The carriage-house haunt

We were in junior high school, he and I – called middle school by most folks today.  He lived about two blocks up the street from my house, in Webster Park, a part of Webster Groves, an older St. Louis suburb.

He was smart, cool … blond hair. He played French Horn, I played trombone in the band.

He used to boast that his house was part of the Underground Railroad.  Once he even showed us his basement, and a big hole in the wall. “That’s where they’d come in and out,” he said.  “They,” of course, were the slaves seeking freedom in the North.

I never quite believed the story. He tended to boast a lot, about a lot of things. But you were never quite sure.  He was smart, cool …

On this day, in October, he invited us to stop by the large garage behind his house. There were three stalls for cars on the first level.  But upstairs was an apartment of sorts – a living space a bit rough around the edges.  But clearly, a home behind the home for someone.

I and some friends assembled, and we climbed the stairs.  I remember it well – a simple space, wood-framed, with windows on both sides of the main room. A small kitchen sat at the east side; a door to another room on the west.

Remember the context here … Halloween loomed.

He asked us all to take a seat.  And we did.  It was immediately after school, so I’m guessing now maybe about 4 p.m.  So the sun was still up a bit; hardly close to dark.

Our host began telling an involved tale of the former residents of this carriage house. (Yes, it was a garage, but now he had elevated it to a carriage house.)

“They lived here many years, they were family of the residents of the main house,” he said.  Though it was still daylight outside, he had turned off the lights inside. And given the low angle of the sun, the interior had turned a dark shade of gray.

As he talked, he grabbed a flashlight.  And held it under his chin, casting deep and dark shadows up beyond his nose, highlighting his eyebrows but not much else.

Yes, creepy.

But sure, we were up for the game.  We knew he was smart, cool … manipulative.  But this was adventure, pure and simple. 

“Strange things started happening to the people who lived here,” he said, standing at the top of the stairs.  “Rumor has it that one was murdered …”

And then, slowly, drip, drip, a red substance began to fall from the ceiling.  We all saw it.  It pooled on the ceiling, then slowly descended to the floor, creating a small puddle.

“The authorities suspected an ax was the weapon,” he said.  “Right between the eyes.”

And then there were clanks and bumps – odd noises in the attic above the apartment.

“And it’s said that she haunts this carriage house today.  That she struggles to get free …

“In fact, I think she’s here now … and is about to speak!”

Suddenly, the windows on both sides of us flew up, one by one, entirely on their own!

“Oh, s---!!” I thought.

Never, in my life, have I been so startled and scared.  Without thinking, I hurtled myself through one of the open windows in the back. I landed with a thump, first on an out-crop of the back of the garage, and then, bounding over the edge, to the grass below.

I wasn’t alone. Others had jumped through the windows, or ran down the stairs. Like ants from a disturbed ant hill. All were, at least for a minute, terrified.

As I sat dazed on the grass, the laughter began bubbling from upstairs.

And then our cool, blond friend descended the stairs and boasted the classic “gotcha.” 

Yes, he got us, big time.  We hesitated to believe it though knew he was right.

He invited us back upstairs to explain his technique.

You see, it had all been planned. He had compatriots in the attic; they’d drilled a hole in the ceiling for the red liquid; they did the clanks and bumps.

But the windows … well, that was pure genius on his part.  If you know anything about old double-hung windows, you know that they are balanced by heavy, metal weights attached to ropes.  It’s a perfect system. You can raise and lower the window with ease, because the weights on the ropes will perfectly offset the weight of the window.

Yet, our friend’s genius was shorting the rope so that the gravity would make the weights “heavier” than the window itself.   Basically, the windows and weights were out of balance.

Normally, this would mean the weights would pull the windows wide open. But he drilled tiny holes, plugged by finishing nails attached to strings.  The nails held the windows closed and the weights out of balance; as soon as the nails were removed, the windows would fly open.

And that’s how he did it.  He tied string to the nails, and when the time came, the guys in the attic yanked on the strings, and up went the windows.

Illusion is powerful. This guy was a master. I wonder what he’s up to today?

I suspect a lot.

A fool and his laptop

(Photo at left … the Flint Hills of Kansas, taken with my iPhone yesterday.)

Okay, this is plain silly.

I am on furlough this week.  It’s the f-word in the workplace these days – a week away from work, without pay.

Newspapers and other companies have chosen this during the recession as a way to cut costs while avoiding more staff layoffs. I’m all for it. We’ve had to lose too many good people as it is.

But it’s proving to be an eye-opener for me.  I’ve never considered myself a workaholic … and I don’t think I am.  I enjoy my weekends, like to do stuff in the evenings, am hardly the early-riser-so-I-can-get-in-the-office-early kind of guy. So I’m no workaholic.

What I am, though – and this is a very painful conclusion – is an office-information addict.  Ugh.  Worse, it’s apparent that I don’t trust my staff enough to do what needs to be done while I’m not there.  Double ugh. The latter is entirely irrational, given their capabilities. 

Before I continue, I want to stress to my friends who are still seeking work after being laid off that my problem is a very nice problem to have.  I still have a job.  (At least, I expect to when I get back to the office next Monday.)

But here’s the deal: By law, when you’re on furlough, you’re technically laid off by the company. So, I’ve been laid off.  Yes, there’s the promise of my job come Monday.  But the fact that I’ve been laid off is sobering on its own.

Second, because the company can’t have it both ways – lay you off and not pay you for a week, yet expect you to keep on working from home or wherever – you can not have any contact with the workplace.  No email, no voicemail, no phone calls, absolutely none. Don’t even try to visit your office.

And that’s the rub. Especially with the advent of voicemail and, later, the Internet and laptop connections to the workplace, I have never – ever! – been out of touch with the office while physically being out of the office.

A weekend road trip?  I’d check my email in the hotel Saturday night.  Two weeks on the lake?  I’d admire the scenery … even blog about nature’s beauty.  But I’d also check my email and voicemail daily.  While in Ireland, visiting Meghan, my laptop would hum in the late hours as I checked email back home.

Worse, I now have an iPhone, fully capable of checking not just my work email but all of my email accounts 24/7.  Oh, how I use my iPhone!  It’s often the last thing I look at before sleep.

There are those of you who relish this connectivity.  I thought I did. 

But now that I can’t have it, it’s sobering – literally. I’m in withdrawal.  And, frankly, it disturbs me, because it demonstrates a huge loss of perspective on my part.

One part of me tells myself: “Well, guy, in the end you’re responsible to your boss for hitting your numbers.  So you shouldn’t apologize for wanting to know how it’s going while you’re away.”

That’s the devil speaking, I think.  Because the angel on my other shoulder is whispering: “Relax, let go.  You’ve hired good people, they know what they’re doing. They own the numbers, too. In the end, you’re not as important as you’d like to think. So accept that, and spend more time looking outside of work for what’s beautiful, real, important.”

Yesterday, my first furlough day, I drove west to Manhattan, Kansas, to visit son Zach at Kansas State.  I took the dogs, and he and I took them for a walk after lunch.  We caught up on how he’s doing.  I'm very proud of him and miss him.

I then headed further west to visit the U.S. Cavalry Museum at Fort Riley, traversing the Flint Hills to get there.

And they were gorgeous – vast rolling plains of rust-colored brown, with lines of trees of burnt orange, red and yellow.  The tree lines were like seams in a vast blanket.

I worked so very, very hard to soak up that beauty – to fill my heart and mind with it, in hopes of shoving aside any thoughts of the office.

It’s telling that I couldn’t do it.  Not completely.  Not yet.  But I'm working on it.

“My name is Doug.  I’m an office-information addict.”

“Hi, Doug!”

Pink shoes

I was driving the truck back to Kansas City from the trade show in Houston. Somehow, after my overnight stay in Dallas, I missed the turn north at I-45 and ended up farther west on I-35.

No big deal. It was dark and storm-filled that morning in Dallas; the traffic was a mess. Not a bad outcome, all things considered, since I-35 dances along the Flint Hills of Kansas – always a beautiful sight.

My delay out of Dallas, though, meant daughter Meghan and I wouldn’t be able to meet for lunch in Tulsa. So I was on my own clock.

As I neared Oklahoma City, I remembered I’d always wanted to stop at the site of "the Oklahoma bombing" – that horrendous day on April 19, 1995, when a non-descript guy named Timothy McVeigh drove an explosives-packed Ryder truck to the front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, parked it and walked away.

At 9:02 a.m., the truck and more than one-third of the building disintegrated into shards of glass, metal and cement dust. 

Killing 168.

It was America’s first major dose of contemporary political terrorism, this at the hands of the extreme right wing of the nation’s political culture – those who saw the events of Waco, Texas, and Ruby Ridge as a sure sign that America’s liberties were at risk. 

McVeigh, executed on June 11, 2001, believed as much. 

Today, the site is a remarkable memorial to the pain and destruction that rained down, literally, on this Oklahoma community as well as the nation.

I parked my truck on N.W. 5th Street, facing north. The memorial loomed ahead of me. It was raining slightly … had been all morning.

The nine-story building is gone now, of course, though foundation remnants remain – by design. In its place is a large, green field upon which sit nine rows of chairs, each chair representing one of the victims, each row representing a floor of the building. Because children were laughing and playing at the child-care center inside the building that morning, sixteen of the chairs are smaller than the rest.

McVeigh parked his truck directly under the child-care center.

Where once stretched N.W. 5^th Street upon which the Ryder truck sat, there is now a long, horizontal pool of water – placid, nary a ripple. Peaceful. And at each end of the memorial are the start and stop times surrounding the destruction: 9:01 and 9:03.

Of course, the destruction caused by the blast would go on for years ... goes on now.

After I walked around the memorial taking pictures, I wasn’t sure I wanted to go into the memorial’s museum. I have friends who did not go once they got here. But school children on tours were streaming in and out. Silly for me not to.

The museum is housed in the Journal Record building immediately north of the memorial. This building has been carefully maintained to show the damage caused by the enormous blast across the street. Layers of the building’s brick walls were lifted by the blast, and gravity slammed them back down – like layers of a cake. You can still see the cracks. The museum chose to leave one Journal Record office exactly as rescuers found it after the explosion. 

Inside the museum awaits an incredible, sobering journey. You take an elevator up, then move down floor by floor. At a key point at the start, you are ushered into a facsimile of a hearing room. And you listen to an actual recording of a permit hearing that went on that morning … the drone of the bureaucrat talking about the morning’s agenda.

At first, you don’t understand why you're in this room witnessing the conversation … and then you do. You know that you’ll soon hear the blast as it punched through the hearing room, hear the real screams of anguish and shock, then the silence.

I won’t go into the details of what follows as you emerge from that room. Just know it is wrenching, unimaginable, tortuous and so very, very sad. And yes, there’s tremendous anger, too.

On this day, school children were everywhere, moving from exhibit to exhibit, their attention spans incredibly short. Teachers, meanwhile, worked mightily to maintain a sense of decorum. At one film, the children would squirm, ready to run to the next station; the teachers would dab their eyes, fight back tears – perhaps they knew a victim.

I didn’t stay long – I couldn’t. It’s difficult in such a place to keep your emotions in check. The hardest stop for me was a room devoted to some of the victims and what they had with them that morning: their car keys, their wallets, their shoes.

I turned to the left at one point, and there in a glass case was a pink toddler’s shoe – the right shoe of one of the children in the day-care center. Her name was listed. The room spun a bit, and my eyes misted; the shoe was pure innocence colliding with the absolute evil of a twisted mind. “God!? …” I thought.

I remembered that Meghan wore such shoes; I wondered if I could even fathom sharing a shoe in such an exhibit.

As I left the museum, I walked by the fence where the public can still post memorials. Flags, personal messages, photos of victims adorn the chain link.

I then moved, again, past the site’s pool of water, looked again at the rows of chairs – the large ones and small. I thought of the pink shoe.

I wondered how many Americans have actually seen this site, have learned up close its painful lessons of intolerance and extremism. It’s distant Oklahoma, after all. Yet, in a sense this was our Sarajevo. It deserves attention. 

I climbed the long stairs to North Robinson Avenue, away from the memorial, and pulled myself back into the comforting isolation of the truck.

I took a deep breath … looked around the empty street.

And then, free now, I cried.

The break-in, Part 2

It seemed a useless expense, that door.  Not to mention an impediment to judicial efficiency.

I was sitting in the waiting room of the Johnson County District Attorney’s office in the Johnson County Courthouse, a blond-brick structure centered in Olathe.  I was summoned there by multiple subpoenas related to the break-in of my VW Beetle and other cars.

And every 15 to 20 seconds, the heavy metal door from the hallway into the waiting room would swing open, a cop or victim or office worker or vending-machine guy would pop through, and the door would SLAM! shut, rattling the walls.  SLAM!  SLAM!  SLAM!

And each time, we’d jump in our seats.

I would have killed for a doorstop.  Even in the D.A.’s office, I would have killed …

“We” were the small community of victims whose cars had been violated by an apparent small ring of car burglars. 

Their M.O. was always the same.  (If you know your cop shows, you know that M.O. stands for “method of operation.”)   The burglars would case a local gym – they seemed to prefer 24 Hour Fitness and Bally locations – spot a car that seemed promising, bust the windows, grab what they could inside, then split, all in a matter of seconds.

I counted five victims, plus myself, at this preliminary hearing.  We were there to testify, if necessary, that our car windows were smashed, personal goods taken, and hopefully project the anger to the judge that a crime victim typically feels.

We signed consent forms, then we marched as a group down to the courthouse a floor below.  It was kind of like old-home week, even though we didn’t know each other.  We shared a common experience, which made the conversations easier.

“Where’d your car get hit?”  “What’d they take?”  “What kind of car do you own?” “Do you have a car alarm?” “Did you turn it in to your insurance company?” “You prefer the elliptical or the treadmill?” “Does your gym smell as bad as ours?”

After we gabbed a bit in the hallway, an assistant D.A. handling the case emerged from the courtroom. She told us the odds were good the three perps would waive their rights to a preliminary hearing that day.

No, she didn’t use the word “perp.” I did. Interesting how an immersion into the criminal justice system makes you talk like you belong. Did you know cops call motorcycle officers “bucket heads?”  And a “homicide kit” is 12 donuts with an equal number of cups of coffee?  “Fat pills” also are donuts. A “Frankster” is a felony subject?  And a motorcyle is a “crotch-rocket.”

Imagine the conversations these officers have!  “Hey Bucket Head, me and my partner, we think that Frankster over there is the key perp in this case. Now hand me a fat pill from that homicide kit before I shoot the tires off your crotch-rocket.”

But I digress (a bad habit).  The A.D.A. then invited us into the courtroom, even though it was unlikely we’d have to testify.  She stressed that our trips to the courthouse weren’t  wasted – that the perps’ attorneys would see that the prosecutor had amassed a large group of willing-to-testify victims.  That, she explained, would convince the defense attorneys that it’d be smarter to seek a plea agreement rather than a trial.  More efficient for everyone.

We filed into the courtroom.  In the row ahead of us were eight different police officers from various jurisdictions, all sharing similar blue uniforms and crew cuts, also ready to testify.

And there, off to the right, stood the three perps.  Each handcuffed.  Each wearing prison garb featuring fat blue and white horizontal stripes. (Who designs prison garb? Are they Armani wannabes? How would they do on Project Runway?)

I won’t comment on the trio’s appearance, beyond a couple of points:  They were hardly intimidating … they seemed boyish, with quizzical smiles on their faces, amused by the proceedings. And they were small, as in short. Though I believe I already mentioned this was a small burglary ring.

Also, as I indicated in the first installment, if these were the guys who took my phone, they weren’t very bright, because they used it to place so many calls immediately after the theft.

In fact, we were told that they were arrested earlier on the car-burglary charges, then jailed, then were bonded out of jail, THEN immediately started knocking over cell-phone stores. 

What is it with these guys and cell phones?

Anyway, I’m trusting American justice to render a verdict and appropriate punishment.  It looks like us victims won’t be asked to testify.  The three indeed waived their rights to a preliminary hearing, which means they’re willing to admit to some fault in hopes of a lighter sentence.

All that said, one of the perps caught my attention.  He had bright red hair, seemed to be in his early 20s, and clearly had Eastern European roots.  His first name was Viktor.  He had a slight accent.

His face was cherubic, innocent. An immigrant gone bad?

Maybe. I’m guessing he was motivated by seeing so many cell-phone commercials on television … Sprint, Verizon, AT&T and more.  Then there are all of those iPhone ads pushing the latest apps.

It had to be phone envy.

We’ll know soon whether Viktor and his compatriots are locked up in a cell-phone-free cell for their alleged indiscretions. 

SLAM!

One part of me hopes so.  Another part looks at them and wishes they’d taken another path, especially in these tough times. 

It’s one thing to steal food to feed your family. It’s another, Viktor, to steal a phone to feed your street cred.

Oooh-ahhh!

I’ve been remiss about feeding this blog. Too busy of late, perhaps.  Ideas I have – plenty of them.  It’s the time that’s been scarce.

Not right now, though.  I’m back at the lake.  My sister, Linda, and I arrived on separate airplanes at O’Hare in Chicago, then we took a quick flight on a slender jet to arrive in Traverse City.

Mary Ann, sister No. 2, will arrive by car in an hour or so.

We’re here to close on the sale of the cottage.  That happens Monday, day after tomorrow. Today and Sunday, the cottage is still ours – still in the family.  Sure, we’ll be leasing it from the new owners – the National Park Service – for a year.  But that’ll be a twinge different. For the next 48 hours, it’s still truly ours.

It was striking flying in to Traverse City.  It had been years since I had done it, and then in the green sweep of summer.  Today, though, the trees were painted red, bright yellow, purple and ever-green - nature’s quilt, gathered and bunched against the deep blue of Traverse Bay.

We grabbed lunch, then drove the 23 miles northwest to the cottage, which sits on the south side of Glen Lake, just below Inspiration Point.

Typically by now, we’ve sealed the cottage for the winter. The power would be off, the dock pulled on shore, the windows locked tight. 

But this year is different.  We knew we’d be here to close the sale, yes.  But we’ve all thought of ways to extend our love of the place by planning off-season visits.  Personally, I’ll be back with Cindy, Meghan, Zach and the dogs over Thanksgiving.

It’s cold here now.  Not nasty cold … instead, a pleasant mid 30s.  But the cottage’s bones were stiff when we arrived.  We quickly started a fire and turned up the heat.  Our wood supply was low, so after Linda visited the grocery, I drove up by Empire Airport high atop the hills overlooking Lake Michigan.  I had remembered a roadside wood stand. 

“$4 a bundle,” said the metal sign.  You slide your bills into a rusty money box.  I bought four stacks.  It’s good wood … seasoned, slow-burning.

Though the sun shines and the lake remains its deep, crystal blue, just as in summer, the flecks of orange, red and yellow in the surrounding hills speak volumes of the season.  (That, and the giant inflated Halloween spider stuck on the side of Melba Ann’s Bakery at the Narrows.)

October at the cottage is so beautiful.  Sad to say we’ve rarely seen it, content instead to spend mainly summers here.  But October is the transition month on the aft side of the year – when summer yields to fall, yielding to winter.  Nature uses these splendid colors to celebrate that fact … quiet, slow-shooting fireworks extending from trunk to tree top, rippling in kaleidoscopic waves across the hills.

Next month, when we return, the trees will be muted, the temperatures frigid.  Perhaps there will be snow.  Animals will be fewer.

Then, we’ll rely more on the fire in the fireplace to brighten our souls. 

Today, though, we just need to look out the window and marvel at Nature’s pyrotechnics.

And say, “oooh … aaahh!”