My mother and I had a game we used to play. I’ve been putting a lot of thought into that game lately. We used to scare each other. We sometimes pulled pranks on each other; we sometimes teamed up and pulled pranks on other people.
She would stand in the closet for ten minutes just to jump out and frighten me. A plan that would back fire if the other person realizes you were in the closet, 10 minutes became much longer, or worse my dad was the one that opened the door first. Scaring my dad was liable to get someone hurt.
One time my mom spotted me lying on my bed. She quietly opened the door the rest of the way and moved into arms reach. Trouble was it was a trap. I had spent a long time molding the laundry into, well, me. (Now it wasn’t just a pile of cloths. I molded legs, and feet, arms and hands. It looked like a person sleeping in my bed.) Then I covered it up with my bedspread. What she thought was me was just a pile of laundry. As she grabbed the laundry, I grabbed her from behind and screamed. She screamed and I ran for my life.
We worked together more than once to scare other people. We scared my aunt in "Man She Can Run" (story in blog). Onetime we almost gave a friend of my dad's a stroke. My mother had me hide in a closet. She got the poor man close to where I was hiding (the setup) and when my dad’s friend came into the room, I reached out of the darkness and he almost hit the floor (knock down).
Not all pranks worked as planned. The time I walked up the stairs and my foster brother jumped out at me. I punched him out and he bled for half an hour. That wasn’t really all that funny, but that does bring me to my next point.
“People can get hurt.”
One day my dad came home and told me that the scaring of my mother was no longer an option. Turned out she had a bad heart problem and it could kill her if we scared her. It didn't stop from scaring the crap out of everyone else, up to and including the last month that she was alive. She just got of outpatient surgery and my brother helped her into the car. He asked how she felt.
"I’m Okay. Can we go to the casino one last time?" she asked.
"What?" he answered.
"I really want to eat out and maybe play a little (gamble)," she asked.
“AH,” he muttered out, he turned white and really looked frightened. My mother got off her death bed for a surgery to help her comfort level and really had no business anywhere near a casino.
"Yeah, I can't see a problem with that," I said as it started the vehicle. I could see my mom and how she was smiling. She let him off the hook and we drove home. More than once she stopped taking breaths and laid still on the couch just to see if anyone got scared.
“Mom, MOM!” we would yell.
“Just seeing if you were paying attention,” she said with that little croaked smile.
When she past from this earth, Halloween just hasn't been the same. Hopefully, she doesn't scare the crap out of me one of these nights. Unexplained noise makes me think of the times we had when I was a child.
“Ghost, great now I am not going to get any sleep,” he said out loud.
Bam, scrape, rattle, bam.
“No seriously, Mom is that you?”
He turns from the keyboard and runs in search of yet another noise.
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