LIVING WITH THE BOOGEYMAN

I believe in karma, as in what comes around goes around. My brother is three years and nine months younger than I am. When he was in the second grade (and I was in the sixth grade) he got it into his head that hiding in various places and then jumping out to scare me would be great fun. The game began with him hiding behind doors and in corners and it worked every time. He scared the bejesus out of me. I never failed to deliver a heartfelt (truly heartfelt) scream. He then got more inventive and his patience was truly impressive. He would hide in our clothes hamper (it had a lid). I don't know how long he sometimes had to lie in wait for me to open it before he would spring out like a jack-in-the-box. Aaaaghhhh. Countless times he hid under my bed and grabbed my ankle as I passed by. Aaaaghhh. He hid behind my clothes in my closet morning and night. Aaaggghhh. There was no safe place in our house that I hadn't been scared witless at least ten times over. The boogeyman was real; I lived with him and he slept in the room across the hall.

{Warning: this could be a whole new blog, but I will try to keep it short.} My father wanted to heat our house with a woodstove. The only problem was he never had enough wood for the winter to actually heat the house with a wood stove so by morning in the wintertime our house was FREEZING. I set my alarm 30 minutes before I wanted to shower so I could go downstairs and turn on the spaceheater in the bathroom and shut the doors so that it would be warm in there for my actual shower. So, on this very frosty morning I am preparing for my shower when I hear this banging on the wall. I freeze. My imagination? Prowler? If I ignore it will it go away? Is the boogeyman for real? Have I really and truly finally lost what's left of my mind? My heart is beating 90mph. Nothing. Okay, just my imagination. I turn on the water. More banging. Crap. There might actually be someone out there waiting to do me bodily harm. I open the bathroom door and look into the kitchen and see... nothing. Enormous relief. Heart still going 90 mph. Best idea is to get into the shower and hope that whoever is out there is gone by the time I get out. Or if there was no one there, there will still be no one there. People who say that conversations with yourself are good because they are the only intelligent conversation you might have all day are totally full of crap. Well, they are full of it if their conversations with themselves are anything like mine with myself. Anyway....

Twenty minutes later.... twenty minutes you say? Yes. Back then I liked a nice, long HOT shower. And then there was lotion and getting dressed and hair. Whatever. On with the story. I come out of the bathroom and there is my brother on the back porch. He had let the dog out and gotten locked out of the house. It was easily 15 degrees on the back porch. He was barefoot and pissed. "Didn't you hear me banging? I know you heard me banging. I saw you peek out that door and then close it." He was ranting like a very cold angry person. After that it was a lot of finger pointing and door slamming and silence. Cold silence. One could argue that karma had come around and they would have a point; he had spent years making me afraid of the boogeyman and it worked.

I feel a bit like Paul Harvey when I say this, but I can't leave the story there because there is more to this story. However, I have to back up a bit to tell it. It is that same boy and that same girl. He is two going on three and she is five going on six and she is scared of the dark. The problem is that the lightswitch to the hallway is at the end of the hall, so to turn it on she has to walk all the way down the dark hallway. The little boy knows she's scared so he says, "I'll do it Wobin." And off he goes. He has to stand on tiptoes and can barely push that switch to turn it on. If I left this part of the story out I'd be leaving out the essence of who my brother actually was as a child and who he is today.