The spooky mirror

When do we get back on good old Eastern Standard Time, is what I want to know. Shouldn't that have happened already?

I have a confession to make: I love being plunged into darkness. I love it when suddenly it is 5 p.m. and it has been dark forever and it will be dark forever. That is a wild and unruly time of year! Not only that, but I like gaining that hour. That hour is like the icing on the cake. I can spend it on Leonard Pennario.

Does this election remind anyone else of a horror movie?

I have peeked at Fox TV and they talk about things you could not dream up. I have heard that maybe Barack Obama was not born in America, that he could be thrown out on a technicality. Then there is this voting goofiness. In some states, people have already voted, and in others, loopholes pave the way for them to vote several times. Lastnight I heard that people without addresses could register by giving the name of a bench or soup kitchen.

Then there is that business about Joe Biden predicting that if Obama is elected there will be an international crisis and we will not like how Obama handles it? Will one of our mainstream papers at least mention that so I know I did not dream it? Even if they say it never happened, at least tell me that, you know?

Also, the confusion about whether Obama was born here, even if it is an idle rumor, I would at least like to see that addressed. So I know I am not losing my mind.

Speaking of losing my mind, remember my haunted apartment, on Parkside?

Barack Obama was born there.

OK, just kidding. But there was the matter of the spooky mirror, which was almost as good. It is our subject of our supernatural October tale o'the day.

When rented the apartment, this oval mirror came with it. We found it in the back hall, leaning against the wall. It measured about a yard from end to end.

We put it in the living room, over the couch, because back then if something was free, we never turned it down. I still think that way. I have not changed. In the case of the mirror, though, that was not a good philosophy to have. Because we noticed when people showed up, they always said something about that mirror.

"What's with that mirror?" the would say. A few even came out and said: "That mirror gives me the creeps."

One of my roommates had a pair of dogs named Compton and Witch and the dogs would whine when they went near the mirror. You are dealing with something really spooky if it gives the creeps to a dog named Witch! Witch was a big, dumb Russian wolfhound who never did become housebroken. That was a colorful life I led in those days! In illo tempore, to use a phrase I love from the Latin Mass.

Here was something else that was odd: The dogs always whined in the back hall, and they shrank from going there. They did not like the back hall. That was where we had first found the mirror.

My roommates and I pondered things. We thought maybe over the couch the mirror's angle was wrong. That is how badly we wanted to hang on to this perfectly good freebie. So we tried moving it. But everywhere we put it, the comments continued.

Finally we moved the mirror to the attic and left it there, facing the wall.

I wonder if it is there still.