Haunted Dawn

Last weekend, Lazz and I headed out to middle-of-nowhere Missouri to participate in a guided tour and exploration of an official paranormal site. We visited a haunted building--formerly hotel, schoolhouse, brothel--now run down that was on Travel Channel's "Top Twenty-Five Most Haunted Places in the US."



It was a truly enjoyable experience--meeting these other couples from the petite college cheerleader and her brawny man who had "ghost apps" on their phones to the women who worked at a Reebok store together and watch ghost TV on weekends. We had experienced paranormal hunters with us. There was equipment for monitoring electro-magnetic charges, unexplainable flashes of light. I got seriously creeped several times, but I also laughed a lot with Lazz.

We stopped hunting around 3:30 AM. Too tired to drive back, Lazz and I set down blankets on the porch.


We were inside a closet that had a confederate flag on it. The house was once a stop on the underground railroad. We sand "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" trying to invoke a spirit. It did not work.

The fireflies were huge, jetting between the ancient trees in the front lawn in front of us. Thousands of visible stars. Broken limestone was everywhere. The house creaked. Cicadas.

Suddenly the stars were disappearing. "Look what we did," I said. "We made the stars go away!"
"I think it's the light," he replied.
I pointed to one street light a mile away. "That?" I asked.
He laughed, "No. The big light. The sun."
"Oh that," I said. And next thing I knew, dew was everywhere and the sky was full of bright blue.

The sky became pink.
And then guess what happened?
Well, what do you think.

Here's One

This morning I saw that it was snowing, and my knee-jerk reaction was crawling back into bed and pressing fast forward. BUT I am a happy person now! Things are going well for me! I need to stop hating winter so very much. I promised last fall! I promised after falling in love with "Blood Bank."

And then it came to me, slow and spinning like the flakes outside, a good winter memory.

When I was a freshman in high school I played Gavroche in Les Miserables. It was the first time I sincerely got acting. I was all about that part. I died on a barricade and everything. My family was impressed with me. I had grown up and died in front of them. My grandmother could not believe it. To her I was still four. Her eyes were wide looking at me like No. No, that couldn't have been you.

She wasn't a stereotypical harsh grandmother, but she wasn't a cushy one either. She just didn't quite know me. I had never spent time alone with her, but a couple weeks later she called my dad and arranged a one-on-one visit for me. She had purchased tickets to a new musical, Seussical the Musical , and wanted to make an event of it. Just us. The actress and her grandmother.

My dad drove me downtown, and the three of us had lunch at Marshall Fields (EFF MACY'S!) Dad left us, and I just didn't know quite how to act or what to do. We looked at the furniture, the Christmas windows, the jewelry. We made our way to the theatre, and I was surprised by how much I feel in love with a show based on Dr. Seuss books. We ate chocolate mints throughout the performance. She was very interested in my opinion of the acting, the songs, the costumes. I told her, and in the dark we caught the train back to her house. She told me stories about the 1930s, and I stayed the night.

For Christmas she gave me a square glass ornament that read

November 1, 2002
Alice (Last Name)
A Star Is Born

It was not opening night, but the night she saw the show.

Oh the thinks you can think, think and wonder and dream, far and wide as you dare.