Skeptics and Unbelievers

If you talk to most people who know me they would tell you that I'm pretty much the most skeptical person they know of. Unlike my sister I do not believe every unexplained circumstance is a supernatural one. Whenever anyone tells me a ghost story or about a flying saucer, I treat it with the same respect as when my youngest son thinks his Elmo doll is alive.
I didn't always be so cynical. I used to be quite open minded in my youth. As a young boy I was positive that Bigfoot was lurking mere inches outside my window. The only reason he didn't come into my house to get me was that he was getting into a nightly fight with the ghost of Charles Manson over who got to kill me first. Imagine my surprise when I found out old Charlie was still alive.
When I was younger I believed firmly in UFO's and the Bermuda Triangle. To me it was a unquestioned fact that these things existed. If someone told me that their house was haunted I took them at their word. And why not? I had lived in a house that was haunted hadn't I? Why couldn't they?
Yet as I got older my world became less and less supernatural. When I heard my sister tell me of her haunted house I laughed. I looked for a natural explanation and found one. (The voices she heard came from teenagers parking at the car wash behind her house. But don't tell her. It's more fun to watch.) Whenever anyone tells me of anything the least bit odd my first reaction is that they are nuts.
I fear I've lost something as I've aged. My brother Steve was, if anything, even more open minded about these things than Rose was. He was so superstitious that he viewed his lawn gnomes with great distrust. Yet as funny as that sounds ( and it's true) I think Steve and even Rose live in a far more interesting and wonderful world than I do. I'm just too closed minded.
And yet here I am writing about a house that can only come across as haunted. It makes me somewhat conflicted. Yet I can't dismiss the events that happened there. The time my family lived in that house has become part of my family mythology. We discuss the ghost and the flying skillet and the cool spots all the time.
And initially that's all I was going to write about here. But as I wrote some stuff down and looked though the photo's I found myself thinking about things I hadn't thought of in almost 30 years. The Teddy Bear and what happened to it is among the things I haven't given a lot of thought to these many years. Just like I haven't given a lot of thought to my Mom being pregnant 30 years ago.
At first I wasn't going to even mention these things. Then I thought of Ethan and Isaac and remembered why I'm doing this. If this is going to be the story of where they came from they deserve the truth. This can't just be entry after entry of humorous things my brothers and I did to each other.
So if you only read these to get a chuckle maybe you might want to skip tomorrow's blog. After that things will get funny again.
And I promise , no more ghost stories.