Godda love facebook. 

I thought I had heard from just about everybody from my checkered past I was bound to when I got a friend request from Jody-Lynn Rader, whose mother asked me if I was a fag ("what are you, a fag?") because I wouldn't date her daughter, who looked like a UFC wrestler (but not, alas, a hot one).  Jody-Lynn and I were all of thirteen and on our way to a birthday party for one of our Sunday School chums.

Good times.

I, um, declined that friend request.

But the other night I got one from a guy I went to grade school with named Bobby Ingals.  Bobby was the quiet kid, so it didn't surprise me to find that he was in a metal band now.  What did surprise me was the fact that he now lives in my childhood home with his wife and two kids. 

And that, apparently, the house is haunted.

"Ever see any ghosts here when you were around?" he asked.

I had another look at his profile, where I found a photo of an electric guitar made of a human fibula he said he was having trouble pawning. 

"Tell me more," I replied.

"We have had physical encounters," he wrote back. "Such as someone pushing my wife's hair aside from her face as she laid in bed.  Also, someone sitting on the foot of the bed as she rested. She said it felt 'Motherly', comforting I guess. Also many sightings of a figure going into the master bedroom from the bedroom across the hall."

That would have been my bedroom across the hall, by the way.  Maybe it was the ghost of my innocence. 

Sadly, I didn't have any ghost stories for Bobby, but I figured I'd ask my mom if she did, although if she did she'd never shared them with me. 

"Oh yeah," she told me off-handedly when I asked her this afternoon, without my giving her any of the details of Bobby's wife's encounters, or where in the house they had seen the apparition.  "I remember seeing something floating across the room in my bedroom."

I was like: "Whoa.  That sounds spooky."

She said it wasn't scary at all, if that's what I meant.  She had heard from our meddling next door neighbor that an "elderly person" had died in the master bedroom long before we'd moved in.  She imagined that's who it was.

She was very matter-of-fact about it.

"You know," she added.  "Your father died in the very room I'm sitting in right now.  But he didn't stick around.  He's moved on."

I know.  I saw him in his little boat drifting across the River Lethe, disappearing in the fog.

She said she was moving on, too.  She had just joined a new gym where some of her pals from Sunday School were members.  She hoped to expand her circle of friends there.

I told her if she sees Jody-Lynn Rader's mom, just tell her, um, yeah, as a matter of fact I am.