At Least They're Committed

I was nearly 10 in 1971 when we packed up the 1969 Dodge Polara with summer clothes and a gerbil whose name I don’t recall as the Gray Family of Five set out from Ann Arbor, Michigan, to Grand Junction, Colorado. I remember singing Donny Osmond songs until my mom and dad had finally had enough — I think it was near the top of Loveland Pass. God bless them.

Maybe it was all those Donny Osmond songs or the 110th gerbil bite or maybe it was moving to the other side of the Continental Divide, but my “overactive imagination” was gone by the time we reached 544 North 18th. I still had nightmares, of course. I just didn’t wake up to find decayed corpses or monstrous shadows climbing the ceilings or crawling to get me.

Thus this particular blog is a CliffsNotes of the decade after; 10 years in which I almost felt like a normal human except for:

• When, at 134 Vista Grande where my sister and I at-first shared a bedroom, Dad found me standing like a statue by her bed, a baseball bat raised high in the air aimed at her head.
• That time I woke up and the 5-foot-tall spiked agave houseplant in my bedroom was buzzing and slightly glowing. Spent the rest of the night on the couch.
• How I woke up because a plane was flying overhead and thought, “The devil is here!” and, knowing there were flames at my back and no way out, stood in my bedroom window frame and prepared to jump to my death, the wind whipping my hair as I looked down at the concrete street dozens of floors below. Kind of like a precursor to 9/11, maybe. Fortunately, my sister was still up talking to her friends and found me before I leaped to certain death . . . out of the first floor window and into the juniper bushes. (Well, I could have gotten some nasty scratches, right?)
• When in college at my apartment I’d awaken to see the shadow of a demon moving against the wall. I’d close my eyes tight, say the Lord’s Prayer and make it go away.
• The time on Kayenta Drive in Farmington, N.M., when a face and hands pressed out of the wall toward me, features undeterminable as they didn’t break through the adobe-colored paint, but with enough detail that I could see it was a 1960’s era young woman with a wide hairband.

For the record, yes, I did investigate each of these oddities for not-so-weird sources and was fully awake.

So there ya go. Next will discuss E. 10^th Avenue in Broomfield and the playful and perilous Paw-Paw.