DTp4

On other nights, wrapped in a blanket to protect myself from the chill of the basement rec-room,

I tuned in to Tales from the Darkside
                     and Hammer House of Horror
                                            and Kolchak the Night Stalker
                   with the telephone in my hand.

My best friend
(a boy ~ and thus not welcome to my house late at night,)
and I watched together.

Sometimes we talked,
mostly we just breathed
and crunched snacks
into the receiver.

Suddenly, video stores bloomed on nearly every corner.
All the movies I had ever wanted to see were available for a rental fee of a couple bucks.
I spent a lot of bucks and watched a lot of movies.

Genuinely Frightening Films:

Silence of the Lambs	1991
Near Dark	1987
The Shining	1980
Halloween	1978
Night of the Living Dead	1968
Picnic at Hanging Rock	1975
Amityville Horror	1979

If you haven't seen this, you should. Its rentable now.

With keys to a car finally in hand,
(at the age of 20),
and a great babysitter (Grandmothers are so wonderful for these things . . .)
for my two-year-old,
some of those same friends and I drove to
Mr. Gein's Hometown.

We found his grave in the town cemetery,
just after dusk (though we hadn't planned it that way)
on the weekend before Halloween.

We put flowers on Mary's grave.
We were stunned to see flowers on Ed's as well.

At the time, he'd only been dead for 3 years.