The longer I live, the harder it becomes to ignore the dozens of times over they years when the thought of a friend or family member pesters me until I call them. When they answer the phone, I sometimes  just say, “You were on my mind, and I thought I’d better find out what’s going on.” I can think of very few times when my “something is going on” feeling was wrong. I suspect some will dismiss this as coincidence, but I’ve come to believe in ESP…or at least in something like ESP.

When I was in High School, our American Problems teacher Mister Chamberlain brought up the subject of ESP. I don’t know why he did that. But the class jumped in with all sorts of opinions from ESP being nonsense to it is the work of the devil. Just for fun, I wrote the names of five of my classmates on a scrap of paper with a list of times I would “mentally” wake them up during the coming night. Then I handed the list to Mister Chamberlain.

“Okay,” I said, “I’ll wake up five of you sometime tonight. I’ll ‘think’ you awake. Your job is to write the time down. Then we’ll see if it matches what I’ve given Mister Chamberlain.” (In truth I wasn’t very serious about the “experiment.” I was just having some fun with the notion of ESP.)

I might have been cheating some because I knew the bedrooms of the classmates I had chosen so I could visualize where they were sleeping.  (And, no, none of them were girls. We weren’t allowed in a girl’s room in those days.) Anyway, I woke at 1:00 a.m. and visualized Bob’s bedroom and told him to wake up. I concentrated until I figured I had about used up my ESP power for a while. And I repeated the exercise for the remaining four people at different times during the night.

The next day, four of the five classmates turned in their “woke up” times to Mister Chamberlain. The fifth didn’t wake up during the night. But I nailed the times almost exactly as reported by the four who did wake up. And I think I scared all of us into moving on to other more comfortable topics. We did not repeat the experiment.

Do I believe in ghosts? I’ll give that a strong maybe, although I’ve never seen a ghost, but I have “felt” the presence of people I was close to after they had died. Other family members have seen ghosts…or at least they tell me they have.

Do I believe in Angels? Absolutely. Once I had this conversation…well, it was more like a butt chewing than a conversation…with an Angel. I highly recommend you not try to bargain with God.

Do I believe there is magic in this old world? Absolutely. It’s all around us. How else can you explain thousands of varieties of flowers, the pattern of butterfly wings, life in a dry seed?

Do I believe in ESP? Yep, but do I think I can control it? Not really, but I almost always follow up on my “something is going on” feelings.

I wonder how many other people have had the same experience? More than those who admit it, I’m willing to bet.

Rod

p.s. I don’t know if this counts as seeing a ghost, but it just occurred to me it might. I was in the little waiting area next to the birthing unit at Salem Memorial Hospital waiting for the birth of my first child. I was alone until the elevator door opened and a man who looked just like my dead grandfather Truman Collins got off.

He came in, sat one chair over from me, unfolded a newspaper and read while never saying a word. When the doctor came out to tell me I was the proud father of a healthy baby girl, the silver haired old man folded his newspaper, walked to the elevator button, got on the elevator when the door opened and left. I was so dumbfounded by his appearance…and his disappearance…to mention the event for about ten years. Spooked me, it did. But was it a ghost? I’ll never know for certain.

In my late-thirties, I paused long enough to remember the people who had helped me on my journey, and then I sat down and wrote each of them a heartfelt thank you. Unfortunately, I waited too long to express my thanks to Agnes Brown, my teacher during four of my eight years at Shady Cove Grade School. By the time I realized how much Agnes had influenced and helped me, she had died. To my regret, I will never be sure she knew how much I admired and loved her.

Agnes was my protector, disciplinarian, and inspiration all rolled into one. All of five feet tall, Agnes was a stern task master. Once when I had gotten the top score on a test, Agnes gave me a grade of 2. When I asked her why a 2 when my score was the highest, she told me I wasn’t working up to my potential and until I did I wouldn’t be getting any 1’s. I understood from that point on I wasn’t in competition with my classmates as much as I was in competition with myself.

I’m not sure why she fell in love with our class, although I’m sure we were lovable rascals. But I’m sure she did fall in love with us. She maneuvered her way enough to be our teacher in the second, fourth, sixth, and eighth grades. But she wasn’t easy on us. Once in the second grade, she paddled my butt when I walked in a mud puddle in my new shoes. I can still hear her saying, “Your parents worked hard for those shoes. You make them last.” (We were still living in a one-room shack next to the school yard while Mom and Dad worked their way out of the monster recession which followed the end of World War II.)

Once, in the eighth grade, I must have misbehaved because she told me to hold our my hand and then she swatted it with a rule…aka, a “ruler.” (She was very precise in her use of language, and always called that twelve inch stick a “rule.”) I turned my back to the class and worked hard to keep from laughing. She just wasn’t big enough to hurt her big eighth grade boys any more.

The last time I saw Agnes was at Benny Nork’s funeral. Our class members had just reached the prime age of 37 when Benny was killed in a logging accident. I made sure I was late for the funeral so I could sit in back. (I don’t do well at funerals. I cry and I’m not much good at helping the walking wounded. I am the walking wounded. I can hold the tears as long as the other people don’t cry. If I see a tear, mine start to flow.) But Benny’s wife held up the service until I got there, so I had to be strong.

And there was Agnes to say goodbye to one of “her boys.” I got a hug, but Agnes didn’t say a word, and I’m glad. I can do the hard things, but sympathy does me in.

I didn’t get word of her passing in time to make it to her funeral, but I was truly sad when she died. And I’ve always regretted my failure to write and tell her how much she had helped me…and how much she meant.

Some wise man…maybe Mark Twain…wrote it isn’t what we have done that brings regret. It’s what we didn’t do.

So, belatedly, “Thank you, Agnes Brown.”

Rod

All of my aging friends talk now and again about slippery memories, and how they forget things they could once bring to the forefront of their minds…and their conversations…without effort. I, too, have experienced moments when I fish hard for a specific word, but after nearly eighty years I reckon my data banks are pretty crowded, so I don’t let it bother me too much. Besides, it isn’t a failure on my part. It’s all because of the Voodoo Lady. You see, she’s trying to put a hex on my life.

If you ever watched the old voodoo movies, you know how it works. The Voodoo Lady steals personal items to decorate a doll that looks…sort of…like the person she is hexing…and then sticks pins in the doll. This causes pain for the hexed. (I know darned good and well that explains the sudden onset of pain in my various extremities from time to time.)

That also explains why I search the house and the garage for items I know I put on the workbench or the island counter top. They simply disappear. It took me quite a while to finally figure it out: the Voodoo Lady has been stealing personal items to use in hexing me. Sometimes she returns the items and I find them in out-of-the-way places like in a dresser drawer or hiding behind the salt shaker in the kitchen.

The Voodoo Lady serves a purpose from time to time. When I can’t find an item, I can just blame it on her and not on my shaky memory.

However, I do wish she hadn’t taken my polarized sunglasses.

Rod

Once in a while a memory slips through the cracks of time and startles me with the realization I missed something on my way to becoming an adult. (Let’s not have any wisecracks about “if” I reached adulthood.)

Along about my fifth year, we lived in an old farmhouse about five miles west of Shady Cove. One warm summer day, a rattlesnake slithered from the front porch into our living room. I heard the rasping sound from my pallet in a corner of the living room…where I was supposed to be taking a nap. The snake headed across the bare boards of the floor right at me.

I jumped up and hollered, “Snake, Mama. Snake.” Mom came rushing out of the bedroom in time to scare the snake back into the far corner of the living room. I can still hear the snake rattling away, all coiled up, ready to strike.

Mom put me up on the bed in the bedroom,  grabbed her .22 pistol, and then shot the hell out of the snake’s corner of the living room. (I think she even hit the snake once, not that it stopped rattling. She shot six times, reloaded and put six more holes in the floor.) She told me to stay up on the bed, and then closed the door. I looked at the two inch gap under the door and stood up on the bed with a pillow, ready to “pillow” the snake. I heard a long continuous thumping that lasted several minutes, and then Mom opened the door and said it was all right. The snake was dead. She had taken a long pole and chased the snake into the other bedroom on the opposite side of the living room where she proceeded to pound the front half of the snake into a paper thin layer of snake skin.

I was scared of snakes after that and stayed scared for years. Finally, along about the 6th grade, I decided to learn everything I could about rattlesnakes. Know your enemy. I read up on “crotalus” and learned their habits, and while I never quite got over being wary in snake country, at least I wasn’t paralyzed by fear. And I learned first aid if you did get bit. When I was up in the hills, I carried a little metal box with a razor blade, a tourniquet, and a suction cup…to suck the poison out. That took care of one of my childhood bugaboos.

Another was ingrained through drills at school where we practiced hiding under our desk in case the Russians dropped the A-bomb on our heads. We had all seen pictures of Hiroshima by then, and even as children, we knew we would be incinerated anyway so the drill was just a waste of time.  (And my wife tells a similar story from her grade school years, only she kept looking at the big windows and knew the glass would blow out and cut them all to pieces.)

Along about age thirteen, I started writing a novel about a Russian invasion and about me and my friends taking to the hills and fighting a guerilla war. I can still show you real places where “we” ambushed a Russian supply column. (You gotta smile at that.)  It was a lot like Red Dawn and a heck of a lot earlier. Hmm. If only…

The A-Bomb fear lasted up to my college years. One roommate was a survivalist, so he kept a pack with survival gear ready at all times. If the Russians attacked, our plan was to run to southeast Oregon and live in a big cave I had heard about. It sounds silly now, but the threat felt real, and when the Oregonian put a map of “Ground Zero” with the center circle right on the west end of the Burnside Bridge in downtown Portland, we knew our fear had some basis in fact.

Polio was a constant threat as I was growing up, my fear driven by pictures of kids in iron lungs. We were told to wash our hands…and we did. When finally the polio vaccine was found (invented? discovered?) the fear washed out.

So what’s the point? Well, in a sense, I took charge of my life when I read up on rattlesnakes. And I think I must have been looking for a way to “do something” about the threat of Russian invasion and A-bombs when I started my war novel. The title was “Ambuscade.” My friends and I were really rough on the Russians.

And one night, I got tired of worrying about Russians and A-bombs. I unpacked my survival gear and decided if the Russians did nuke us, I’d just go down to the Canteen and drink beer and wait to see what happened. It was time to get on with life.

Now we have covid to worry about, but after reading articles about it, compared to earlier fears of slithering snakes, polio and A-bombs, I’m not too impressed by that threat.

Do you want see my really neat mask?

Rod

When we moved into the Yew Avenue house a couple years back, son-in-law Brad helped me “deconstruct” a nice hen house tacked to the metal storage shed in the back yard. (I like hen’s eggs, but I don’t much care for live chickens, so I was happy to be rid of the hen house.) Anyway, I stacked the lumber we salvaged between the cedar fence and the back of the shed…and promptly forgot about it in deference to the more pressing projects that came with the purchase of the house. “Out of sight, out of mind,” fit the situation nicely.

This spring I finally got around to cleaning up the detritus gathered in and around the storage shed, including the lumber salvaged from the hen house. The two-by-fours still had the nails sticking out, ready to stab, cut, and tear the flesh of the unwary. (Or puncture a shoe sole, something I haven’t experienced since I was a kid. Tetanus shots anyone?)

My first impulse was to take my skill saw and just cut the ends of the two-by-fours and toss the end pieces and the nails in the trash. But a wash of memories from a childhood building project nagged me into pulling all the rusty nails and putting them in a coffee can…saved for one of those just-in-case times..in memory of one fine summer on the Rogue River in Shady Cove, Oregon.

In those days it seemed like every small town had its own sawmill. I know Shady Cove did, and there was a one-horse mill in Eagle Point. That mill was my favorite because during the process of turning round logs into square lumber a lot of odd sized boards were cut and then tossed on the scrap pile. And a pickup load was simply free for the trouble of loading the lumber.

During my eighth year of life, my cousin Terry spent the summer with us. We whiled the summer away swimming in the big hole above the old bridge, catching fish, fighting wars with our rubber-band guns, and building our very own “fort” from lumber Grandpa Troop hauled in from the Eagle point mill.

We had us a handsaw for cutting boards, a slow job since the saw was pretty well used up, a battered wood-handled hammer, and a bucket of rusty nails. We scouted up big flat rocks for a foundation, framed our fort into a lean-to shed, and nailed it together with crooked nails from the bucket. (We got pretty good at the business of straightening nails.)

When we finished, we had a floor, four walls, and a shed roof. I can’t say the roof would keep the rain out, but I don’t remember a single rain storm testing our handy work that summer so it didn’t matter much.

Mother gave us an old mattress we dragged to the fort and squeezed through the door. Memory says we never quite got around to building a real door, so we just lived with the opening. And then we moved in and slept most nights that summer in our very own fort. A broken double-barrel shotgun hung from two big nails over the door. We were happy campers.

But it is the nature of things, or so it seems to me, to change. Summer faded, Terry left for home, school started again. The nights turned cooler, and I moved from the fort to an upstairs room in the big summer house we rented that year.

And then one Fall afternoon I walked home from school, crossed the bridge to the south side of the river, walked a short piece of the road leading to the Cove, and up our gravel driveway. As I walked to the back door, I noticed my fort had been moved, and a stack of new lumber sat where the fort belonged. The process of moving it had wracked the little building to the point of near collapse.

I was furious, and I was crying when I took a hammer and knocked all the boards apart and tore the fort down. (I won’t share the name of the man who ruined my fort, but I still remember him some 71 years later. He’s long dead, but I still think he was a worthless, unfeeling s.o.b.)

But, to put a period on this tale of years gone by, after I finished the destruction of our summer fort, I pulled every crooked, rusty nail and put each back in the nail bucket. That may be why it is still hard for me to throw away any rusty nails.

Rod

A friend recently jogged my memory by stating he had nineteen years of fun while living in Valsetz, Oregon, a once upon a time mill town set high in the Coast Range. His enthusiasm urged me to think back and remember jobs I really found to be just plain fun.

Surveying: I only worked two weeks “pulling chain” for a surveyor, and “pounding hubs,” and clearing sight lanes with a power saw and an axe, but I loved every minute of it, and I was sorry when the project ended. Thought briefly about becoming a surveyor.

Setting Section Markers: My job…for six weeks…was to take a map of the North Warner mountains and find Brass Cap survey markers, some as recent as 1880 or so…at least that’s what I remember engraved on the caps. (I might have to research the timing of the first surveys in deep SE Oregon just to be accurate.). I walked wild forests where I felt like the first man to ever see it, only to find an old bearing tree and scout up the brass cap to prove I was definitely not the first of European decent to tread that ground.

I’d take a compass bearing from the brass cap and walk as straight as I could through the timber to the closest road and put up a silver section marker. (This was all before GPS.) I think I got pretty good at it.  (And as a side benefit, I found a beaver pond brimming with nice brook trout. I’m certain no one had fished the pond in decades.) Anyway, that was one of the best jobs I ever had.

Soda Jerk: I loved being a soda jerk. One spring college quarter, when my money was about gone, I worked for almost three months at Pat and Jerry’s Dairy Queen in Independence, Oregon. I was paid a dollar an hour, supper, and time to study when business was slow. (I won’t mention a free pack of cigarettes thrown in for good measure.)

I learned to make malts so thick you had to use a spoon. We made root beer malts, purple cow milk shakes, whipped up big banana splits and fudge sundaes, and filled cones with ice cream I personally made in the machines. We also served a type of hamburger called a Sloppy Joe. The customers were always friendly and I could always get a laugh or two. Mostly they came back time and again. It was a job I looked forward to.

Backhoe Operator: I liked digging holes so much I nearly quit college to work construction. (Good thing I didn’t drop out of school, because the company I worked for went broke soon after I left.) But, I felt a kinship with “my” machine, and I think I became a pretty good operator.

There were some other good jobs along the way, but these were the first to jump out of my memory.

So what’s the point? I’m not sure. Maybe to just jog your memory and remind you of some fun times from way back when.

Rod

p.s. I just remembered working as a “Barker” for the High School Carnival. “Step right up, ladies and gentlemen and give Lady Luck a chance to make your evening.” I had a top hat and a cane. Good fun.