A Ghost of a Chance Of A Chance Of A Ghost

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"Starlight, Star Bright, we hope to see a ghost tonight!"

We were kids back in Iowa and we'd shout that phrase like an anthem when the summery dusk had swept through the neighborhood. I'm sure that some neighbors, the older early-to-bed-early-to-rise folks, were often startled out of a peaceful slumber when the late evening crackled with our twilight call to arms.

"Starlight, star bright" was actually nothing more than a game of tag in the dark. But it went a step farther. It gave character and definition to the child who was "it." He (or she -- we were not a misogynous neighborhood) was not just "it," but played the role of a menacing ghost who lurked among shadows in a bushy thicket or behind Mrs. Orsborn's white-washed garage.

When the children came roaming, hoping to see a ghost, "it" would pop out and run down whichever players he could catch and tag them. I'm not sure what the end result of all this nonsense was.

There probably was none because as I recall, the game was always left unfinished after mothers and fathers on doorsteps throughout the neighborhood, with hands cupped around their mouths, hollered out the names of their respective children, serving notice that the hour was late and it was time to come home. 

"Jimmy! YooHoo! It's getting late, son!"....."Nancy dear! Time to come in!"...."Ann!  Your milk and cookies are ready!"...."Wendel!  Hope you get home before the serial killer comes out!"

Darn, and just as the elderly neighbors were once again settling in for the night. Those folks just couldn't buy a decent night's sleep in the summer.

Ghosts, or the notion of ghosts, entered in to a lot of our youthful games and adventures. On Saturday afternoons, we went to the movies to see the latest ghost or monster film and reveled in being terrified out of our wits. And when we camped in the backyard, no sleep-out was complete without exchanging spooky tales and bits of ghostly lore. We loved being scared!

I'm a somewhat spiritual person and I've never discounted the possibility of visits from another dimension. Some of this may be rooted in my Irish Catholic upbringing where stories of visions and sightings of long-dead saints walking the earth were commonly discussed.

However, it was actually my dad's side of the family, the English Protestant side, that made some pretty marvelous claims on the subject of spiritualism. 

The most popular story was that of my Grandma Potter's sister, Aunt Fan. Fan had the uncanny ability to look into the bottom of a teacup and foretell the future by studying the tea leaves.

It is Potter family legend that one morning Aunt Fan sat in the kitchen of my grandparents' farmhouse and told my grandmother that she saw a man, blind and bloody, coming in to her life. Not long after that, Grandpa made his way to the house after a morning of blowing up tree stumps with blasting caps.  I don't know if that was his job or if he just enjoyed blowing things up with blasting caps.

Now, apparently one of the charges appeared to be a dud so Grandpa approached the stump and it promptly exploded in his face. When he stumbled into the kitchen, his face was bathed in blood and his eyes were filled with dirt and tree stump shrapnel.

Coincidence? You decide. All I know is that Aunt Fan was a decent God-fearing woman who obviously had psychic powers of some sort. Or it could have been hallucinations from drinking too much tea.

Fact or fantasy, stories like these made childhood fun. It was a part of growing up.

Even when I was in high school, we delighted in ghostly legends, real and imagined. There was a house over in Fullerton, Nebraska (where we moved to in 1964) that could have been the model for any haunted house movie, as old and ramshackle as it was with weeds growing up around it. It sat away from the road, back in the trees, on the very edge of town.

An old man and his spinster daughter lived there, so they say. Although we never saw the gentleman (or the daughter, for that matter), we dubbed him "Candleman" because it was said that if you stood along the lonely road in the dark and watched long enough, you would see the flame of a candle flickering about the inside of the house, floating from window to window.

Apparently, the guy was not a supernatural being, he just had no electricity. And on many dark, moonless nights we wandered down that road and kept vigil. We never did see the candle or the man (or the daughter, for that matter), but it made for a great story.

I'm not sure what it was in our psyches that found spooks and spirits to be so attractive, but the supernatural world certainly seemed to be an inherent part of our culture growing up. Nowadays kids seem to opt for the cheap thrills of graphic horror movies or video games, the slash and gore stuff, that requires only Hollywood's special effects rather than the viewer's imagination.

Or maybe it's just that kids today take no pleasure in classical old-fashioned scares because they're daily being been exposed to the reality checks of our modern age -- of nuclear and chemical threat, outbreaks of strange diseases, and terrorism in our own backyard. 

Perhaps back in my day it was just plain fun to let ourselves be scared of things that go bump in the night because we knew that those bumpy night things, along with ghouls and ghosts and goblins were made up and weren't really to be feared.

Sadly, the world these days has become a terrifying place and contrary to what Franklin Roosevelt once told Americans, there is plenty to fear besides fear itself.

I often wonder what Aunt Fan would have to tell us about our future if she were alive today and read our tea leaves. Maybe late on some summery night, when the moon is hidden in the shadows of the universe and a warm whispery breeze murmurs like a lost soul, I'll ask her.

I'll let you know what she says.

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Don't Forget To Move Your Sundial Ahead

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That's right. It's the second Sunday in March. And some early risers may be reading this in the dark.

Well, not in total darkness. Of course, you have a light on. But that's my point. 

Yesterday morning, at this hour (by the clock), we didn't need to turn on the lights. Today we do.

Obviously, I'm talking about the dawning of daylight-saving time. It began today and so far I've saved no daylight. As a matter of fact, I've lost an hour's sleep!

I've always questioned the term "daylight-saving time." Sure, by the new clock setting -- spring ahead! -- we gain an hour of brightness in the evening. Yet what have we saved? We lost an hour of brightness in the morning! Do the math!

Back in the 1960s, when daylight-saving time was first instituted in Nebraska, it was agreed in the state legislature that by moving our clocks ahead one hour in the spring, our farmers would be able to work longer in the evening.

But don't farmers traditionally get up really early in the morning to start work? Now suddenly it's pitch dark when they get up. And to benefit from the displaced daylight, they have to work an hour later at night. 

If it were not for daylight-saving time, they could knock off at 9 p.m., have their dinner, sip a couple of brews, and see what's happening on "Criminal Minds".

My Grandpa Potter would not have approved of daylight-saving time. I never knew him, but it was said that he was a cantankerous sort. And being a morning person, he expected his brood to be up and working by 4 a.m.

Now when evening came, Grandpa went to bed with the chickens. That's because Grandma made him sleep in the henhouse. I'm serious. Winter and summer, he turned in at 7 p.m.

Six months of daylight-saving time would have severely maladjusted his body clock. He would have grown more cantankerous than ever. 

Thankfully, cantankerousness was not a trait that was passed on to his grandchildren. (And according to spell check, cantankerousness is not really a word.)

Now, I'll give the farmer his due. And I understand that moving that hour of daylight from morning to night benefits the evening golfer or fisherman or even the guy who has no other time to mow his lawn.

As for me, I was always a morning fisherman, my golf game could not be any worse if I played in the dark, and if I don't have time to mow, well a guy can always spray a little Round Up across the yard.

You also have to take God into consideration when you introduce something like daylight-saving time. The whole time concept was his thing to begin with. So who are we to mess around with it?

You don't read anywhere in the Bible where God tells Noah or Abraham or Moses, "Now on the second Sunday of every March, you guys have to get up at 2 in the morning and go out and move your sundials ahead one hour. You'll notice then on Sunday night that the sun will appear to set an hour later than usual. This will give you some extra daylight so you can slaughter a few more sheep and burn them on the altar for the Sunday Night Summer Sacrificial service. I think you're going to like it."

I have to admit I'm a morning person, especially in the spring and summer months. I like to get up early and have my coffee and listen to nature as it greets daybreak.

Well, that's a little difficult to do right now when day doesn't break until it's time to rush out the door to work. And since I don't go to bed especially early, I resent missing "Letterman" jsut because the sun is casting a glare on my television screen.

But I seem to be in the minority where daylight-saving time is concerned, so I'll have to keep making the best of it. And I guess I'd better start working on my next column since I'm already an hour behind and I haven't even begun slaughtering my sheep for tonight's sacrifice.

Copyright by Wendel Potter

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Give it up! It's Mom's Macaroni and Curdled Cheese Casserole

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When I was a kid, many of my parochial school buddies gave up going to the movies during Lent. Being a compassionate fellow, I didn't want to see the guy who owned the movie theater go out of business (even if he was a non-Catholic), so I continued patronizing his place on Saturday afternoons between Ash Wednesday and Easter Sunday.

Besides, in a way I, too, was giving something up -- companionship at the movies! While my friends were off playing ball or riding bikes on Saturdays, I was sitting through a double-feature ALONE!

I'm telling you, when John Wayne was having it out with the bad guys or the girl in the haunted house was about to be strangled by Vincent Price, not having a friend in the seat next to me to share the excitement with was almost unbearable to an 8-year old boy.

But I suffered through it in silence. It was my Lenten duty.

Some kids gave up eating candy during Lent. For me, that wouldn't have really been a major sacrifice.
My mom -- or as we called her, Mother Most Frugal -- rarely bought candy or sweets. So eating candy wasn't a habit. To my way of thinking (or what's known as Catholic rationalization), giving up something that you didn't eat on a daily basis wasn't really giving something up.

Besides, that poor guy who owned the movie theater didn't survive on ticket sales alone. Why, he might have gone belly up before April if folks like me hadn't plunked down our nickels for a Slo-Poke sucker or a box of Boston Baked Beans to get us through the movie.

But while giving something up for Lent was encouraged by the Church, it still remained an option. One thing that did not was abstaining from eating meat on Fridays.

Today, the Catholic no-meat-on-Fridays rule applies only during Lent. In my younger days, it applied to every Friday. All year. No exceptions.

That rule never really bothered me. While I love fried chicken or a good slab of roast beef, I would be just as content to eat a catfish dinner or a plate of spaghetti smothered in sauce (meatless sauce, of course).
What did bother me was the macaroni-and-cheese casseroles my mother used to make every third Friday. This is where the Lenten suffering came into play.

Growing up Catholic, our Friday evening menu rotated. One week we would have tuna and noodles (tolerable). On another Friday we had salmon and baked potatoes (not bad). But the third Friday on the rotation was the dreaded macaroni and cheese.

Don't get me wrong. Mom wasn't a bad cook. The problem was my dad. Mom cooked to suit his taste (and when it came to macaroni and cheese, he had pretty poor taste).

I remember the big brown baking bowl. Mom would bring the macaroni to a boil on the stove, drain it, then dump it in that bowl. I'm not sure what kind of cheese she used -- Velveeta, I think, but I remember she used enough of it to bind up a small continent. Then she poured in the milk. Lots of milk!

The brown bowl went into the oven where the casserole baked. And baked. And baked. Until it was done to Dad's liking.

When it came to macaroni and cheese, Dad's liking meant the casserole was covered with a thick, crusty brown skin and all that cheese and all that milk had bubbled and boiled and blended into a curdled soup.

Come and get it! Dinner's ready! Mmmmmmmmm.

Well, you can imagine.

So there you have it. Maybe I didn't give up movies or candy during Lent, but believe me, when "Crusty and Curdled Macaroni and Cheese Friday "rolled around every three weeks for as long as I care to remember -- how I did suffer!

Copyright by Wendel Potter