Haunted Houses

I was reading the other day about a family who is convinced that their house is haunted. It seems their soap and candy bars keep disappearing, and they keep finding poker chips in the bathroom and gum on the dining room floor.

I know exactly how they feel because my house has been haunted that way for years. There isn’t a candy bar made that could last two minutes around here, and we never have any soap. Not that anybody washes with it—their dirty necks prove that. What they do is carve it up for the art teacher at school, leaving soap shavings all over my living room rug.

This is normal. Things like candy, soap, sweaters and gloves were made to disappear. (We once misplaced every hair brush in the house, but that’s championship stuff and doesn’t happen every day.)

What I can’t understand is how an otherwise perfectly normal little girl could lose her underpants on the way to the grocery store without once letting go of my hand, a fact which was pointed out to me by several perfect strangers we met along the way. Actually, they weren’t exactly perfect, but then, so few of us are.

Naturally, not everything in my house disappears. Some things show up with a disconcerting disregard for logic, like ice cream bars in my underwear drawer and bedroom slippers in the freezer.

What drives me absolutely wild is never being able to find anything to write with. Now I buy pencils the way Howard Hughes buys hotels—without thought of expense or upkeep. Then I hide them from my children, who eat them for breakfast. (They must, because there’s never anything to write with, and there's all that toast and piles of Cheerios on the breakfast table every morning.)

Nevertheless, my pencils always disappear, only to turn up weeks later in the laundry hamper, the piano or the trunk of my car.

That’s why I can’t understand how anyone could be surprised to find poker chips in the bathroom and gum on the dining room floor.

I don’t know much about poker, but my experience with gum is legion, covering a span of fifteen years, three houses, four children and one nervous breakdown. I’ve cut gum out of hair, clothing and curtains; I’ve scraped it off windows, walls and floors; I’ve peeled it off plates and pillows; I’ve dug it out of ears and noses.

Gum stuck to the dining room floor? I should be so lucky!