Bigfoot has been part of my life since I was a little girl. My first memories of watching television consist of two things: Sesame Street and the Patterson film. I was five when I first saw the Patterson film on TV, and it is so firmly impressed in my psyche that I can even picture the pajamas I was wearing when I watched it. My parents probably didn’t exhibit the best judgment on that one (but who am I to say, both my kids have seen it, too). And I’m pretty sure they regretted it later, especially when I made my daddy cut down the Bigfoot-shaped tree outside my bedroom window!

Later, we moved to a small town, into a housing addition at the edge of the country. Neighborhood legend claimed a monster lived back in the woods beyond the barbed wire at the end of our dead-end street. I would lie awake at night listening for him, but only heard trains and coyotes. There were a few times when I ventured into the wilderness, well as wilderness as my Girl Scout leader would allow. At night I kept my eyes tightly shut so I wouldn’t see Bigfoot’s shadow on my tent wall.

I’ve always insisted that curtains and blinds be closed after dark, “so Bigfoot doesn’t see me.” Although why I’m being so solicitous of Bigfoot’s sensibilities doesn’t make a lot of sense. But neither does my fear/fascination with him.

My peers have always had a lot of fun at my expense because of this Sasquatch-a-phobia. Several of the boys from my church youth group made a short Bigfoot mockumentary on a group trip to the Kiamichi mountains that I had to miss. Whenever we would see a large, hairy man driving by, my ex-friend and I would shriek, “It’s Bigfoot!”  Let’s hope none of them ever heard our display of extreme immaturity.

After the Patterson film came out, Bigfoot enjoyed a brief flurry  of pop culture attention. Then he largely faded into the background once again. Harry and The Hendersons tried to revive wide-spread interest in Sasquatch but, alas, it was a very stupid movie.

The past five years or so have been a veritable renaissance in all things Bigfoot. Once relegated by the media to northern California and the Pacific Northwest, sightings of Bigfoot and all his smelly cousins are being reported in every state except Hawaii. He goes by different names: skunk ape, Fouke monster, grass man, and let’s not forget his Tibetan cousin, Yeti.

Monster-hunting shows are always looking for Bigfoot, one was even set here in Oklahoma (in those same Kiamichi Mountains!). You can now buy Bigfoot greeting cards,  Christmas ornaments, and toys. And don’t forget that Yeti has been a part of Christmas ever since Rudolph, The Red-Nosed Reindeer came out! In fact, there are so many cool Abominable Snowman and Bigfoot-themed Christmas items, that I will be having myself a Yeti Little Christmas for 2010. Anyone who wants to receive our Sasquatch Christmas cards needs to let me know early.

Anyway, after all these years fearing Bigfoot, it’s time I address that fear, and him, directly:

Dear Bigfoot,

Look, I know you’re shy, a lot of big guys are self-conscious of their size. There’s no reason to be ashamed. Maybe it’s the language barrier, or the smell. It’s nothing a bar of soap can’t handle, and an ape named KoKo learned sign language and you are lots smarter than that dame. Perhaps it has something to do with all that bad press in the 70’s.

The Legend of Boggy Creek didn’t cast you in the best light, and don’t even get me started on Creature From Black Lake! But I think your nadir had to be your dubious appearance on The Six Million Dollar Man. Talk about your dark-night-of-the-soul, that had to hurt.

I know there was a half-hearted attempt in the 80’s to cast you as a gentle giant, all vegan and crap. But nobody bought it, it’s just not reasonable to suppose you got that big just eating twigs and berries.

If you haven’t been keeping up with your press (maybe you need a better agent), let me tell you it’s on the upswing right now. Frank Peretti wrote a book called Monster, he even made you the Big Hero. (Side note to Frank Peretti–if you want to disprove Darwinian evolutionary theory, making your hero gigantopithecus, not the best idea. Seriously, Frank, if my buddy Sasquatch is so adapted to his environment that he is virtually undetectable, then he pretty much proves that whole survival of the fittest thing.)  There are all these TV shows about you; you’re even selling beef jerky these days. And then there’s that whole Official Olympics Mascot-thing!

I think now is the time to go public. You couldn’t ask for a better time, look how well your buddies, the cavemen, are doing!

Anyway, when you’re ready, just let me know. I’ll try not to freak out.

Signed, Burning Prairie.

We had to get rid of our old sofa sectional recently. It had been a good and faithful friend for many years. We got it right after we got back from Chicago. The kids literally grew up on that sofa. It gave me a comfortable place to sleep when I was uber-pregnant, I timed my contractions (for Monkey) on it, and I nursed both babies on the chaise part of the sofa. And it became my bed when my poor hip joint couldn’t take side-sleeping anymore.

Eventually it began to show its well-used years. Mr. Prairie did something to the back cushion on his side; it became a misshapen lump only vaguely resembling a sofa cushion. I had to stomp it into submission whenever Nana came over, just so she could sit there. The seat cushion on my chaise first developed a rip in the fabric, then gradually the deeper layers of foam began to separate until it also got uncomfortable to sleep on.

My parents, bless their hearts, go through den furniture like nobody’s business. This latest time when my mom decided to redecorate her den, she informed me that we needed her old sofa and comfy chair with ottoman. The chair and ottoman is pretty comfy even though it is totally not my style and will be replaced as soon as we get around to it, but the sofa, while rather innocuous looking, is evil.

It hurts my hip, my back, and my sense of aesthetics. It will be replaced as soon as humanly possible. In the meantime, I have dubbed it the Widow-maker.

I think it’s trying to kill me.

Me, that’s who. Today, Saturday June 7, is my 40th birthday. (This is being written before Saturday because I don’t want to spend my birthday doing this.) I was born in 1968, one of the most turbulent years in recent history. The Vietnam War, the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy (who died the day before my birth), protests and riots, the Chicago Convention, Nixon. “Sympathy for the Devil” and 2001: A Space Odyssey were both released that year. Those two pieces of popular culture neatly encapsulate both the darkness and the hope of the year of my birth.

Hope was abundant that year in the Apollo Space Program. Apollo 7, in October, was the first manned Apollo flight and a welcome success after the tragedy of Apollo 1. Apollo 8, in December, was the first mission to leave Earth orbit and travel to the moon. Humans left the relative safety of Earth’s orbit and traveled to another world!

I decided to look up other people who share my birthday. Here are some of my favorites:

• Beau Brummel, 1778
• Paul Gauguin, 1848
• Jessica Tandy, 1909
• Dean Martin, 1917
• Tom Jones, 1940 (yes, that Tom Jones)
• Liam Neeson, 1952
• Prince, 1958 (yes, that Prince)

Thanks to Brainy History for some of the dates.

I grew up in Claremore so I was literally steeped in Will Rogers lore. The Will Rogers Memorial Museum was not far from my house and every time we had out-of-town visitors, we’d drag them there. Heck, I even had my formal wedding portrait shot on the museum’s wide veranda. I don’t think I’ve seen any more of Will’s movies than the snippets they played in the exhibits, but the title of one really stuck with me–Life Begins At Forty. I remember thinking how impossibly old forty seemed even as my parents neared (and passed) forty themselves. How could life begin at such an advanced and decrepit age?

Well, now that I’m here, forty doesn’t seem so advanced, maybe just a tad decrepit. But I get the title, I finally get it. At the time that movie was made (1935) people tended to marry and have kids fairly young. My own great-grandmother got married at 13 and had my grandmother at 15. So if you get married, say, at 18 and have kids in your early 20’s, then by the time you turn 40, the kids are grown and gone or nearly so. The next phase of your life (one sans kids) would indeed start at 40. Now more people are holding off on having kids, waiting until their mid-30’s to mid-40’s, much like I did.

Even though I got married at 23, Monkey wasn’t born until I was 34, then Pumpkin came along right before I turned 37. I had plenty of time to live one sort of life, one sans kids, and get thoroughly set in my ways. Parenting infants can feel like a kind of timeless limbo, but things start to pick up once they become toddlers and preschoolers. So it does feel like a different phase of life is beginning. Plus, I’ve only got two more years of school then I will re-enter the working world. I finally feel like I have a concrete direction for my life, not just nebulous wishes.

Even though I live in same old ghost-ridden house, I am still married to my best friend after all these years, and I’ve decided to keep at this whole motherhood-thing, I feel like I’ve been given a fresh start, a do-over. Maybe life really does begin at forty after all.

Of late, the House of the Burning Prairie has been a veritable hotbed of ghostly activity. OK, not exactly a hotbed, but it has been rather active. And in some new areas.

The master bedroom has been the site of some paranormal goings-on. A bit of background-I can’t sleep in a bed right now on a account of something went wrong with my hip (bursitis, meh) and because, apparently, I snore like a buzz-saw. Of course I’ve never heard this snoring of which Hubby speaks, so I’ll just have to take his word for it. But the result is I sleep on the chaise in the den so I can remain in a partially upright position to take the pressure off the ol’ hip and to not disturb anyone else with the snoring. Eventually I want to get one of those Tempurpedic mattresses, but I digress.

In the past several weeks, Hubby has seen some apparitions in there. Once he woke from a dream convinced that Pumpkin, our 3-yr old, was standing by the side of the bed. He lurched up out of bed and stumbled over to her, thinking something was wrong, but she wasn’t there and was, in fact, still sleeping soundly in her crib. Then one restless night, he glanced over to the same area of the room (right in front of the master bath door) only to see a man-tall solid black presence just standing. Right. There.

He was completely spooked both times and came to tell me about it. As some of you may or may not know, I have seen the little apparition with my own eyes. While I was fully awake and standing up, and folding laundry, the toddler-size form floated into the room, “stood” in front of me and then slowly disappeared. It is about the height of Pumpkin, so I think this is what Hubby saw the first time, as for the dark thing, I don’t know.

And we have seen some things that others would call poltergeist activity. We had an infant car seat for Pumpkin, the kind with the pull-out infant carrier and since we’re lame, we left it in the den when she out-grew it. She’s quite the naughty little toddler, and we used it to block off one of her escape routes. We are also so lame that we left one of those little hanging baby toys hanging from the handle. One evening, Hubby and I were sitting on the couch when he said, “Oh my god!” I looked over at him and he was pointing at the infant carrier. Then I looked over at the carrier, the little toy was swinging back and forth by itself. What Hubby “OMG”-ed over? He saw it start, he was looking right at the thing when he saw it pulled forward, as if by an invisible hand, and released to start swinging. Just in case you were wondering, Hubby absolutely does not believe in the paranormal. Not that I do, or anything, mind you.

Small objects also tend to be found in unlikely places, places where we don’t put them. I suppose some of that could be blamed on two very naughty and inventive kids. But I saw something yesterday that cannot be explained away.

After dinner (hummus and tabouli), Pumpkin decided she’d seen enough of me for a while and went off to bother, I mean play with, her daddy. Hubby was in the bedroom playing with his computer, I mean working on stuff, when she went in there. I followed her and she told me, “Mama, you need to get out of here.” So summarily dismissed by a baby, I left. That was o.k., Monkey wanted to talk about his day at school.

It seems that there is a rather troublesome kid in his class. Yesterday Troublesome Kid, or T.K., told Monkey that the teacher said he (Monkey) was supposed to go to time-out. So Monkey dutifully asked the teacher and she said No, she didn’t want him in time-out. Guess who I think belongs in time-out? Anyway, I was telling Monkey about my own experiences with a T.K. when I was a kid. Monkey was sitting right in front of me the whole time, I didn’t take my eyes off him until I saw a slight movement out of the corner of my eye.

Pumpkin has a play kitchen, complete with pots and pans and six thousand (I exaggerate) little plastic pieces of play food, including play sushi! Well, as Monkey and I were talking, one of those little pieces of play food rolled into the room from out in the hall. It was the little tomato, which is not perfectly round, though it did roll as if it were. It looked as if someone had rolled it into the room from the front hall.

I picked it up, expecting it to feel too cold or too hot or have a slight electrical charge, but it felt perfectly normal. I could still hear Hubby and Pumpkin back off in the bedroom playing. I walked back and asked Hubby if either of them had left. They’d both been back there the whole time. We tried to come up with a logical explanation. Hubby, security-minded as always, checked all the doors and windows. Then we asked Monkey if he had seen what happened. He told us that he saw the little tomato under the couch when he was looking for another toy earlier. Hubby asked him if he could’ve kicked the thing out from under the couch, but that isn’t possible because I was sitting on the couch in question and hadn’t seen him do anything like that. And even if he had accidentally kicked it, how then did it roll in from the other room?

I also find it very interesting that something manifested itself when Monkey and I were talking about bullies. I was telling him that there will always be a T.K., I even had one of my own. And I told him about one of the times when my T.K. made me feel so scared that I didn’t want to go back to school. I could still feel an echo of that fear as I told the story. Then the tomato rolled in.

While I don’t have a personal theory about poltergeist activity, I do have one about hauntings. As I’ve said before, after someone passes away, surely he or she has better things to do than hang around in my kitchen. I do not for one minute think that the earth is populated not just with living people, but also with the spirits of the dead. That could get crowded.

There is speculation that hauntings are simply tears in the space-time continuum. This sounds reasonable. If some kind of traumatic event occurs-suicide, murder, battle-the violence inherent in the event rips at space-time. Then what we see are not spirits, but actual glimpses of the past. Or the future. But what about the non-traumas, the ghosts that haunt houses for no discernible reason? Place memory goes a long way towards an explanation.

How can a place have a memory you might ask. Well, I think, to a certain degree, some buildings are alive. Have you ever loved a house and then lavished that love, and time, and effort, on that house? Did that house seem happy? Have you ever seen a well-cared for, but empty, house? Did it seem sad, even though the yard was mowed and there was fresh paint on the outside? Maybe houses, and other buildings, are alive with spirits we invest in them. If a house or office building serves its purpose well, keeping people and possessions safe and comfortable, then it will be happy. But what of run-down buildings? I’ve often wondered which comes first–do people stop loving a building because it falls into disrepair or does the building fall into disrepair because people have stopped loving it?

And since something has to be alive to have a memory, that explains why hospitals don’t report a rash of hauntings even though lots of people die in them. Nobody loves a hospital, even when it’s doing its job, so hospitals never get invested with a spirit.

What if my silly, repairs-in-progress house remembers the other people who loved it? And it’s just showing us its memories, like someone playing slides from his latest vacation? I like that.

But that still doesn’t explain the tomato.