To be perfectly honest, when I remember my childhood, my parents are very rarely featured in the memory. Where the hell were they? Was life one long trip to the grocery store during the day and one long bowling league during the night for those people?

Whatever they were doing, I was left in the hands of my two older sisters and one older brother for most of my life. If memory serves, which I don't believe it does.

My possible brain damage aside, my sisters were nine and ten years older than me (and my brother five years older, but he wasn't put in charge) and when my parents were out, they took care of me.

Well, I mostly remember my second-oldest sister taking care of me while the oldest one lounged around in her downstairs bedroom crying over some injustice or mooning over some boy at school. (At least, that's how I remember it.) And my second-oldest sister amused herself by terrifying me.

Not in a bullying, mean sense. I mean in a turning the house into a Haunted Mansion sort of way, with her dressing up in weird costumes and turning out all the lights, except for one flashlight that she held under her chin while pretending to be the ghost of a gypsy woman named "Madame Curie". This made science class interesting for me later in life.

And she also enjoyed playing the odd assortment of strange, frightening music we had lying around. Really, my parents were too old to be hippies, but they still had some oddities to them. One song that springs to mind this time of year is this one:



This was not nearly one of the scariest songs (and back then, we had phonographs -- which could be played at 78, 33 or 45 rpm's. You could make ANY song terrifying by playing it at the wrong speed.), but it was strange enough to stick in my head.

Is it any wonder that Halloween is my favorite time of year?