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Our young son passed away five years ago. To say we were devastated would be the understatement of the century. This week, after years had passed, my wife finally got around to going through his room and closet so that we could move on and find a new home for his belongings. His bedroom is on the second floor of our house. Directly across is a reading room with books, a TV and Nintendo® (he and I used to battle it out on baseball Nintendo in this room) and down the hall is our bedroom. The night of the cleanup, my wife and I went to bed, tired and emotionally used up. All the lights in the house were turned off, as is our custom, and, living in the country, it was very quiet and dark. We were in bed about twenty minutes, I had fallen asleep and my wife woke me saying "I hear music playing and there's light coming in from under the door - there's someone in the house!" Very reluctantly, I put on my pajamas and opened our bedroom door as slowly and quietly as I could. My hair was standing on end by now, as I could hear a radio plauing from my son's old room and there was also a light and separate music coming from the reading room, directly across. I walked slowly down the hall. I first peered into our son's room. The clock radio had turned on and was playing. "OK," I thought to myself, no big deal. When she was cleaning up in there she must have pressed the sleep button or turned on the wake button somehow. A little unnerving but I could offer an explanation. Across the hall, however, quite another thing awaited me. I opened the door to the reading room (again slowly) and get this - the TV was not only on but the Nintendo baseball game was running on it as well. To do this someone had to have manually pushed in the power button on the Nintendo to start it up and also pressed the "on" button on the remote to get the TV on. These things just don't happen by themselves. Needless to say, we didn't get much sleep that night with both of us trying to offer rational explanations, but none were to be found. We tried to recreate events and offer other possibilities, but none surfaced. You cannot turn on the Nintendo without pressing in the power button, period. The next night, I was writing music on my electronic keyboard. I was done for the night, so I pressed the power button on the back and the keyboard shut down. I turned off the lights and went to bed. The following morning, I stopped by that room to listen to one of my compositions, and - the keyboard was already turned on. Now I thought, "OK, you dumbell, you must have forgotten to turn it off last night." Except that the setting that it was on was the initial "power on" setting which only appears when the keyboard is initially turned on. Therefore I had to have turned it off the night before, as I was sure that I had. I could almost hear my son laughing good-naturedly with the laugh that I'd always loved, know that he'd got me and his ma real good. Perhaps this is the start of a new communication. I certainly hope so. skeptika's note: This story gave shivers as I retyped it for this page. Thank you FJM. |
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