https://scott-maiorca.medium.com/d4a038714069
I can remember my dad’s accident. He was standing outside my bedroom window. I see this from across the street. I was barely three, I was never allowed to cross the street, but yet I see our front yard from across the street. My dad collapses and then he’s gone. MY grandparents, his parent materialize. Grandmother Sally is distraught, a cigarette hangs loosely from her mouth. Grandpa John stands to the side: aloof. Grandmother’s sadness will go away. She will have a range of emotions. Granpa John will remain aloof, or angry. He has only three emotions.
This is how I remember my dad’s parathyroid episode. This is not how it happened. My dad Was in San Antonio, TDY, temporary duty assignment, when he collapsed and had to have emergency surgery. My grandparents came to Oklahoma as soon as they could, probably a few days by car. My mother, grandmother, and I drove to San Antonio to see my dad in the hospital.
I remember none of that. I remember him removing my rusty window screen. Taking it off of the brown brick house, and setting it on the ground, and then collapsing.
It wasn’t the only brickhouse we had when I was a kid. It’s the first time I remember moving. I knew we were somewhere before the brown and red brick house in Midwest City, but no idea where.
The living room wasn’t carpeted. I’d lay on the floor on Sunday afternoons watching the Sunday Matinee’s creature features and classic Horror films. I was four years old, and my mom delights in telling my sons what a handful I was at that age. The Creature feature may have been the only thing that settled me down.
My Dad was in Medical school and my mom was in graduate school. They both were Air Force officers. Watching Tv kept me out of their hair while they studied.
The house was haunted. I remember looking down the hallway that connected my bedroom to my parents, and seeing it. I was late one night, they were asleep, I’d been put to bed hours before. I don’t know why I was awake staring over the child gate blocking my door. But I was. And there it was. In the center of the hallway was the translucent spectre of a mad scientist, lab coat goggles and all. I did the only thing I could do. I climbed over the child gate and ran straight through him. I didn’t stop until I reached the safety of my parents’ bed. These events happened almost nightly while we lived in that house. I can still see the translucent mad scientist when I close my eyes and try to remember. I haven’t seen him in a house ever since.
Looking back I was too young to watch Karloff’s Frankenstein, or Chaney’s wolfman. I was to young to be left alone in the living room for hour at a time. Yet I understand now how much that time with the creature feature shaped who I am today.
I enjoy solitude. I enjoy creature features. Most of all my imagination still goes wild at the creaks of a settling house, or a dark foggy day.
Only now I know it’s my imagination, and not the mad scientist ghost.
I miss him.
