like
that.
For a few years after that, the
house belonged to this daughter and her husband. They left the area after they
sold it to us, so we were never able to ask them about any incidents in the
house – not that we would have been able to broach the subject very easily, but
still. There really is no good way to ask how I met your ghost mother (probably a better story than a lot of the CBS show of almost the same name). Heather
learned this when her former sister in law drunkenly explained to her family
that she was now communicating spiritually with the mother in law that didn’t
think much of her. If the family hated her before, they really hated her now.
These things just don’t go over well, even in a family that believes in ghosts
due to many of the younger girls claiming to have had visions of things that
were not quite alive.
Because of the inability to broach
the subject with anyone knowledgeable and the decorum, tact, and general fear
of being thought that I’m not right in the head, I asked my neighbor Shirley
questions that confirmed things such as the presence of cats having lived here.
In this, I did it in such a way that we could have just been talking about
lingering pet odors instead of some evil harbingers of death.
In addition to this incident, it
seems that more pain has existed at this house. The man who Hazel was married
to lost a limb in an accident in the backyard. There isn’t much detail on that,
but it’s something that seemed to have happened. Apparently, something fell on
his leg and it got infected, so it was chopped off. It’s just something that
happened. Nevertheless, we have never seen a phantom limb floating through our
Siesta Zone or chanced upon a one-legged ghost telling us to get out of his
house.
I’m glad for that.
All in all, we never think about it
much except at times when things are going bump in the night. Those times have
a way of making us remember stories of limbs that succumb to gangrene and the
presence of deceased women.
Back on that October night in 2011 when Rockwell's lone hit permeated my house,
I was now forced to confront whether I had an intruder in the dining room or whether
something from the other side was in my house as the muffled sounds of an
eighties classic played out from my downstairs. I went into the basement, but
nothing was there. A bug might have scurried across the floor, but that’s not
something that would set off a motion detector. It takes loud thumps or
dropping things to do this. Thus, I went back to sleep, but it was interrupted
again with the sound of Michael Jackson’s voice keeping me from my sleep.
I
went downstairs again, and I did my same checks again, but this time, I took
out the battery from the lights and unplugged them as well. Now, I couldn’t get
back to sleep and the fire alarm was occasionally chirping.
Did I have something else to worry
about? Was my home going to be reduced to ashes? The answer was obviously “no.”
It just meant that the batteries needed changed and that the motion detector
downstairs was so sensitive that it was picking up on the sound of chirping
from up above them.
Nevertheless, for one morning only,
it felt like we had ghosts in our house all over again. And with that, I
breathed a sigh of relief that nothing was watching me.
I’d like to
think that our protection comes from Heather following the advice of the
goofballs from Paranormal State that
seem to think that by telling a ghost clearly and directly that the house
doesn’t belong to them anymore that there will be no issues with said ghosts. One time while she was alone in the house,
Heather declared to that which might have been or might not have been that the
house was ours. Whether this did the trick or not, I can’t say, but I can say
that the house has been quiet since then.
Personally,
I think sage helped more, but that’s just me. If something / someone ever comes
back, I hope it’s either able to be pushed away that easily or it shows itself
as her mother or my Gram / Nana, who I feel have tried to look after me.
Spookily
enough, in my life, there has always been some paranormal force out there
looking to interact with me.
I can
remember bumps in the night while I was living on Southgate Street in Bury St.
Edmunds. It was an old row home that definitely had about one hundred years of
history to it. Nevertheless, it was a time I never thought much about ghosts
despite the fact that I was creating ghosts in my life with all of the actions
I was doing stumbling around my early twenties and obsessing over my past. Even
with those bumps and thumps in the night, this dead world kingdom of England
only brings the ghosts that possess people in mental ways that they can’t leave
behind. For this reason, no exorcism can remove these demons. Instead, it takes
stabilizing life actions and / or little pills that go with therapeutic
expressions of understanding to make them go away or at least to diminish their
presence. Over time, I’ve left some of these behind, but still, I keep so many
more.
As a child, I was first introduced
to paranormal ghosts by my dad who told me that Reggie Rothenerger, a person
who once lived at the house that we were living in while we resided at 627 Vester
Place in Sinking Spring, fell off of my enclosed porch and died. His ghost was
living in the cooby hole in the attic, which was a crawl in closet on the side
of the house. For years, I never went in the cooby hole or close to the edge of
the enclosed porch. On one hand, it seemed to serve a need to keep me away from
falling off of the 2nd floor dusty and dirty porch. On the other
hand, it created paranoia for edges that I can’t shake to this day. In the same
respect, it kept me away from the cooby hole, which was right next to where my
dad kept his old Playboys stashed. I
only found this out because a childhood friend of mine found them while we were
playing in that room. He told me that I could come and look at them whenever I
wanted to, but whenever I did, I would always feel nervous about being in the
ghost room. Somehow, ghosts and naked women became engrained together in mind.
Both of them became elusive to approach and to touch for the longest time
despite the fact that it was a Holy Grail quest to see all of the things that
were associated with them.
The house
at Sinking Spring was an older house. It was also the place where all of my
childhood memories came together to make me who I was. Some of these were
humorous, some of these were typical in their childhood nature. Some of these
are held close to my chest in a place where I can keep them hidden and never
have to think about them again. These memories, like the memories of an odd
painted bird that was decorating the dining room wall, are the things that make
the house I lived in from 1977 to 1988 so unique and eerie at the same time.
No matter
which of these memories exist, be they the romanticized good or the painful
past, I still dream about them in all of their actuality. I say this as a fact
despite the fact that I haven’t seen the rooms since 1988 and despite the fact
that we don’t have pictures of much of the house.
Nevertheless, my mind is completely
certain to what is there. In the backyard, we once had a shed that was old and
decrepit. I always felt that it was haunted, too, but that seemed to come more
from the cover image of a mystery book that I had as a kid. Nevertheless, the
shed was completely removed to make way for a newer shed sometime after we got
there. I didn’t have anything to do with it, but I was glad that all of its
rotting gray boards and black roofing were gone.
Since we
left, much has changed. It’s no longer the same house as it was when I was a
kid. The concrete wall that we had between our yard and the neighboring yards
down below us fell and was replaced with timbers. The cherry tree that grew in
the yard was cut down because it was so big and messy with big black cherries
dropping everywhere in the midst of its growing season. Now, there is a chain
link fence between the front yard and the street. There is a deck that was
constructed in the back and a new tree now fills the yard. I’m sure there are
other changes internally, too, but I haven’t seen them.
Across the
street, we would see the Sinking Spring Elementary School. It used to be open
when we lived there, but now it’s an apartment complex. The playground was
where I learned to drive a bicycle. I got my first kiss on the left side of the
school when I was in high school. On the right side of the school, we would
play baseball. Behind the school, there was always a kickball game happening.
We also played dodge ball in a circle that was painted onto the back of the
schoolyard. In addition, there were basketball poles and a rim, but there was
never a net. It was a great place to be a kid, even if the train whistle blew
incessantly from the locomotives moving down the tracks that were behind it.
Eventually, like so many other things in life, we got used to it. It became the
place that we became who we were, for better or for worse, but now Old Sinking
Spring is no more. In fact, the traffic pattern in front of the school has been
reversed as well so that nothing exists as it did in that glorious time that
was the eighties.
I can still
feel the ghost that is Old Sinking Spring though. There’s no denying that it
was once there because its spectral force is still here. Sure, much of it was
vanishing to new housing developments that all looked the same. The fields we
played in were replaced with middle class houses and communities that weren’t
part of the world that we grew up in. This has nothing to do with
socio-economics; rather, it has to do with the fact that these people didn’t
live in row homes and the community existence that we did. Instead, they live
in comfortable cocoons that were even more subdivided by their not knowing the
neighbors that moved there to be in their comfortable cocoons. Community was
gone. Nobody knew anyone. There was just a house to live in.
There was
no home.
Eventually,
we too moved to a new neighborhood, and despite its age being much older than
the new housing developments, there was no community there either. It just was.
Nobody cared to know anyone. We just lived our lives in our homes and
backyards. Instead of being a part of something, we were just a part of
ourselves.
And so Sinking
Spring is now another ghost in my life.
Occasionally, I still walk through
it in dreams and deliver my papers like I did in my teenage years. I used to
dream of home as being in the house that we lived in. Prior to coming home to
this house in Ephrata, it’s been a long time since I felt that way.
With this
house we live in now, I feel like we have made it our own. We have established
our lives. Heather has used her art to make the rooms special. We have memories
here. Maybe someday after I move on, I’ll dream about its ghosts the way I do
that house on Montieth Avenue and the apartment in Mount Penn.
Some things
just stay with us and haunt us forever, for better or worse.
