A Ghost Story

The above picture is from WAY above Tuskegee....really the best picture to show you ...

So.....

Last Sunday I had to travel to Tuskegee for a funeral. It seems the only reasons I ever really get back to my hometown are for funerals.

We got there a little early for the graveside service and we decided to take a few and ride around town ...What I found was distrubing.

Tuskegee is full of ghosts ....not the traditional ghosts of old Hollywood. The ones in old white sheets floating around ...Tuskegee is full of old memories of days and things long past.

We rode down north main street and headed around the town square...Still being protected by the young faced statue of the civil war solider. Facing north and ready to defend.

Turning onto south main street we rode slowly by the building that once held our old family business....Windows now boarded up and the building stripped of anything to denote that a family ran a good, decent business for nearly 60 years in this place ...

Grass growing high in the adjacent parking lot ....a parking lot where I fought many a battle against invading "bad guys". We never again have the imagination in our lives that we had when we were kids ....

Continuing south we saw what was left of the old high school gym ....it burned a few years back and has never been rebuilt. My parents attended dances here, they had ball games there , they enjoyed life there .....and its gone...dark and runied.

Empty lots here and there along south main street that once held beautiful old homes..Gone mainly from fire over the years or abandonment ..... families like the MacGregors,Allys,Segrest, Ensleys,Ramons and Filinggim ....family names that continue in other cities....but how many of those family members know where their roots used to run deep.

Turning onto Wallace drive and coming up the slight hill that seemed SOOO steep as a kid I see my Nana'd old house ....yard run down,vines growning up the side of the house,broken windows. It was 10 years ago that we were last in that house...So sad.

Going down Lake street headed towards the old city pool my mother started telling me stories about summers at the pool.

She said during the summer everyone would go there and take swim lessons or just hang out and over the Labor Day weekend there would be a Pool Dance. Teams of folks would showcase the stuff they had learned during the summer...folks would take to the high dive and attempt to look gracefull as they fell into the deep end of the pool. As they got older my mother said the teens would stay in the balcony on those warm nights and flirt with boys...letting the boys buy them Cokes and frozen Zero candy bars.

I have always hated the idea of seeing a ghost....being scared...Last Sunday I saw real ghosts and I was not scared ....I was sad.