It's no secret among fiction writers that the purely fictional story is pretty rare. The way Bob wears a hat canted over to the left, or slouches as he enters the diner, or glances both ways before he shoots through a red light: those aren't inventions, but observations, taken from real life.

Non-fiction writers are less honest, but in fact they can only present part of one person's perspective of an event. They don't know that the third cop in was distracted for a fraction of a second by the little girl on a scooter a block away. They pretend they present all the facts, when in fact, no newspaper could possibly describe all the facts relevent to a given event.

And with fiction masquerading, with the best of intentions, as non-fiction and with non-fiction masquerading, with the best of intentions, as fiction, the line between the two gets more than a little blurry. We all live lives that are made up of sequences of short stories. Short stories and balderdash, as the late Harry Chapin put it. And yet sometimes some of the fiction we read contains more truth than the non-fiction we believe that we've experienced.

Growing Up In A Haunted House

People don't believe me when I tell them I grew up in a haunted house. Accordingly, I don't tell them that very often, but that doesn't mean it didn't happen. It was on a hot summer afternoon like today that I was lying in bed upstairs reading one of the Wizard of Oz books. Oh, you thought there was just one book? You poor deprived child! There were dozens of stories sold, and the county library had most of them, most of them showing signs of being much wear.

The windows were open on all four corners of the house, and with trees on all sides, a temperature in the 80s was tolerable if not enjoyable. The was a light film of perspiration on my arms, and the upper forearms came in contact with the rough texture of the paper, adhering slightly, and it was hard to tell if the book was getting dirtier from my sweat, or if my sweat was wearing the dirt off the pages onto my arms. Glenda and Ozma were telling their stories, and that was occupying most of my attention, but downstairs, there were piano and organ lessons going on.

For some reason, the early lessons on Saturday were piano lessons, and as it approached late morning, they switched over to organ lessons. About 1 or 2, the lessons would end, and Mamma would start playing for her own pleasure, or she would practice the music she'd play in church the next day. Some weeks, Mamma would play at the Methodist church, other weeks at the Presbyterian, and still others, at the United Church of Christ, and on certain weeks, she'd play at two, or even all three churches.

To Sing Once Is To Pray Twice

"To sing once," Charles Wesley wrote, "is to pray twice," which was admittedly self-serving, Charles Wesley being a prolific hymn-writer, but also something that Mamma believed. The parsons at each of the churches recognized that good music built attendance, and filled the collection plates, and each would have loved to have Mamma play every Sunday, but she gave first priority to the Methodist church, her own, when someone else wasn't fighting for the honor of playing there, and the other churches tried to develop their own talent. It wasn't easy. Mamma was exceptionally good, and musicians are a carefree lot, not wanting to be tied down to a rigid schedule of Sunday morning performance, and practices with the junior and senior choir for what amounted to subminimum wages.

Still, when God calls, one answers. It wasn't all that infrequent that the UCC held their service an hour early and the Presbyterians held theirs an hour late so as to allow Mamma to commute between churches on three corners of the same block. We couldn't complain, we supposed. Our junior choir was led by a catholic whose father was a good methodist and whose grandfather had been a Quaker parson.

With piano and organ lessons being given six days a week, my exposure to music was fairly broad. Mamma didn't necessarily approve of what it did to my musical appreciation. Tired of hearing "Irish Washerwoman" played to a conventional cadence by dozens of other students, I'd play it as boogie woogie, and she'd be distressed. Dad told a story, though, of a guy trying to get a job. "I know all the tricks of the trade", the applicant would say, and the interviewer would dismiss him. "That's the trouble. Everybody knows the tricks. What we're looking for is someone who knows the trade." When it came to a difficult piece, I played it straight until I'd mastered it before I applied my own variation.

What's That Song?

On the radio, they would announce a song before or after they played it, and so I learned the names of that music, but sometimes I would wander into the room when a student was playing "Claire de Lune" or one of LeRoy Anderson's songs, just to take a glimpse at the sheet music. If you're upstairs, though, and the action in that Oz book was too compelling, you tried to remember enough of the melody that you could recreate enough of it to ask later.

Several times, though, I would come down at 5 PM for supper - often it was cold cereal on Saturday nights - and ask about a song, and Mama would swear that she hadn't played it that day. "Last lesson was 12:30, and I had to hurry uptown for choir practice at 1. I bought groceries after that. All the other kids went to the tractor store with Dad all day. You were alone in the house from 1 PM until 4:45 or so."

Or there'd be times when I'd be sitting in the living room, and see bicycles coming down the road, out of the East window, out of the corner of my eye. Somehow, they would never arrive in front of the house. I'd go out on the front porch and look both ways, then out and stand in the middle of the road. I could see both ways for a couple of miles. In fact, the land was so flat, I could see the train on the tracks from six miles to the east and six miles to the west with nothing blocking a complete rail car. This was flat country, flatter than a checkerboard.

Stolen Bicycles

I never said anything about it, until one day Mamma commented on the fact that the house stole bicycles. The same thing had happened to her. I was older by this time, and was driving, and I'd noticed that I'd been kidnapped, too. Suddenly, I would realize that I was miles further along than I should be, and it was minutes later as well. I would have figured that I was absent-minded, except for the fact that I saw bicycles - and sometimes cars - disappear near our house.

Psychiatrists have a name for it. They call them "absence disorders" if you're the one that experiences the missing time, or "dissociative identity disorder", the fancy new name for multiple-identity disorder, but they don't have a name for an objective third party that notices it happening.

Vague And Unsatisfying

In September, 1963, professor Edwin Urch of Defiance College disappeared. His car was gone, his car keys, and his body. Everything else was in his apartment. He had a few hundred dollars in the bank, and his family didn't seem much interested in finding him or glomming only his booty. Nothing every showed up of him or his car.

Bill Miller, who later became head of the Physics department at DC was taking a history course from Dr. Urch. He said no matter how hard he would try, Urch would give him a mediocre grade on his submissions, writing on his papers that they were "vague and unsatisfying." He figured it was suitable, that Urch's disappearance would be, as well, vague and unsatisfying.

Short stories. And balderdash.

Names are routinely changed in this blog to protect the identity of guilty and innocent alike, but in this case, the names of Dr. Edwin Urch and Dr. William Miller are correct, as far as we know. As are the names of Ozma and Charles Wesley.

Other Bloggers On Related Topics:
Bill Miller - Charles Wesley - Claire de Lune - dissociative identity disorder - Edwin Urch - fiction - haunted house - Irish Washerwoman - LeRoy Anderson - missing time - non-fiction - Ozma - Wizard of Oz