OTHERPLANE

Sometime in the summer of either 1994 or 1995 (I can't remember which), I was living in Lubbock, Texas, on 15th Street, just off University Avenue, near Texas Tech University. I had an apartment there in the rear of the main house on the street. I must say that this is not a very scary, scary story, but it nonetheless is a very, very true story!

One day that summer Jason (one of my buddies), dropped by just to say "hello", took off his tennis shoes and put his feet up on the desk. We lounged around a little, listened to a little "Counting Crows" and he decided to take his leave. When he put his feet into his shoes he found the inside of the shoes to be soaking wet...not 'damp'...soaking wet!

Well, it had not rained in a month or more, there were no puddles in the road or on the sidewalk. Jason, of course, accused me of playing a practical joke, but I had no more idea than he of how that water got into those shoes. I accused him of stepping into a puddle.

I had just two days earlier purchased a new telephone from Radio Shack and all had been working well with it until, for no reason known to me, I could not dial out. A friend dropped by and he had a look at it before I took it back for a new one. In the process he turned it over and water poured out from every crack and crevice in that telephone machine... didn't leak, IT POURED!

J.T. suggested that I might have spilled some cocktail into the microphone holes (I was known to imbib somewhat a few years ago), but I did not! We could never answer the riddle.

At this juncture I called my friend Bob in Austin, explaining that I might have an unusual and most unwelcome guest in my house. I told my friend about Jason's soaked shoes and my waterlogged telephone but the most sympathy I could wrest out of my old friend, Bob, was a name for my nemesis..."Aquaghost"! Yeah, Aqua...water... I got it.

Within ten hours, I went to my "wall of tapes", as I called it, a rack of cassette tapes lined up ten high and ten across against the wall. The one in particular I was searching for lay in the middle, so that when I tried to get it out I had to hold the ones surrounding it up and aside... The Beatles, I think, but that's not important right now. What is important is that one cassette tape case (and no other anywhere around it was filled with water.

There are two animal graves in the backyard, but I don't know if there is a connection.