The day is perfectly lovely. It is 80° with a strong breeze from the north. The den is dark and cool. This is a busy week for me with ukulele just about every day, four concerts, practice and a lesson.

I found a book in the back of my bedroom bookcase. Finding it was happenstance as I was looking for something else. The book, Dorothy Lamour and the Haunted Lighthouse, had been a stocking stuffer. What made this book special was its publishing date, 1947, the year I was born. The book was published by Whitman Publishing, the company in which I invested my weekly 50¢ allowance when I bought mystery books like Trixie Belden and Donna Parker. I started reading my find. The book is dated but readable. The pages have yellowed.

My father used to tell us stories. They involved men with hooks instead of hands and things that go bump in the night. I was not so much frightened as wary. A strange noise in the house gave me pause. I listened but nothing ever came of it. The wind banging against the windows had my imagination running wild, andI was alert for one of those things that go bump in the night, but I never saw anything. When I walked home in the dark, my footsteps echoed on the sidewalk, and, just in case, I would check behind me. No one was ever there. At some point, when I was older, I didn’t notice the sounds anymore. I didn’t look for shadows. I stopped being wary.

I still have a strong imagination. My coffee maker is a Black and Decker. You lift up the top to add the coffee grounds and the water. When the top is up, it looks just like Darth Vader’s helmet, black and with the same shape. The good thing is it doesn’t talk or make breathing sounds.

This entry was posted on August 24, 2026 at 2:02 pm and is filed under Musings. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.