Ghost Story

The curtain parts. On the center of the piano bench puppet stage,  sits a haunted house made of honeycomb cardboard from the Ikea bed we assembled last week. It makes a swell haunted house. Next to it lurks a Tyrannosaurus Rex. There are two ghosts flying over the whole set. 

Miss D, the five-year-old script-writer, director, and composer is playing spooky low notes on the electronic keyboard, and giving us, her grandparents, directions like, “Just act.... and make lots of scary noises.”

I hit the floor with my fists, like claps of thunder. This activates the sound-sensor in the big stuffed tiger a foot away, and starts him to G-R-O-W-W-W-L-I-N-G. Gran’Pun swoops his ghost low enough that part of the haunted house is knocked off. Our two ghosts get into out-boooooing each other.

Before her Dad, audience of one, gets here, D asks, “Which way shall I run with the signs?” She has painstakingly written “Boooooo” and “Aaaahhhh” and drawn ghosts and a witch on old cue cards. (It pays to save things after all!) She deliberates running right to left and decides upon left to right, because that’s the way people read, and she doesn’t want to have her sign misread as “OooooooB!” and “HhhhhaaaaaA!” The logic is irrefutable. Stifling laughter sometimes hurts, like stifling a sneeze when it just wants to rrrripppp.

To his credit, Dad is an appreciative audience, and laughs in all the right places - particularly when his daughter says, “It’s not over yet!” 

Gran’Pun and I are getting cramps - as much from sitting cross-legged on the wood floor as from the laughter.

She’s a hoooot, this grandie! This is where we’re supposed to be. It’s worth the upheaval, the shifts of tectonic magnitude, the missing of Southern California, and the temporary inconvenience of extra caution due to thuggery that’s moving from San Francisco to East Bay. 

Sunday night, at our third community meeting in less than ten days, we signed on as supporters of Bay Alarm patrolling the neighborhood. They need thirty families. Looks as if the meeting gave them that.

We look forward to many more puppet shows, walks in the park, play-dates with the seven-year-old-young man across the street, and hours of music, magic, reading, and dancing.

Notice the Bats in the "B"

D's re-write changed "I am…" to 

"We are the scariest ghosts."

Her spelling skills astonish us!