I could hear the twisting of the door knob by a small hand opening up the bedroom door. Then the sound of small feet walking down the hall toward me caused me to look up just in time to see a small shirtless little boy rubbing his eyes.
“It’s way too early for you to be up buddy” I will quietly tell him as he crawls into my lap.
“I was scared”, he will mumble, “I had a bad dream about ghosts”.
The rubbing of the eyes stop and the hands will move from his eye to around my neck as he makes his way from the doorway to my lap.
“What are you doing?” His tiny voice finally finding the morning will ask.
“I’m just writing stories…do you want to write one about ghosts?”
“Can we?” Him perky up just a little, as I adjust him better on my lap so that he can see the computer screen.
“Sure, let’s write a story about ghosts.” I say
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Ghosts are silly, or dumb, or silly-dumb, if that is even a word. I mean, ghosts don’t even have a body to live in, they just stand there, or hover, or float, or whatever it is they do.
They are like clouds in the form of people, and well, that is pretty silly-dumb if you ask me.
At least the clouds in the sky can choose to be cool things like elephants, or horses, and yes, even fire breathing dragons.
So why in the world would a cloud want to live on Earth and look like a human?
Silly-dumb ghosts, they should know better, it is way more fun to live up in the sky like the rest of the fun clouds.
If I were a ghost, that’s exactly what I would do, I would choose to live in the sky and look like a monkey that swings from cloud to cloud.
Or maybe I would choose to look like a jet plane and see how fast I can fly across the sky and maybe even race other clouds that chose to be jets too!
Oh the poor ghosts that live on the Earth, I bet they don’t even know that they can do all the fun things the other cloud ghosts can do.
So next time I see a ghost, that is exactly what I will do. I will just look at their silly-dumb face and tell them that they would have more fun in the sky with the other clouds, and they will be so happy to hear that, and they will say something like..
Thank you Jack, thank you for setting us free and letting us play in the sky, and be whatever we can be.
And that silly-dumb ghost will just fly up in the sky and leave me alone.
The End.
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He climbed down off my lap and soon found his way to the couch. The scared little boy was now feeling like a hero. I was feeling a bit more inspired.
He had his ghosts and I have mine. His are made of clouds and mine are made of memories.
His will come from time to time in the form a bad dream, mine will come in the form of a picture that pops up in my memories, or a song that played on the radio, or even a smell as I walk down an aisle at the store.
Funny how ghosts just show up out of now where.
His ghosts may scare him. Mine just make me smile, at least most of the time.
Little kids don’t have the pleasure of a long life yet, most everything they see and do is new and fresh. We adults have the pleasure of time to let us know about things. The problem with time is that we also build up memories, the ghosts that come back and say hello every so often, at their timing, not necessarily ours.
The thing about little kids and ghosts, we can teach them how to defeat them, how to make them go away.
Sometimes we adults like to talk to our ghosts, invite them in, hope they stay awhile.
The thing about our ghosts that make them sad, isn’t the memories of the past that they bring us, it’s the fact that we don’t always have a chance to make new memories in the future with them.
That is what makes us sad. That is what makes us stare at the picture a little longer, listen to the song one more time. Take big long breaths.
I’m sure this will not be the last time a little boy crawls into my lap and wants to talk about ghosts. I look forward to those moments, for the chance to create a new narrative about the thing that scares him and make it feel safe.
I also look forward to the next time I hear a song, see a picture, even simply have a thought. My ghosts will come to me and I will welcome them. I will have my moment and then I will tell them to go to the sky and play with the other ghosts.
And then I will wait, until the next time, when I can sit and talk to a ghost and smile.
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