The Ghosts Are Not As Friendly

                From its perch atop one of the highest hills in Madison, Florida, the massive building looks down upon the town and seems to take a deep breath. The breath is filled with satisfaction.

                A drive through the town reveals tattered Southern mansions and brick ranch houses with oak trees in the front yard with Spanish moss hanging from them like bunting hanging from porches on the Fourth of July.

                The town and the county are filled with teenagers who carry their guns on racks in their pickup trucks. The guns are used only for hunting, and if there is ever a need, they will be used for protection. Unless there is a loose cannon in the crowd, there is never a need to fear most of the owners of rifles, shotguns or handguns In the sleepy Southern town.

                Geeks and nerds are also in abundance in the town. Somewhere, I fit in with the geeks and the nerds. It’s probably somewhere in the middle. They show a thirst for knowledge and learning but I have no aptitude for Geometry or Trigonometry or Calculus. My tastes run toward literature, but some of the early writers put me to sleep.

                Let’s return to the huge building on the high hill. The building is not nearly as old as the restaurant, the public library or the college campus within its view. Before, however, there was another building there. The building bore the same name. Its namesake was a very successful businessman in the north Georgia, south Florida area and Van H. Priest called Madison its home.

                The storm which hit on that April in 1989 destroyed the other structure. In its ceiling was a cat walk, where lights were rigged as young men like me sang “There is Nothing Like a Dame” with the rest of the male cast of South Pacific. In the belly of the gentle beast were catacombs where other young men went on treasures chests in their depths.

                Ghosts roamed the old Van H. Priest Auditorium but the only time they ever spoke to the living was to whisper to former students who sat watching their children in a play. The whispers would bring back a past memory. The invisible apparitions would whisper to the young men in the catacombs they were safe there. The spirits would then proceed to whisper new adventures in their ears that would drive the men into brave new worlds.

                When the storm came, the building lay in ruins, crumbled like so many dreams. A couple of years later, something newer, something brighter took its place. As people sit in the VHP II, they can still tune their ears off the sound on the stage and listen to the sounds of the building. Sometimes, they may hear a ghost dragging a chain across the floors or whisper boo to a person who dreams in fantasy of the past glory of the former Van H. Priest Auditorium.

                The ghosts are not as friendly as they used to be.

Sunday Morning Hymn

          Outside, the choir of crows and mockingbirds begins a hymn. Somewhere in the distance, a bullfrog provides the bass line as crickets carry the rhythm and a hummingbird hits the shrill high note. The sounds join together in perfect harmony on Sunday morning to sing a song of praise to their Maker, who provides for each of them..

                Soon, the hymn beating perfect time with nature will be interrupted by a cacophony of other sounds:

                Feet hitting the floor as people roll out of bed.

                Coffee percolating.

                Eggs and bacon frying.

                Showers.

                People scurrying to find their Sunday clothes.

                Doors closing as people hurry out to go to Sunday School and  church to sing their own Sunday morning hymns on Sunday morning.

                

Stubborn Goats

‎”You can lead a goat to water, but you can’t make him drink. A horse will usually drink the water, but if you try to make a goat drink, you may end up in the water yourself.” Bobby Bembry, January 6, 2013

The Grass is Greener, But…

The grass in my own yard was green when I was growing up, but the grass on the other side was greener.

The grass in the area surrounding my home was a lush shade of green. It was the shade of legends like King Arthur, of storybooks like Anne of Green Gables, of fables written by Aesop, of wisdom written by King Solomon. Everything appeared to be better and brighter.

While the grass was greener, I could tell even at a young age that it was not better because I knew why it was green. You see, I grew up on a dairy farm and I was surrounded by beautiful green cow pastures. While the pastures were pretty to look at, I would not want to live there with the cows. I was nice and cozy in my home. 

When you think of climbing the other side of the fence and making a new home there, you have to consider that if the grass is greener, will the living conditions actually be better? In some cases it may be, but in most cases, it’s not. You may have to lie down with the cows and what causes the grass to be greener. 

Always pray about any decision you have to make in Jesus’ name. 

Locking the Door on Monsters

I spent my formative years outside Monticello, Florida, a small town in north Florida known as “the most haunted small town in small town in the United States.”

The first home we live in was in a neighborhood on a hill about one mile from Bassett’s Dairy, where my father and, eventually, my mother, worked. It was a huge one-story house that, along with two other homes in the neighborhood, had once been part of what we had been told by someone was a converted Army hospital. Although there may have been soldiers that had died in the house, I never saw a ghost in it. My sister, Debbie, after watching Dracula, or something like that, on TV, woke up in the middle of the night and looked outside her bedroom window one evening and see the devil. When I looked outside the window, I saw the menacing face of what she had seen. I saw a pine tree and laughed.

The next home was a different story. It was also near Bassett’s Dairy but it was next to a cemetery. On some cool evenings, the front door would open by itself. This became so common that I jokingly began saying, “Come in, ghost.” I am sure that it was just something structurally wrong with the house.

Some evenings, I would hear Ben Lamar, the cowboy at the dairy, rounding up cows and shouting at them. A family, who had lost a son in a boating accident, used to come out to the cemetery in the middle of the night and pray for God to send their family member back to them. One night, they were out there when Ben came to round the cows up. They heard the noise he was making and got scared and never returned again. My father said Ben heard them, too, and went home and didn’t return to round up the cows.

During warm summer evenings, since we did not have air conditioning, windows were left open. The front door was left open. The screen door was not even latched. All this changed following January 15, 1978, when a killer was loose in the area and he had struck less than 30 miles away, at the Chi Omega sorority house at Florida State University.

No ghost, no poltergeist, but a real monster made me start locking the doors to my family’s house. Before, there was no reason to lock the front door. No one was going to break in. As it turned out, there was no reason to fear Bundy breaking in either but I wasn’t going to take a chance with my mother and sisters in the house.

I didn’t believe in ghosts back then and I still don’t believe in ghosts today, but this world is fractured thanks to Adam and Eve’s fall in the Garden of Eden, so there are bad people in the world, so I keep the doors to my family’s house locked and dead-bolted today. I wish that it were possible to keep the front door open and not have to worry about thieves or my family’s safety today.