...your old men shall dream
dreams,
and your young men shall
see visions.
Joel 2:28†


Up the hundred year old stairs in the hundred year old part of the house, two boys once slept in cribs, then a bunk bed, with book shelves and stuffed animals, an old rocker, walls painted pale yellow then pale blue, home-sewn curtains once hung dark blue.


The ceiling slants in an odd way because of the curve of the roof and the attic above. It is now named the Ghost Room, two closets filled with old toys, Lionel trains in original boxes belonging to an old man who dreams of childhood, a reel-to-reel tape recorder with tapes, and a blue dresser with a bottom drawer of once-loved metal cars, trapped in time.


Trapped, much like the dinosaurs in the room, contained in books, once so fierce and free, believed in by young boys, even after The American Museum of Natural History, even after driving north to Dinosaur Park and walking through the covered excavation of dinosaur tracks, people talking in hushed tones as if in a cathedral, which of course it was, just not to God.


In the Ghost Room, there's a corner of a dead mother-in-law's things, widowed longer than she was married, covered with cheap white sheets, and on a windless night, sifting through her old love letters, still in envelopes with penny postage, held together by an ageless ribbon, written by a young husband and father in Cleveland, Ohio to his wife and young son in Metuchen, New Jersey, you might hear the rattle of the bones, or a satin ribbon falling onto a hundred year old wooden floor, with no rug to soften the sound.


† NRSV The New Oxford Annotated Bible with the Apocrypha, an Ecumenical Study Bible

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