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

Forty Years in the Desert: Is There Pie at the Next Oasis?

The Lenten season will soon be upon us. It's the time of year that one of my friends, also a Catholic, refers to as his "desert journey".

I thought he said "dessert journey" and I told him I'd be glad to go along with him and have some pie. He pointed out that maybe, since it's Lent and all, I should take my own desert journey and give up eating pie for 40 days.

We Catholics are notorious for sacrificing or "giving up" during Lent. Personally, I've always felt that rather than deny myself something pleasurable over the course of the holy season, it would be much more righteous of me to do something unselfish for others.

I thought perhaps I could start by sharing my pie. That way everyone wins. Of course, I'll need to get more pie.

Now the idea of the 40 days of Lent being likened to a "desert journey" is a reflection on the 40 years that Moses spent in the desert, leading the Israelites to the Promised Land. We've managed to narrow it down to 40 days for our own purposes because someone must have figured out that it should never have taken the Chosen People that long to get from Point A to Point B.

The only reason it did was because Moses was so fiercely stubborn.
That and he walked slow. His bunions really bothered him. And the Lord, with his wonderful sense of humor, led him to Mt. Sinai and said, "Here, Moses. Take two tablets and call me in the morning."

So it's no wonder the people were getting so testy on their desert journey. And at one point they had had quite enough and turned on Moses.

"Come on, Moses! It's been almost 40 years and we're getting nowhere! Day after day, the same thing. Tear down the campsite, trudge through the heat, up one sand dune and down another, step in camel poop and ruin another pair of sandals!

"And what do we get to eat, Moses? A bunch of weird, stale cookies that fall out of the sky. Then you do that trick where you tap the rock with the stick and--presto chango--we all get a drink of water! Whoopee!

"Well, yesterday we noticed something when you tapped that rock. It's the same rock every day! We've been walking in circles! We're lost, aren't we? And all because you refuse to stop at an oasis and ask for directions!

"This is why we build golden calves! For something to do! We're going crazy out here, Moses!

"Then to scare us, you come down from that mountain looking like you've seen a ghost, you've aged about 90 years, you're muttering some nonsense about a bush that's on fire, then you tell us that you've got some new rules for us that are written on a couple of slabs of rock! Is the heat getting to you, Moses? Well, we can't take it anymore!"

After putting up with all of that, it must have been disappointing for Moses to find out that God would not let him enter the Promised Land. Everyone in his group was jumping up and down, whooping and hollering, "We made it! Yay! It's the Promised Land! There it is!  Come on, Moses. We'll race you!"

"No, that's all right. You guys go on ahead and I'll catch up later."

Now that was probably one of the most unselfish acts of all. To lead a whining, belly-aching, and faithless throng on a desert journey for 40 years, without cable TV, while knowing full well that he himself could never cross over into the Land of Milk and Honey.

Sometimes it probably did appear that Moses had no direction, that he didn't know where he was going. Yet he forged ahead on his desert journey with no map, but only faith.

And often that's what life is like, isn't it? We seem to wander aimlessly, without direction, wondering if we're really getting anywhere. But, like Moses, we don't stop to ask for directions, because if we have faith, that is our road map. We know we just have to keep moving.

So when Lent rolls around,  have a good desert journey and take time out for a piece of pie. 

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Copyright by Wendel Potter
 

The Great Phone Booth Escapade

In some circles back home in Fullerton, Nebraska the "Phone Booth Story" became legend.

As it often happens, and it did in this case, a tale can take some bizarre twists as it travels from one ear to another. But I'm going to clear things up and tell the story the way it really took place.

I remember it well. And I should. As it turned out, it was my first brush with the police.

Every small town has its "characters," usually colorful folks who, for one reason or another, stand out from the crowd. Helen Harper was one such citizen. The main reason she stood out was because she weighed upwards of 400 pounds. There was a lot to stand out.

Helen once paid a visit to our town doctor and he ordered a physical exam. They needed to record her weight, so they sent Helen down to the grain elevator. It was the only place in Fullerton where there was a scale that would support her.

I would guess that Helen, at that time, was somewhere around 35 (which also happened to be her shoe size). She was married to a wiry little man in his 70s and they had at least eight children. She could have been hiding at least one or two more. Helen always looked like she was about to give birth to octuplets.

And talk about pushing her weight around. Rare was the person who messed with Helen.

Bell Telephone tried it. Helen was behind in paying her bill, so her phone was disconnected.

Take that, Helen! Yeah, right.

Upon discovering why her phone didn't work (I wonder if they called her to tell her she had no phone service), Helen ripped the telephone off the kitchen wall and wildly drove her blue Plymouth station wagon downtown to Ma Bell's business office where she slammed the phone down on the manager's desk, and told him quite plainly where he could stick his dial tone.

And that is where the Phone Booth Story begins.

It took place on a summer evening back in 1968. There were four of us young men who had wandered downtown, probably to get a Coke at Clara's Cafe, then to walk the small town streets looking for harmless adventures.

We had passed by the telephone company's branch office and turned at the corner where there sat, fittingly, a phone booth. We ventured on about a half block when we stopped and turned. The blue Plymouth station wagon had driven by and pulled up to the curb on the corner.

Helen Harper jiggled out from the driver's side and headed for the phone booth. Without phone service at home, this was her only alternative if she wanted to place a call.

Our curiosity got the best of us. We were extremely interested to see how this woman was going to fit into that phone booth. We figured it was worth watching. After all, teen aged boys will be boys.

Helen pushed on the glass doors and began stuffing herself inside the booth, filling every square inch. It reminded me of that famous old college prank where fraternity brothers would see how many of them could fit inside a phone booth. With just Helen in there by herself, it looked like the entire university.

What happened next was totally unrelated to our mission and, to three of us in our group, totally without reason. But, as Helen dropped in her dime and began dialing, one fellow among us, on a strange and fateful impulse, reached down and, in one fluid motion, scooped up a handful of gravel from the parking lot where we were standing. He reared back and let the rocks fly in the direction of the phone booth.

My two innocent cohorts and I stood frozen, watching in amazement. It unfolded like a slow motion movie. The spray of gravel pummeled the phone booth and that was followed by the sound of breaking glass. We could actually see the glass shatter and hear the bellowing of the woman inside the booth.

Suddenly we unfroze and began running. That's what level-headed teenagers do when they smell fear. They run like panic-stricken dogs.

After a couple of blocks, we stopped to gather our wits and three of us asked the perpetrator why he had suddenly decided to kill Helen. He had no reasonable answer. So we figured, he's on his own. We went our way and he went home.

The rest of the evening passed uneventfully. Later, we couldn't help returning to the scene of the crime. I guess we wanted to make sure there was no blood. Fortunately there wasn't, although glass was everywhere (along with four or five candy bar wrappers) and there was no sign of the station wagon.

The next evening, I was over to the house of one of the friends who had been with me the night before. We were alarmed when his dad sought us out and told us that one of our local policeman was in the living room and wanted to question us.

Sam the policeman was an aging, friendly sort and when we walked into the room, it showed in his eyes that he knew we hadn't done anything wrong, but he needed to know who had. He told us that Helen hadn't been injured in the incident the night before, but when he had arrived, she was standing on the corner violently shaking glass out of her big cotton tent of a house dress.

It seemed Helen had spotted a couple of girls across the street from the phone booth. Sam had tracked them down and asked them if they had seen anyone in the vicinity. They obliged and gave Sam our names. So we obliged and gave Sam the name of our friend who had launched the preemptive strike.

Now, come to find out, Sam had already been down to my house, so it wasn't long before my parents showed up to join the festivities. My dad was fit to be tied, mostly because I hadn't already mentioned anything about the previous evening to him.

He explained to me that running away was the worst thing a guy could do in that predicament. Somehow, I begged to differ. I just couldn't feature myself walking up to an angry 400-pound woman covered with shattered glass and saying to her, "Excuse me, but my friend over there took a sudden notion to watch a phone booth implode with you inside and I'll be glad to call a cop and have the lad sent up the river if you'll just promise not to sit on me."

Well, I think I was grounded for a week after that. The boy who threw the rocks had to make restitution. And, fortunately, Helen Harper never found out where I lived.

So, in a nutshell, that's the legendary Phone Booth Story, just the way it happened. And (sorry, Dad) but if I had it to do all over again, I'd still run like hell.

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Copyright 2011 by Wendel Potter

Have a Very Merry Whatevermas

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"A very merry Xmas and a happy New Year, Let's hope it's a good one without any fear." -- "Happy Xmas (War Is Over)", John Lennon and Yoko Ono


John and Yoko must have been the original political correctionist officers.  But I'm sure they felt that, by replacing "Christ" with "X," they were spreading their season's wishes to everyone in the world, to all cultures, races and creeds.

When I was a small boy in Catholic school, our favorite teacher, Sister Attila -- we called her Attila the Nun -- made it very clear that saying "Xmas" was not proper. As a matter of fact, it would be pagan of us to say "Xmas," and for those who risked such an impropriety, the chances were pretty good of spending an eternity in hell, roasting like an Xmas goose.

"If you take out Christ, you won't have Christmas," she used to tell us.

That's true, I thought. Remove Christ, and we'd be left with plain old "mas." How weird would that be?

Change those traditional songs to "We Wish You a Merry Mas," "I'm Dreaming of a White Mas" and "It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Mas," and they just wouldn't have the same ring or rhythm to them as the original versions.

Of course, keep in mind that, if you study the lyrics to those songs, you won't find any mention of Christ throughout except in the word Christmas itself. Nor will you in "Silver Bells" or "Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer."

Why bring political correctness into the scheme of holiday things? I've known Jewish people who warmly exchanged "merry CHRISTmas" with me. I've also known folks who professed no real religious faith at all, but they didn't hesitate to share a cup of holiday cheer, nor did they rebuff me when I wished them a "merry CHRISTmas." They even wished it back right back.

With or without Christ, the message of peace and goodwill still rings out loud and clear like the peal of a church bell whenever a heartfelt "merry Christmas" is passed from the lips of one person to the ears of another.

The declaration that Christ is "the reason for the season" has been a fashionable Christmas sentiment over the past few years. People like catchy little phrases, especially if they rhyme. It's that Madison Avenue influence.

Surely Christmas,  as many of us know it, is rooted in the birth of Jesus. Of course, along the way, we've added traditions that stemmed from other cultures, like the Christmas tree, the lights, the holly and garland, the ornaments, the wonderful foods, the wrapping paper and bows and so on.

It's all been blended in a fabulous mix that delights us every December -- and keeps retailers' cash registers ringing.

At the same time, Christians shouldn't be so narrow as to assume we corner the market on Christmas, not where the true meaning of the yuletide spirit is concerned.

"Merry Christmas" isn't solely a religious greeting just because it contains "Christ." It so happens that it's a wonderful offering of friendship that happens to contains Christ's message: Love one another.

The way I see it, to spread that message must be the reason Jesus came to earth.  And not only Christmastime,  but all year long should be the season for the reason.

John and Yoko needn't have replaced Christ with X in order to reach people the world over with their song of peace. Today, we needn't say "season's greetings" or "happy holidays" merely as a politically correct substitute for "merry Christmas."

On the other hand, Christians should be sensitive to the beliefs that non-Christians hold dear to their own hearts. As long as everyone is on the same wavelength of peace on earth, goodwill toward men, does it really make a difference who the messenger is as long as everyone gets the message?

All I am saying, is give peace a chance.  And have a Merry Whatevermas.


Copyright 2010 by Wendel Potter

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My Lean Halloween Years by Wendel Potter

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As a youngster, I went through two dismal Halloweens with no tasty treats.
 
In Emmetsburg, Iowa, where I was born and lived until I was nearly ten years old, the Halloween celebration achieved a status that ranked right up there with the Fourth of July and V-J Day. Well, almost.

There weren't fireworks lighting up the sky after dark, but porch lights beamed from nearly every house in town, welcoming all the costumed goblins, ghosts, and witches to each door where treats o' plenty were doled out with great kindness and generosity. In a couple of hours' time, we kids hauled in more loot than the James' Gang after a train robbery, enough sweets to get our dentist gleefully warming up his drill and pricing winter homes in Jamaica.

Our M.O. was pretty much like that of Charlie Brown and the "Peanuts" gang. As soon as darkness had fallen, we'd all meet at one house, map out our 20-block strategy, then hit the ground running with large grocery sacks in tow. None of those tiny, plastic pumpkins for us! Volume was our goal.

Then one year Halloween came crashing down for me like a witch shot off her broomstick. We moved to another town across the state that discouraged the very fine art of trick-or-treating.

Worse yet, we lived there for two years! That means on two consecutive Halloweens I wasn't allowed to put on a mask and go door-to-door for candy.

Now this particular town had a twisted posture when it came to trick or treating. The civic leaders wanted to keep the kids home after dark and off front porches. Apparently, they figured if Halloween was assigned a low profile, then the town was less likely to suffer from the rueful tricks of Halloween-inspired vandals.

But their alternative to trick-or-treating stunk. The Chamber of Commerce staged a downtown parade for the youngsters and everyone who participated received a measly bag of tasteless sugar-free candy and was then scooted off the streets and sent home.

I was a well-practiced trick-or-treater. Not only was it not customary for me to walk in the door by seven o'clock on Halloween night, but to return home with less than forty pounds of goodies was a blow to my ego.

The kids in that town never balked at the deprivation, though. They didn't know any better. They hadn't experienced the joys of trotting from one house to another and being handed candy bars, caramel apples, and popcorn balls.

Personally, I was having a sugar fit! I lost weight during those two cruel years. The condition of my teeth even began to improve.

The poor dentist in that town lived in a tar paper shack and had no running water. I heard that he later moved to Pennsylvania where he set up shop across the street from the Hershey chocolate factory and became quite wealthy.

Fortunately we moved, too. We came west to Fullerton, Nebraska where trick-or-treating was happily in fashion and smiling porch lights and sugar highs were the order of the night on October 31st.

By that time, though, I was getting near the age when soon it would be no longer appropriate for me to dress up like a ghoul and demand candy from the citizens. There's a fine line between trick-or-treating and terrorism.

But I still feel like I was cheated out of those two Halloweens. It's just something you can never get back.

Or can you? Let's see. I'll need a mask and a large grocery sack and a map of the neighborhood...

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Copyright 2004 by Wendel Potter