Before I begin this very confusing and confusticating tale, I need to start by stating clearly that I do not believe in ghosts. I am firmly convinced that there is a rational scientific explanation for everything, and those things we may be tempted to see as a spirit living on after death of the body are really only misperceptions of other things… and wishful thinking.
In spite of all that, we have a ghost dog living in our house.
I know that contradicts everything I just said, but human beings are like that. Practically everything about this life is shot full of contradictions and impossibilities. So, let me lay out those contradictions as I encountered them.
This house we live in now was built in the 1970’s. It was lived in by a middle-class white family. A woman showed up here ten years ago wanting to look at the house because she grew up in it, and it had been sold when her parents died. So this house is not young enough to be free of potential spirits of those who lived before. But no tragic deaths, the kind that the lore says cause ghosts to walk, happened in this house. Except for the possibility of a family pet hit by a car in this neighborhood.
The first time I saw it was when I got out of the bathtub one evening in early January. As I opened the door to the bathroom, still not having my glasses on, I saw a dog sitting in the upstairs hallway, panting with its tongue hanging out. Now, we do have a dog, but our dog, Jade, is a small yellow-and-white dog. The dog I glimpsed out of the corner of my near-sighted, astigmatic eye with no corrective lens in front of it was a rather large chocolate brown dog. I jumped a bit and looked directly at it. It was no longer there with a speed that gave the lie to the notion that it was a real dog. It had to be a trick of the eye and the goofy old brain. Our mind is wired in a way that makes sense out of every visual stimulus-blob in the best way that it can. I must have misinterpreted some shadow or blob of color in a way that my brain instantly converted into a chocolate-brown Labrador-retriever sort of dog… with a goofy, open-mouthed dog-smile.
So, I didn’t really think anything more about it. I investigate ghost stories and conspiracy theories all the time as a part of the kind of surrealist writing I like to do. I always find those wedges of doubt that smugly allow me to dismiss the Don Knotts’ Mr. Chicken response.
Then, I saw it again. I have to get up in the night to go to the bathroom at least three times every night. About a week ago, I was making one of these necessary nocturnal treks when I happened to look down the staircase in passing. I saw the tail end of a big chocolate-colored dog trotting past on the way towards the garage. My heart leaped. And then I reminded myself we have a dog and she lives on a very different schedule than we do. I went to the bathroom, and then went down the stairs to investigate. The family room door was shut and blocked with a clothes-hamper. We have been trying to keep the dog out of the family room because she has a bad habit of trying to pee on the family room carpet in the middle of the night to mark her territory. There are certain discolored spots on the rug that we have worked very hard to keep dry. And I found our dog asleep on the foot of my son’s bed where she always sleeps. Whatever I saw wasn’t her. But again, I didn’t have my glasses on. I began mulling over the possibility of this post at that point.
Last night made this post a necessity. While returning from my nocturnal pee-break after midnight, I distinctly heard a dog whimpering, coming from the landing of the stairs. I stepped into the landing, and I still heard it. If it was not a dream sound or a misinterpretation of my own stomach growling, then I was hearing an invisible dog whimpering. It didn’t last for more than a minute. Again, the dog herself was nowhere near the place.
Should I be scared? Of course not. Ghosts don’t exist, do they? And even if this one does exist somehow, it was a beloved family pet, more likely to protect us than hurt us. So I was able to get back to sleep easily. But this post became absolutely necessary. If you read in the newspapers that a family in Carrollton, Texas was eaten by wolves in the middle of the night some night… tell somebody about my unfounded suspicions.
Catch a Falling Star 
Consolation Hockey Night
Sunday was a bad, bad day for me. My football team, the Arizona Cardinals, were in the National Football Conference championship. One game away from their second trip to a Superbowl. But they not only lost, they were crushed 49 to 15. Not one morsel of goodness was left to a poor humiliated die-hard fan who has been waiting for the team to succeed his entire life. So, how do you recover from that? My wife decided to take me to a hockey game. Surely that would make me feel better. Of course, I was dying at the time of virus-related lung-mangling coughing fits and total lack of will to live. My novel that I have worked so hard on and was so proud of is in jeopardy of never being published. My sky no longer has sunshine. It is only natural that the Dallas Stars hockey team would help. Hockey is my real favorite sport, and I have loved the Stars as my second-favorite team since the 1960’s when they were the Minnesota North Stars.
It should be explained at this point that I love hockey in the same way that I love Mark Twain and the basic concepts of comedy and humor. It all stems from the same basic seed… ridiculous behavior lampooned by its own awareness of itself. Look at how it all started. The hockey gods, Dave and Rick, sat down together beside a frozen lake in Saskatchewan some time in the cold winter in the late 1800’s and decided to invent a national sport for Canada.
“Canada deserves a pretty cool national sport, eh,” said Dave.
“We gotta frozen lake right here, hoser,” answered Rick. “We can take some other sport and do it on ice, eh?”
“You got it, hoser,” said Dave. “What could be cooler than that lacrosse game the Iroquois and the Hurons play? With the whacking sticks and junk! Wouldn’t that look cool on ice, hoser?”
“They’ll never get a good hit in on anybody else’s head if they are slip sliding all around the ice… Let’s put ’em on skates. And we gotta make sure the game ball ain’t too big so they can whip it around with the sticks really, really fast.”
“Yeah, let’s increase the difficulty by taking the net-thingies off the sticks, and let’s make the ball into a little hard rubber disc. We’ll call it a puck. And people will die all the time in this high-speed multiple-projectile game with lots of whacking sticks!”
“Truly excellent idea, hoser. You are one really great hockey god!”
“You too, hoser… you too.”
So you can see by this carefully researched and verified origin story that hockey is not a sport to be taken lightly. Grown men with skates and sticks going around in circles really, really fast, trying to whip a puck past the goaltender into a net and at the same time trying to avoid all manner of collisions… though not trying very hard.
So my wife drags me to the American Airlines Center, the arena the Stars share with the NBA Dallas Mavericks. We get in easy enough, and then march all the way up to the three hundreds’ sections where all the cheap seats are. To get there, you must go up and up and up on multiple escalators, get to the arena roof, and take the stairs up higher still. This we do with Filipino friends in tow… who know absolutely nothing about this whacky sport, but they like big spectacles and the arena food. And I have the added benefit that they will believe absolutely anything I tell them about the game. Oh, it turns out it could be really fun after all! And I wouldn’t even have to lie to make their eyes pop out of their heads.
Of course, from the rafters with the bats, the game looks like a bunch of colorful ants scrabbling all over a big white postage stamp, but the new highlights screen makes it kinda like watching TV at home, except with lots of expensive snacks that you have to go mountain-climbing for and drunk guys that have had too much of the beer that vendors actually carry up into the stands. (One fight actually almost broke out in the crowd near us, three rows down, but the young guy got scared of the really loud and old fat guy who was yelling obscenities at him and scurried away faster than a drunk fat guy can follow.)
Of course, my wife never lets me bring binoculars to these things because I might lose them… and also because the Ice Girls who scrape the ice during time-outs wear skates and very little else. I have to look at the big hanging TV very closely during those times. Especially when those times occur while wifey is down the mountainside searching for affordable snacks.
And, of course, it is always a very welcome thing when the Stars win. As you have probably guessed, I don’t get to see my favorite teams win in front of me very often, and we have to savor those things when they occur.
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Tagged as consolation for losing, Dallas Stars, enjoying hockey, goofiness, hockey, hockey fights, hosers, humor