Sometimes the parts just belong to a particular race

A few years ago my daughter was at a summer theater camp where they staged a production of "Once on this Island Jr."

The show is set on an unnamed island (Haiti) in the Caribbean (seriously, it's Haiti). The show is about the class divisions (in Haiti) and depicts a contest among the gods (all named after and patterned on the loa) that plays out as a love story between a peasant girl and the son of a boujwa family.

Seriously, the show couldn't be more obviously about Haiti if it tried. The social structure is Haitian,the names are all Haitian, and the snippets of language sprinkled through the show are Kreyol. The original Broadway cast even used Haitian accents. These are parts that are all black, except for the boujwa young man, who probably is mulatto, what we in America would call biracial.

Almost everyone at the camp was white. A few kids were Hispanic. One or two were biracial.

White kids playing Haitians. White kids playing the loa.

I didn't say anything at the time, or at least not too much, but this really bothered me. Being black is essential to the nature of these parts and the country where it's set. This felt like an act of erasure, of whitewashing. Not intentional, just thoughtless, insensitive, careless and dumb. No excuse.

I love to shake up the casting in shows with an eye toward racial inclusivity, but I feel like if you're going to do "Once on this Island," you'd better have either a solidly black cast, or a backup show planned.

Anything else is just rude.


Copyright © 2018 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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Let's keep America exceptional

I want to take a moment to share why I'm proud to be an American.

A lot of other countries have made a point of priding themselves on their purity. They have draconian restrictions on who can be a citizen, like Japan. Countries like Iceland actually restrict the names you can give your children to a list of preapproved ethnic names. France even has an official body charged with maintaining the purity of the French language and keeping out foreign elements.

In America, it's a point of pride how diverse we are. Our national motto is "E pluribus unum," Latin for "Out of many, one." We talk about our country as a great American melting pot, and we boast about how many nations our ancestors came from.

We talk about American exceptionalism, and the truth is, this diversity is what makes us exceptional. In America I can attend college with classmates who born in Egypt, in Pakistan and India. It's that I can work next to a man from Ghana and that being no more unusual than the man on my other side being from Washington, D.C.

We're exceptional because we're a mix of religions. My daughters have played with classmates who were Hindu. I've celebrated Passover with Jewish friends and broken the fast during Ramadan at the local mosque. Our differences, joined together, are what makes us strong as a nation. It's like alloys: if you mix different metals together, you find that they're stronger together than they are alone.

America is a place where I can commiserate with a Muslim man because his daughters don't know who sings "Let It Be."

America is a place where I can walk down the main drag in my city and have my pick of Mexican,, Lebanese, Ethiopian, Italian, Chinese and Greek dinners, or just grab a burger and some fries.

America is a place where I can connect with people from all over the world in their native languages, and then join them in watching fireworks on the Fourth of July.

America is what President Reagan called a brightly shining city on a hill, a place that serves as a beacon of hope to the rest of the world. It's in the fabric of our country to welcome refugees and immigrants.

This isn't a new or progressive view of America. This is what we have always aspired to be. From the beginning we've been a place of many faiths. The story of Christianity in the United States goes back to our very beginnings. So does the story of Judaism. So does the story of Islam

Peter Salem, for instance, fought for our independence at Bunker Hill. Others Muslims who joined the Revolutionary cause include Yusuf Ben Ali, who fought in South Carolina; Bampett Muhamed in Virginia, and Francis and Joseph Saba.

Beware of those who would tell you that America is best served by turning away immigrants from another country or a particular religion, or who try to portray them as a threat to our country. Such people are lying about who we are, and they're trying to take America not back to its roots but in a very new and illiberal direction, one that betrays our values and all that makes us proud of this great land.

American is an exceptional place in this world. Let's keep it that way.


Copyright © 2018 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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The monster at the university

We live by a Rutgers campus with a large open space that slopes down into an artificial pond that serves as a detention basin for stormwater run-off.

Artificial or not, it's a scenic pond. Passion Puddle, as it's known to the university community, is home to a number of carp, but also plays host to a flock of ducks, and provides water to a number of willows and other trees. A grated pipe lets the water pass under Lipman Drive, which runs in a loop around this open space, and down into a ravine before it tumbles into the Raritan River. I walk the dog past it almost every night during the summer, when the breeze carries away the heat of the day, and the water sparkles as it falls from the fountain and back to the surface of the pond.

Passion Puddle is a prominent feature of the local topography, so much that my girls have all asked at different points when they were young to go for walks there, to feed the ducks, or just to sit and watch them swim. Once we even saw a line of ducklings following their mother as she swam in the pond one June.

Naturally it's figured in the girls' imagination as well. When she was little our oldest daughter, fresh from watching "The Little Mermaid," talked about the time she and her mother had become mermaids and swam around there. Years later, after seeing demonstrations of a submersible craft there one Ag Field Day, she made up stories to entertain her youngest sister about the little people who live in the submarine in the pond.

It was inevitable that Youngest became fascinated with Passion Puddle as well, and called on me to fill in the gaps. I don't have much of an imagination, so I latched onto her older sister's notions of a mermaid, and told her that Passion Puddle is home to a mermaid named Bathilda who is from out in the ocean somewhere but lives in the pond while she takes classes at Rutgers.

Thankfully Youngest didn't ask what Bathilda is studying, but she did ask how the mermaid keeps in touch with her family. Turtle mail, I explained: A turtle picks up Bathilda's mail and takes it down the ravine to the river, and then out to sea, before returning with letters and packages from home.

Like I said, not very imaginative, but it was good enough for her, and when she saw a turtle a few day later, that was all the confirmation she needed. Months later, she was still spinning her own tales about Bathilda.

A boy drowned in Passion Puddle about 10 years ago when he went swimming there to escape the June heat and got his feet stuck in the mud. Mindful of this, I told her that it's never a good idea to visit the mermaid in the pond, and if she ever got the urge to drop in on Bathilda or if Bathilda asked her to, she should ignore it. Mermaids are like Jenny Greenteeth: Avoid them, they are not your friends.

It was a few nights ago that I was taking the dog around Lipman Drive before turning in for the night. I haven't been sleeping well lately, for whatever reason, and I was exhausted. There was a nice breeze, though, and although the days hadn't become especially warm yet, there was something soothing about the feeling of the breeze and the calm susurrus of the leaves almost had a lyrical quality to it. It was a peaceful night, the moon's reflection was sailing across the pond, and the water from the fountain glittered like a thousand tiny jewels as it fell.

It was a perfect night to walk out onto the green, take a seat on one of the benches by the pond and enjoy the cool air for a while.

You know how some spring nights feel almost too beautiful for this world? This was one of them. There was nobody else around, just the insects in the trees making their music, and before long it seemed as though the night was singing to me, calling me forward, and telling me to sleep, to relax and let all my worries go.

It was my dog that ruined the moment.

One moment, everything was peaceful and at rest, and the next thing I knew, Loki was growling and snarling like a dog possessed. He pulled so hard that his leash slipped from my hand, and he lunged toward the water with a fury I have never seen before, and hope I never do again. At home and with the girls, he is as gentle as can be, but in that moment he was all teeth and snarls as he rushed at and wrestled with I don't know what.

And then the moment passed. Something I could't quite see slipped into the water and disappeared, and Loki returned to my side. He rubbed his head against my hip, and I scratched his ears. There were tears in my eyes as though I had just lost something beautiful, but at the same time I felt an indescribable debt of gratitude to him that I couldn't explain.

We finished our walk and went home. Every night as we go past Passion Puddle, a part of me tells me to linger a little while and treasure the sight, but if I try, Loki blocks my way, and pulls his way down the street.

Room for One More

It was 3 a.m. Friday and Maggie was wide awake.

​Maggie is a thirtysomething single mother with three children, a mortgage, and a job with a salary that plateaued even as its responsibilities and the cost of living have continued to mount. It's enough to wake anyone at three in the morning, even without the feeling that they''re paying too much for their phone plan.

After fifteen minutes of tossing and turning that failed to get her back to sleep, Maggie was getting up to turn on the light and find something light to read when she heard the trill of a robin. The song was coming through the window, which to her surprise she saw had been left open.

The light of the full moon fell on the street below. The muted shadows of trees lay across sidewalks and yards, and every neighbor's house was pale and bleached. And coming down the street was a solitary vehicle, an old horse-drawn hearse with a coffin in the back. Its rail-thin driver sat alone on the bench, disinterestedly holding the reins in one hand while he used the other to hold his cell phone.

He looked up at Maggie, and in that light she saw a sallow face with sunken eyes. "Does your cell carrier give you the cell coverage you deserve? Verizon has fewer dropped calls than any other carrier, and their already affordable rates come with a discount for military personnel," he said. He gestured to the back of the hearse, and Maggie saw that the coffin was empty. "There's room for one more."

She woke with a start, gasping for breath. On the night table her alarm clock showed the time "3:04" in glowing green numbers. Outside it was still dark, and the birds of the morning were still quiet. It would take two more hours until she fell asleep.

Friday morning was no better. This time she found herself getting off the elevator in the bottom floor of the hospital. The old analog clock in the hallway showed 3 o'clock, and as she walked through the empty hallway, the only sound she heard was the soft pad of her own feet upon the tiled floor.

There was a soft trill, like birdsong, that came through an open door. As her heart began to pound in her chest, Maggie found herself drawn inexorably forward, through the door and into the room.

It was the morgue. Bodies lay on all the tables, covered in sheets, and latched doors covered the steel sarcophagi where the other members of this silent town lay in state. A single table was vacant and by it stood an orderly with his cell phone in his hands.

"With Verizon's unlimited plan, you get unlimited texting and unlimited minutes to the U.S., Canada and Mexico," he said. "Plus you can stream video with quality as good as on a DVD, all for the low, low cost of just $40 a month per line." He pocketed the phone and placed his hands on the empty morgue table. "Sign up today, Maggie. There's room for one more."

Maggie screamed, and woke up in her own room. It was 3:04, and the room was shrouded in darkness. Moonlight came through the window and fell on the stuffed monkey her daughter had left there that evening before bedtime, its hands clutching metal cymbals and its face twisted by the shadows into a grotesque, mocking sneer.

There's room for one more, it seemed to say. Come on in, there's room for one more.

She stayed awake the entire night, hugging her legs as she waited for the dawn, feeling ashamed at being frightened by a dream but unable to shake the nameless dread that was creeping over her.

Things came to a head that Sunday in church. After a sermon on being nice to one another and smiling more at people, Maggie was talking with her friend Jon, as he and some of the others lingered in the parking lot, and explaining how she was trying to make ends meet by cutting needless expenses.

"Well, what's your cell plan?" he asked. "See, I'm on the Verizon Beyond Unlimited Plan. That gets me premium unlimited data, and unlimited cell minutes throughout the U.S., Canada and Mexico, plus texting. Plus, when we stream video, it's high-density, and it can act as an unlimited mobile hotspot. It's only $50 a month,and whole we can have up to four lines, so far we're only using three. So there's room for one more if you want to join us."

As Maggie turned pale, his phone rang, with a ringtone that sounded like a bird bursting forth into joyous song. He answered it, then looked over at her. "Maggie, a bunch of us are going to Manticora's for lunch. We can give you a ride if you want. There's room for one more in our car."

Maggie screamed and ran away, leaving Jon and his family utterly confused in the parking lot.

That afternoon, the entire church except Maggie died at 3:04 p.m. due to a gas leak at Manticora's. At the table with Jon and his family was one empty seat, the only one in the entire restaurant.

Taking a road trip with Papa

When you're college age and don't have wheels but want to get around, pretty much the only way to do it is to stick out your thumb and catch a ride.

​I had a friend in college named Brad who used to go all over the Northeast that way during breaks, despite the risk. Brad was from California, so when spring and fall break rolled around, he'd hitch a ride to see friends going to school in Cambridge or upstate New York, or once even in Toronto.

The trip that put a stop to it was the trip he took to Baltimore his junior year. Funny part is, I don't think he even knew anyone there. He just wanted to go see it because he could. Even when he didn't have friends he was going to visit, Brad had an uncanny knack for meeting people and finding places to stay on the cheap, that would have made the rest of us anxious.

He left campus around four o'clock with his backpack in tow, and walked along William Penn Highway and other roads that kept parallel with Route 22 until he finally got a lift that was headed his way, about an hour or two later. The ride picked up the interchange before 78, and took him down I-476, past Swarthmore, before dropping him off at Ridley Park, Pa.

Brad hadn't been able to get a ride on Route 22 until around six o'clock, he said; and by the time they dropped him off at Ridley Park it was easily 8:30. He thought about getting a room somewhere, but that's not a cheap option, and usually if you find a truck stop, you can find someone who's willing to give you a ride just so they have someone to talk to as they drive through the night and into the early morning.

The truck stop was open, but there weren't many people in it, and none of the drivers was interested in giving a lift to him. Baltimore was too close, and a stop there just wasn't in the cards.

Brad was starting to wonder if he was going to be stuck in Ridley park overnight, when he noticed someone watching him.

He cut a colorful figure. He was short, dressed in black tails and wearing a high hat like he was going to a formal ball. There was the core of an apple he had been eating on his table, and he sat there puffing a cigar. When he noticed Brad looking, he grinned widely, raised his right hand and crooked his finger at Brad to call him over.

"Looking for a ride to Baltimore?" he asked, as he shuffled a deck of cards on the table in front of him. "I can give you a ride."

Brad told us that the man seemed little off to him, the way people sometimes do, but he also seemed friendly and Brad hated the idea of being stranded overnight or having to use a large chunk of his money on a hotel, so he agreed.

"Excellent!" the driver said. "Want to play a game of cads before we go?" He spread out the deck across the table. The cards were vulgar and pornographic. Brad made a face and the man full-out laughed at him. "Frightened by a woman's boobies?" he said, and laughed again. That was the least graphic part of the cards.

Brad was having second thoughts, but the driver grabbed his hand and practically dragged him out of the truck stop and toward the parking lot where his car was parked. It was a sedan as black as the man's coat tails, with tinted windows. He opened the trunk and threw Brad's pack in before opening the front door and shoving Brad in just as unceremoniously.

The seats of the car were covered with leather, and every surface on the inside of the car was spotless, but the air was smoky and it smelled like used bedsheets. Brad was starting to second-guess his decision to take this ride when the driver got in the car and gave his top hat to Brad, to hold in his lap; and then they were gone.

"Papa, who's with you in the front seat?" came a voice from the back seat, and Brad suddenly realized that there were two other passengers in the car. A pair of women were lounging in the back seat, either drunk or high, in their late 20s.

"He's a friend of mine I am taking to Baltimore," the driver said, and the car tore down the road so fast that Brad instinctively grabbed the arm of the door for support and pushed his right foot against the floor of the car in front of him. The driver noticed and laughed again, his bright white teeth showing in the darkness. "There's no brake over there," he said. "Don't worry, you'll be there in no time!"

Worrying was something Brad couldn't help but do. The road in front of him held his eyes captive, and he stared unblinking and open-mouthed as they would zip up to the rear of one car after another and then weave into the other lane to pass them at a dizzying speed. He stole a glance at the speedometer and saw that it was already past 80.

"Can you — can you slow down?" he finally managed.

"What's that?" his driver asked, and he pressed the accelerator further to the floor. "I couldn't hear you."

There was a flash of red and blue behind them, and the driver laughed again. Brad was beginning to hate that sound.

"Hey look, my friend," the driver said, "boss police wants to chase me. Do you think he can catch me?" And impossibly, the car sped up again, and the police car disappeared behind them.

The driver was laughing again. If a demon in hell laughed at the souls in its clutches, it would laugh like that. The laughter, the heady smell, and the dizzying speed were a terrible concoction, and Brad felt himself getting sick.

The driver noticed.

"Hey girls," he said. "Papa's little friend isn't feeling well. Think you can make him feel better?"

Hands reached out from behind the car seat and started to touch Brad on the arms, on his chest and the sides of his head, while soft voices whispered to him to relax. At one point, he told us, somebody actually passed him a cup with a fruity drink in it that he later realized was rum. He wondered if it was drugged, because at some point he became convinced that he was dead. He had died back at the truck stop, and the rider was taking him into the afterlife. The driver had taken Brad out of his body, put him in a small clay jar and was lowering the jar into a dark pool of water that had gathered in a crypt from the rains that had fallen on the cemetery.

"Just stay here for a year, my friend, and we'll be back," he said. His voice echoed off the walls of the stone mausoleum where he had tossed Brad's bones with a jumble of others. There was a heavy grating noise as the lid was being closed, and then Brad had enough.

"For the love of Christ!" he shouted. "This isn't funny. Stop it. Let me out!"

The driver turned and glared at him, smiles all gone. He pulled over to the side of the interstate, opened the back of the car to get Brad's pack, and threw him out right there. They were on I-95, with signs for the Fort McHenry National Monument and Historic Shrine coming up.

As Brad watched, the driver got back into his car, pulled back out onto the road and drove off. In a moment, the car had vanished.

The highway patrol found him sitting there on the side of the highway about 20 minutes later, out of his mind and violently ill, still holding the top hat. They took him to the University of Maryland Medical Center, where they treated him for shock, although toxicology couldn't find anything wrong with him.

There was one doctor, he said, who took an interest in his story, a doctor whose accent made it sound like she might be from Martinique or one of the other islands in the Caribbean. She had him tell the story again and again, and after he had told it to her to her satisfaction, she crossed herself and told him he had been lucky.

When they discharged him on Sunday, this doctor was supposed to be the one to sign him out, but then she saw the top hat among his personal things, and left the room immediately. She wouldn't come back in, and somebody else had to sign him out instead.

To the best of my knowledge, Brad never hitchhiked again.



Copyright © 2018 by David Learn. Used with permission.

The Guardian of Meadowbrook Road

Rita was about 8 years old when her mother and she moved into the old Muller house on Meadowbrook Road.

When Rita started attending third grade in Level Green Elementary School that fall, she had no difficulty getting friends to come visit. The area was still moving from a farming community to a suburb, and with subdivisions still largely unheard-of in Level Green, the properties along Meadowbrook Road were some of the biggest in the area. Front yards alone often were a half-acre, while the back yards rolled down forever into a ravine that ran all the way into Murrysville. Adults valued the space for the greenery and the privacy. For kids, especially those with smaller back yards, a place like Rita's was an adventure waiting to explore.

It was one of those explorations that Rita and one of her first classmates found a block of cement in the ground in the back yard with the name "Wachter" engraved in faded letters. They also found a pussywillow, an old shed with a roof that was about to cave in, and the area where the Mullers had burnt their leaves in the fall; but it was the cement block that grabbed their attention the most and it was the cement block that they asked about at dinner that night.

"The Mullers used to have a dog," her mother said. "He told me that when it died about ten years ago they buried it out back so they could still feel he was around. I think that was its name."

As you'd expect, the next few days at school all Rita would talk about was her new dog. It was black with brown legs, but it looked like silver in the moonlight. It was as big as she was; no, it was ten times bigger. It was vicious like a wolf, but it was as gentle as a puppy with her. Eventually word got around Mrs. Cromer's class that Rita was making it up, that all she had was somebody else's dead dog, and the boys especially started teasing her. She stopped talking about it, but she would still draw doodles in art class and in the margins of her homework assignments, of herself with a giant dog. The teasing had pretty much played itself out by this time, and everyone just let her enjoy her pretend dog.

It wasn't like there weren't other problems to worry about, after all. There was a rash of thefts along Colbaugh Drive that October. At first it was just cars that had been left unlocked and along the road, but by early November someone was breaking the locks and even a few windows and rooting through people's gloveboxes, looking for wallets or other valuables.

Then it became home burglaries.

Level Green was a quiet community with some roots that go back to before the Revolution. Local folklore says that a young George Washington chased fleeing Indians through the Shades of Death following the Battle of Bushy Run during the French and Indian War, and that was probably the last time anything really exciting had happened in the community. There weren't many active farms left, but there was a lot of open space and the people who lived there generally led quiet lives that involved living in Level Green and driving 40 minutes or so to work in places like McKeesport and West Mifflin, or maybe 20 minutes to Monroeville and Murrysville if they were lucky. The burglaries got attention the way few things could, and they were all people were talking about at church and at school. A family came home from a day trip and found their valuables gone. One woman called the police to report someone trying to break into her house while her husband was away, and while the police didn't find a suspect, they did find a badly damaged back door where he had tried to break in. So by early December when the elementary school students were learning the words to Christmas songs like "Too Fat for the Chimney" and wondering if it would snow for Christmas, their parents were making sure that no child was going home to an empty house. Latchkey kids like Rita would go home with a friend and then their parents either would pick them up, or the friend's parent would drive them home personally before dinner after getting a call to verify the parent was home.

It was five o'clock on a Wednesday in early December when Rita caught a ride home to Meadowbrook Road with her friend's mother. It was already pitch-black outside, but the porch lights were on and so were the lights in the living room, so when Mrs. Kowalczyk dropped Rita off, she waited in the driveway until Rita walked to the door, unlocked it and waved goodbye before she drove off.

From what the police later were able to work out, the burglar already was in the house when Rita's mother arrived. She had come through the front door and called Mrs. Kowalczyk before she noticed anything amiss, and by the time Rita came in the door 10 minutes later, the burglar already had overpowered her and left her tied up in the basement while he ransacked the rest of the house.

This is where the police are less clear what happened. That the burglar tried to catch Rita is obvious. Terrified by the sight of a strange man in her house, she screamed and ran up the stairs to her bedroom, where she had always felt safest. She locked the door and ran to the corner, where she tried to hide behind a large wooden toy chest, only for the door to break as the burglar kicked it open.

One of the police investigators credits Rita with pushing the burglar through the window and then using the phone in her mother's bedroom to call 9-1-1. The burglar, who suffered several broken bones in the fall, claimed that the family's vicious dog, which he described as an 80-pound German shepherd, had come "out of nowhere" and attacked him once he broke into Rita's room. According to him, it bit him on the arm and was going for his throat when its attack pushed him through the window. His arm was bleeding, and badly, but medical personnel said it was cut by the broken window. And of coure, as both Rita and her mother told police, there was no family dog. (They later remedied that, with a large but very friendly St. Bernard named Clifford, whose bark was loud enough to frighten anyone.)

Rita was a celebrity at school once she came back that Friday. She didn't want to talk about it, and since the teachers insisted that no one push her to talk about unless she wanted to, her classmates more or less respected that silence.

All she did say is, "He would never let anyone hurt me."


Copyright © 2018 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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President Trump, the Religious Right and my Jesus

My Jesus cares about justice. There is no evidence that Trump or his supporters do.

My Jesus healed the sick. Trump has made cuts to healthcare, while his supporters approved.

My Jesus welcomes refugees. Trump turns them away while his supporters nod their approval.

My Jesus said "Blessed are the poor" and "Woe to the rich," and warned about the dangers of wealth. Trump is a billionaire who passed tax cuts for the wealthy, cut social aid to the poor while his supporters applauded.

My Jesus welcomes people of every tribe, nation and language. Trump wants to build a wall, block entire countries and set strict quotas on immigration. His supporters are all on board with this.

My Jesus warned against people who harm children. Trump's administration tears them from their mothers at the border, loses track of them, and defunds groups that provide prenatal care. From his supporters on the Religious Right? Crickets.

The first-century followers of my Jesus understood something about the holiness of sexual commitment in marriage. Trump brags about grabbing married women "by the pussy" and covers up a string of affairs. The Religious Right "gives him a mulligan." Ralph Reed even says character doesn't matter.

My Jesus talked theology with a Samaritan and commended the faith of a pagan. Trump slanders Islam,and his Religious Right supporters cheer him on.

My Jesus warned us against men like Trump. The Religious Right tells us he's the dream president for Christians.

What's the matter here? Which god do you serve?

‘Cause I’ve got to say, for all the news you make about your faith, it doesn’t look much like my Jesus.


Copyright © 2018 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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The haunted cemetery

My brother Steve will deny this, which is to be expected; but this is how I've told the story to my children for a few years. You'll have to decide for yourselves where you stand.

The Old Stone Church is about 5½ miles from where we grew up, in the heart of Monroeville, Pa. It's on Monroeville Boulevard and Stroschein Road, right across from the Eat 'n Park diner and a quarter-mile uphill from the Miracle Mile.

It's the site of a former Presbyterian church that's more than 150 years old, which a while ago sold the property and moved to another location. It still gets used for photo ops, and for weddings; and of course for funerals, because it has a large open and active cemetery. (I mean active in the sense that it's maintained and in use, not in the sense that every Halloween the dead all get up and throw a head-banger of a party, but if you know differently than I do on that score, please feel free to share.) The place employs a caretaker who cares for the lawn meticulously, watering the grass and raking things when needed, among other responsibilities.

Like most other cemeteries, Crossroads Cemetery has accumulated a few ghost stories over the years. The land once belonged to a farmer named Robert Johnston. As the story goes in the spring of 1799 when the winter's snows melted, Johnston found the body of a small boy in his woods. Unable to locate his parents, Johnston decided to bury the boy by the spot where he had found him, which happened to be near where he had buried his sister-in-law three years earlier. In 1800, he dedicated that small piece of his land to be a cemetery.

Supposedly on some wintry nights you can see the boy struggling to find shelter. There are a few other stories associated with the place, much of which are bollux, like the supposed "Monroeville strangler" buried there, whom teens claim to have seen while they were walking through the cemetery at night, or Caroline Cooper, who legend says hated kids when she was alive and will pull you down into her grave if you walk on it. Standard stuff.

I tell you this not because I think it's particularly credible, but because it helps you to understand what happened back in July 1984.

My brother Steve was 12, and like most boys that age, was determined never to let people think of him as a chicken. And if you must know, he wasn't. When he was 15 and we went skiing for the first time, he dived headlong into it and was swooping down the intermediate slope before he had figured out how to brake or steer, because he was determined to enjoy himself and the beginner slope was too dull. (I pretty much stayed on the beginner slope the entire time I bothered trying to ski, and was ready to go far sooner than he was.) Maybe because he's the youngest of four brothers Steve has always been one to jump into things with both feet.

So when we dared him to walk through Crossroads Cemetery, he wasn't about to back down even after we'd been telling stories about Caroline Cooper and the Monroeville Strangler, especially once Bill started egging him on.

Blair and I were worried about getting trouble if our parents found out, but Bill was enjoying watching Steve squirm too much to let that stop us. We were soon all loaded into the car, with Bill at the wheel, on our way down Saunders Station Road and headed toward Monroeville.

Along the way, Bill spelled out the terms: Steve had to walk through the graveyard, from one corner to the other and back, right through the middle both times; and then had to repeat the process with the other two corners, while we watched. If he did this, Bill would give him ten dollars.

We got to the church parking lot, and after a little stalling, Steve got going. The moon wasn't out, and it was a little cloudy, so although we were doing our best to keep track of him, we kept losing him and then finding him again a minute later. After about ten minutes in, we were getting bored, and wondering if Bill would let Steve out of the bet early, when Blair noticed that Steve was slowing down. Then he stopped moving, and disappeared completely.

Later after he had recovered, Steve told us that he was actually a lot more frightened than he had let on. He'd been thinking of Caroline Cooper's ghost, and wondered where her grave was; and kept thinking of all the times he'd heard that story or others like it. And then there was that serial killer. But he'd pressed on, telling himself "There are no monsters, and there are no ghosts."

He was about five minutes in when he felt something brush his ankle. But he steadied himself, and kept going. "There are no monsters and there are no ghosts."

Now in the dim light, there were plenty of shadows, and plenty of places for things and people to hide, and we'd been feeding his imagination with plenty of stories earlier that evening. So it shoudn't be a surprise that when something actually grabbed his ankle, Steve started to panic.

"There are no monsters, and there are no ghosts," he told himself again, out loud this time, and he took another step.

Whatever was holding his ankle tightened its grip. He pulled harder, and so did it. After a moment, it gave way a bit, but only a bit. Something caught his other ankle, and slowed him down further.

"There are no monsters and there are no ghosts," he said, even louder, and he admitted by this point he didn't care if we heard him or not. He was getting that panicked.

He took another step, and something lunged at him from out of the darkness and knocked him out cold. He had time to scream, and he went down.

Back in the church parking lot, we heard him scream, and the three of us ran down to find him. I think we were all starting to wonder if there was some truth to the ghost stories, or if someone was hiding there to waylay people or just avoid police. We were worried about our brother, and we were worried what we were going to say to our parents to explain what had happened.

We found him almost on the other side of the cemetery, by Caroline Cooper's grave. His feet were wrapped in a garden hose, and he was out cold from being hit in the forehead after stepping on the caretaker's rake.


Copyright © 2018 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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Attending School on Halloween

Malcolm attended the charter school in New Brunswick back in 2005, making him one of the kids who enrolled in the charter school the year after it finally had moved into its own building on the south side of the city. What happened to the kid is a damn shame.

Malcolm was a quiet and unassuming kid, all things considered. One of his teachers, who told me his story once we were at the school and I had joined the board, remembered Malcolm as someone who followed directions and did what was expected of him without complaining. Sometimes he was a little too compliant and didn't advocate for himself, but when push came to shove, you could count on him to find a solution to whatever problem he was faced with.

Malcolm was from North Brunswick, but transferred to the charter school when he was in second grade, thanks to the enrollment lottery. Nowadays that would be harder to do, because the school is established and its lottery fills up with students from its three home districts; but at the time the charter school was younger and never filled up its vacancies with local students. There were even a couple students from the Oranges who attended.

Anyway, back to Malcolm. Being as his family was new to the school and unfamiliar with its calendar, his mother (understandably) assumed that it was open the same days as the schools his older sisters and brother went to, and so that Halloween she packed him a lunch and dropped him off as usual since it was a Monday morning, and everyone had school on Mondays.

He got to school, and when he didn't see anyone running around outside, he just assumed he was late, so he went in. It wasn't quite what he was expecting. There were teachers there, and there were students; but none of them was anyone he knew. Feeling very confused and unsure what to do, he walked to his classroom and sat down.

Now when people think of schools that are closed, particularly on holidays like Halloween or Christmas, we usually think of them as empty. They're not. They're always filled with the ghosts of students who went there and the teachers who led the classrooms. Some of them died there, and others just had nowhere else to go, but they all come back. How could they not? When they were alive that was where they spent half their time. The school remembers, and it pulls them back.

So Malcolm sat there in class with a classroom full of 20 other students, all of whom were dead. The teacher? Also dead.

About halfway through show-and-tell, he realized he was the only one in the room who was breathing. This made him feel very awkward.

Not long after that they went to gym class, where the teacher had them play dodgeball. He felt he was at a disadvantage because the ball actually would hit him,whereas it went through the other students.

He had always loved music class but this new teacher played everything in a minor key and had them enter and leave the room to Chopin's funeral march.

When they returned to class and started their personal education packets, Malcolm started to feel that the other children were pointing at him and laughing. By the time it came for circle time and everyone gathered on the carpet, no one wanted to sit next to him and he was ready to cry.

The teacher noticed how sad and lonely he looked, so she encouraged him to sit next to her. She was pale and it was very cold next to her, but Malcolm didn't want to be disrespectful so he sat right next to her, criss-cross the way he had been taught.

"Now I know if you're here, you're probably still feeling upset about how you died and that's why you don't want to cross over," the teacher said. Her voice was calm and matter-of-fact, and it took a moment for Malcolm to realize what it was she just had said.

"Let's take a moment to talk about how we died, and share with each other how that makes us feel, and what we've been doing in all the time since," she said in her reasonable teacher voice. "Malcolm, why don't you go first?"

"But I'm not dead!" he protested. "I'm a live boy."

There are moments in every school when the entire classroom is focused on one student, and that student does something inappropriate. Maybe the student farts, or breaks the desk when they sit down, or just says something unrelated to the class activity. Whatever it is, it's something that turns the entire classroom on its head, wrests control from the teacher and leaves all the other students laughing.

That was what happened to Malcolm. The entire class burst into laughter and even the teacher had a hard time stifling back her giggles. His ears burning, Malcolm ran from the classroom while shouts of "Live boy! Live boy!" followed him.

He ducked into bathroom to escape the taunting, but in his hurry, he failed to realize it was the girls room. A girl ghost shrieked when she saw him, and her face melted away until he screamed and tried to run away, only to find that the door had closed behind already.

"Live boy! Live boy! Go away, live boy!" The taunts followed him out into the hall and all the way to the office. There he discovered that the door was locked, and the receptionist wouldn't let him out until school was over for the day. It was only 10 o'clock.

"Go back to class, live boy," she said.

Heartbroken, defeated and dreading the thought of eating lunch surrounded by a bunch of ghosts, Malcolm started shuffling back to class, when he found himself staring at the large trash bin the custodian was getting ready to take outside. Malcolm climbed inside and burrowed his way in until he was completely covered with paper towels and other trash. A moment later, the bin began to roll down the hallway, and ten minutes later he was free.

Alas, the story does not have a happy ending. When he made it home an hour later, pale and weak in the knees from his ordeal, his mother would have none of it.

"No son of mine is playing hookey," she said. "Your sisters are at school, and your brother is at school, and you are going back to school this minute. Ghost teachers and ghost classmates. The very idea!"

She took him back to the charter school and watched from the car as her son, defeated, walked back in.

On Tuesday, the education director came to school after a three-day weekend and found a disciplinary note on her desk with Malcolm's name on it that said he had been found truant and was being held after for punishment.

He has never been seen since.


Copyright © 2018 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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The haunted park

A block away from our house is Feaster Park, a neighborhood playground with all the amenities kids these days could want. There's a sandpit, there are slides and monkey bars, swings for little kids and swings for big kids, basketball courts and picnic tables to sit and chill with one another.

We've taken the girls there many times, especially when they were younger and we didn't have the playset in the back yard that we eventually got a year or two before the Youngest came along. We've had good times there, even though the place isn't perfect. There's graffiti sprayed on the playground equipment, I've heard reports of drug paraphernalia in the sand, and there was one time I found a used condom on the slide.

"Also," I told Middle Daughter's friends Tanner and Isabella on the morning of Halloween, as we celebrated her eighth birthday party, "it's haunted."

I pointed across the street at Pittman Park, which looks and acts like an annex to Feaster Park. "That used to be a cemetery," I told them. (It did.) "After the Civil War, New Brunswick took the soldiers from the city who had died in the war, buried them there and dedicated the park to their memory." (All true.)

"So why is it haunted?"

"Ah," I said. "The soldiers saw some horrible things in the war, and died violent deaths. After all that, they found it hard to sleep, and when they moaned and walked at night, it disturbed the people who lived nearby, which is why they were sent back to New Brunswick. The people hoped that if the soldiers were sent home in honor, that they would finally rest and go to their final sleep."

That's how it worked for most of the soldiers, I explained. But there was one soldier who was especially restless, and even a quiet place like Pittman Park couldn't calm him. His ghost kept walking, and started disturbing the spirits of the other soldiers buried at Pittman Park with him, until finally the city dug up his body and moved him across the street to the corner of Feaster Park, where they buried him again, away from the other soldiers, and planted a tree on top of him to keep him still.

It worked, of course, but only for a while. The tree grew, and its roots held him in place, but he was awake and restless and being held there against his will just made him angrier. But the years passed, and without any new sightings of the ghost, people forgot about him and moved on.

Until one day, of course, when a boy saw the tree and decided to climb it. He walked up the tree and grabbed a branch and the wind shook the leaves and he thought he heard a voice say "Boy, don't climb my tree." But what did he care? He held onto the branch with his right hand, and he planted his left foot on the trunk, and he swung himself up into the tree.

The branches shook as he got his footing, and the leaves rustled, and he thought he heard a voice say "Boy get down now, and let me sleep," but he was only 8, and trees were meant for climbing, so he stood in the tree and he grabbed a higher branch — and his foot was stuck.

The boy tried to pull himself up, but it was no good, his foot was caught. And then for a moment he thought he was in luck because it seemed like the branches where he was stuck were giving way a little, and then he realized his foot was sinking into the trunk.

He gave a start and tried to push himself free with his other foot, but then it got stuck too, and in a moment he was caught up to his knees in the trunk.

"Somebody help!" he cried but the other kids were all playing in the middle of Feaster Park, and he was here by himself in the corner, and now he had sunk in up to his waist.

"Help, please!" he screamed again, but by the time anyone came he had sunk into the tree up to his neck and he couldn't grab onto anything to get loose, and no one else could help him either, They just watched as he sank lower and lower.

"Tell my mom I love her" was the last thing he said, and then his face disappeared into the trunk and his arm too, and he was gone.

"People have avoided that part of the park ever since," I told the kids, "but they say that if you walk past the tree on days like this, you can still hear the boy calling for help."

The girls were quiet, wrapped up in the story. It was Issa, the lone boy at the party, who spoke first.

"Yeah, right," he said, and he led them off to find something else to do.


Copyright © 2018 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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The ghost of Ma Kirby

Back when I was in college, I belonged to a men's living group called Kirby House.

Originally just a men's residence hall, Kirby House incorporated and became an alternative to the Greek fraternity system, I think sometime in the late 1960s. There was no pledge period and no hazing, just a common affiliation around the group we had joined and the building we lived in.

The building had been deeded by one of Lafayette College's wealthier alumni families, and was named after Allan Price Kirby. There was a plaque with his image on it in the hallway, and a giant painting of his mother hanging in the main living room. (Every year on her birthday, a confused-looking floral delivery person would show up, put an expensive arrangement of flowers on the table under the watchful eyes of the painting, and then leave, trying to figure out what was going on and realizing that he probably wasn't going to get a tip.)

That picture of Allan Kirby's mother dominated the living room. We'd have our aftergame parties there, and people unfamiliar with the history of the house would ask who she was. Parents and relatives would come to visit, and as we showed them around, invariably they would ask who she was.

"That's Ma Kirby," we would say.

A year or two before I arrived, in the mid-1980s, there was an incident. I don't know the details, but if any other Kirbs who read this want to chime in with a few particulars please do.

Apparently ano5ther student had tried to get into a relationship with one of the Kirbs, only to be rejected. As many of us do at that age, she wouldn't take no for an answer, and kept trying to push the issue. As I heard the story, one Saturday in November during an aftergame party, when the alcohol was flowing, things got heated and there was a scene. A big one.

That night, after things had calmed down, she fell asleep on the couch facing the portrait of Ma Kirby. From what I'm told, she woke in the middle of the night and ran screaming from the building. She later claimed that Ma Kirby had spoken to her and told her to get out and never come back.

She never did.

Tormented with a creepy doll

Oldest Daughter went away to camp about two years ago with Concordia Language Villages to study Arabic in an immersion environment. It's stuck with her. She learned the Arabic alphabet while she was there, learned a few songs and chants that she immediately taught to her little sister when she got back from camp, and started taking classes in Arabic once she got to college.

Concordia has its language villages in a remote part of Minnesota called Bemidji, around a small and irregularly shaped body of water called Turtle River Lake. The idea is that students can attend the camp for two weeks or for four, during which time they can receive formal instruction in the target language. They share cabins with other campers, and during the daily activities they're expected to complete the learning experience by speaking only in the target language, which again, in her case was Arabic.

Because they're away from home for so long, the campers bring things to keep themselves from getting homesick: favorite foods, some pictures, games to play, an age-appropriate toy or two, just nothing that violates the spirit of language immersion.

One of the campers, a 16-year-old named Marcie, brought a doll.

It wasn't a Barbie doll or something made of cheap plastic. It was made with moving parts: arms and legs that swiveled and bent at their middle joints, a head that turned, and hands and feet that moved at the wrist and ankles. It represented an impressive amount of engineering for a cheap toy, but a lot of the kids thought it bordered on the creepy side. The eyes, instead of being painted on the surface of the face, were recessed into the face a little, the way real eyes actually are a little farther back than the front of the forehead. The effect was that, if you moved across the room, it looked as though the doll was following you with its eyes. That, combined with the sly Mona Lisa smile that had been painted on its face, was enough to creep a few people out. It was like the doll not only was watching you, it was smirking at you the entire time.

This one poor girl named Alexi was really bothered, and she made the mistake on the third day of camp of telling the other girls in her cabin how much she hated that doll. They started taking the doll with them to the mess hall,where they would place it on the table facing her; and every time she looked at it, they would wave its arm and have it say "Marhaba!" They made camp miserable for this poor girl. Alexi would go to class, and find the doll seated at the desk next to hers, its head turned toward her with those creepy eyes and that hollow smile. I'm sure she tried to be a good sport about it, but when something bothers you and everyone knows it but keeps on rubbing it in, it's going to get to you after awhile.

Around Day 10, Alexi went to the staff counselors to complain that the other girls in her cabin were bullying her. I'm sure she felt stupid when she explained how they were bullying her, but the staff handled it professionally. They talked to Marcie, who owned the doll; and they talked to every other girl in the cabin individually, and that night around the evening campfire, they reminded everyone without naming any names the sort of behavior and community spirit that campers were expected to uphold.

Oldest Daughter woke up that night to a contained riot in the other cabin. One of the other girls had thought it would be hilarious to take the doll out and put it in Alexi's bunk, next to her. Alexi had woken up when she rolled over and got its limbs tangled in her hair like the doll was trying to attack her.

There was a big to-do, and when no one would own to the prank, especially after the staff had just addressed the bullying that afternoon, the entire cabin was given disciplinary kitchen duty. Staff took the doll away, locked it up with all the cell phones and personal electronics, and told Marcie she could get it back when it came time to leave camp. Alexi got to sleep in the medical cabin the rest of the night, and was allowed to sleep in past breakfast, usually a big no-no, but I guess they considered this to be special circumstances.

Camp the next day was rough. The staff weren't putting up with anyone's crap, and everyone was trying to figure out who had it in for Alexi so bad. A few of the kids who shared the cabin with her thought they had an idea, but they couldn't prove it. For her part, Alexi stayed off by herself, crying and miserable and even the kids who weren't from her cabin weren't able to get her to do things with them. Marcie tried during dinner, when Alexi was sitting off by herself, to make it up to her by sitting with her and trying to apologize that things had got so out of hand. A couple people saw that as proof that Marcie was behind the hole thing, but she denied that, and it just stayed ugly. My daughter told me that that if everyone weren't on edge about the bullying and how upset Alexi was, it was the sort of prank with a doll that everyone would have thought hilarious.

They went to bed around ten, and then there was a new outburst. Someone actually had got into the lockbox. They hadn't stolen any phones, but Alexi was screaming at everyone when she started to get into bed and found that freaking doll waiting there for her with a knife taped to its hand, like it was waiting to stab her.

Alexi snatched the doll up, walked over to the dock at the edge of Turtle River Lake and threw the doll in, as far as she could.

Another big fight ensued. Marcie cried; the doll had been a gift from her grandmother. Alexi screamed; Marcie had it in for her and had been tormenting her for almost two weeks. The head counselor was yelling because someone actually had broken into the lock box. This was the worst group of campers they'd ever had. Everyone was at everyone else's throat. It was impossible to avoid taking sides in this fight.

The next day the campers who were there only for the first two weeks packed their bags and left. Talk was pretty subdued, but there were dozens of angry looks exchanged.

The day after Marcie came home from camp, a package arrived. Figuring it was something she had forgotten to pack, she took it to her room and put it on the bed then went to grab a snack.

She came back to her room just in time to see the package open from the inside, and to see a small doll step out.

Copyright © 2018 by David Learn. Used with permission.

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Burger King and the little boy's ghost

I took Youngest and one of her best friends to Burger King today so they could play on the indoor playground. As we were eating our fries — because you have to get fries when you're at Burger King, even just for the playground — I explained that the playground was haunted.

"A little boy died there a few years ago," I said. "He didn't tell his parents he was going there, and when he climbed to the top, he got too scared to come down."

The girls listened quietly, hanging on every word. Who doesn't love a good ghost story, after all?

There was nobody else in there, and since his parents didn't know he was there, he got locked in when the Burger King people turned off the lights and went home. He died up there that night, and it was two days before anyone found him."

It was a perfectly morbid story, and I was going to share an example of how the haunting worked, when Oldest, who was along for the ride, decided to cap it off.

"His body is still there," she said. "Kids won't touch it because it's gross, and none of the adults can get up there."

The girls cracked up, and so did I. For the next 30 minutes while we hung out, they would do things like climb to the top, pick up one another's arms and wave it at us through the window.

"Look, I found him!"

So that story didn't stick, that time. But you know, there was another family there, so who knows what their kids overheard and what they believed…

Copyright © 2018 by David Learn. Used with permission.

Encounter in the woods at dark

Back when I was a kid, there was a giant wooded area nearby that we loved to visit, especially during the summer. Sulfur Creek ran through it, with a bend where the water was deep enough to swim; there were trails up near Macelroy Drive where people rode their ATVs; and of course when hunting season came, it was the place to scout out deer. My brothers and I would go there a lot during the summer in the morning and come home for lunch, covered with dirt and sweat, only to return right afterward and stay away until it was time for dinner.

The area was vast. It started out a block away from our house in Penn Township, and it went down to Trafford, and ran all the way to Monroeville and probably farther. There were a few abandoned structures in there that had been built as part of a logging effort more than a century earlier, a railroad that had fallen into disuse, and God only knows what else.

As you may have gathered, this was back in the day when it was fairly common for parents to let their kids run around outside without immediate supervision. It was a time to build forts, to explore, and to navigate the physical and social world on our own, without the constant helicopter presence of our parents. In fact our parents had only one rule about playing outside Be back on the block by dark.

This one summer evening when I was 12, my brother Steve and I were playing in the woods with his friend Kevin, who was visiting from Forest Hills. It was after 8:30 in June, and the shadows under the trees were getting dark. As the responsible older brother, I started to remind Steve and Kevin that we had to start home soon.

"Only if you can make us!" Steve said, and he and Kevin took off, their laughter trailing after them.

This was one of the ways Steve went out of his way to annoy me. He knew I was worried about getting in trouble for breaking the curfew, and he knew that him flouting the rules was just going to make me angry. He's two years younger than me but he's always been stronger and faster, and he's always enjoyed getting the better of me physically. He loved it when people thought we were twins, and enjoyed it even more on those rare occasions when they thought he was older, like the summer he got to ride the more advanced rollercoasters and I didn't. Getting at me by running ahead was just sauce for the goose, as far as he was concerned.

So he and Kevin ran ahead, and I ran after them, getting angrier with each step because there wasn't anything I could do about it, and then they stopped so suddenly that I almost crashed right into them.

"Are you stupid?" I asked. "We have to get home or mom's going to kill us!"

"Shh," he said, and he pointed at an oak tree nearby. At first I thought there was someone up there, and I was amazed at how far up they had climbed. I usually got about 8 feet before I stopped climbing, and Steve had been known to make it 15, but this person was easily past that.

And then I realized there was no way this was anything human. It was about seven feet tall, with long and spindly arms and legs, and it was thin like something that never got enough to eat. There was a bird sitting on one of the branches, and as we stood there watching and listening, the bird opened its mouth and made its final song of the day.

The creature crawled out on the branch as quickly as if it were walking, opened its mouth and mimicked the song it had just heard. It didn't mimick it perfectly; it sounded like what you might hear from the other end of a tunnel, but it worked. The bird walked closer, and this thing snatched it and swallowed it in one smooth motion.

It was too much. Steve made some sort of scared noise, but I'm the one who said the sort of thing out loud a 12-year-old would say, and as soon as it heard that noise, the creature stopped, and looked right at me. It had no eyes and no nose, but it had something that looked like it could be a mouth. That's what twisted into something like a smile, and it started to climb down the tree headfirst toward us.

We took off running, all three of us, crashing through the ferns and other plants that grew all over the floor of the woods. The whole time, I heard this thing crashing along the ground behind us, and it was getting closer.

Now the Shades grew up around Sulfur Creek, and the result is that the ground slopes quite suddenly in a few places. It's the sort of place you need to be careful even in daylight so you don't fall, but in the dark when you're running scared? Things went the only way they could. We fell down the slope, rolling on the trails we'd thought we were so clever for sliding down earlier. Kevin landed right by the creek, Steve tore his pants on a tree root, and I landed hard on one of the rocks beside the creek bed.

And then we heard it at the top of the slope, trying to find us. I don't know if it could look for us, without eyes, but it was doing something. We got up as quickly and as quietly as we could, and moved down the stream a little. Steve and Kevin made it to the other side of one of the big trees that had fallen, and hid behind its root ball. I hid behind one of the large rocks that stuck out from the side of the slope we had just fallen down, and looked around for something, anything I could use to defend myself. There was a branch nearby that must have fallen from one of the maple trees. It didn't have any leaves on it but it wasn't rotted and frail either. I picked it up and held onto it for dear life.

I heard the rustle of the undergrowth, and then the soft pad of feet on the ground. And then, horrifyingly, I heard it speak.

"Guys?" it said. "I think we lost it. Where are you?"

It was my voice.

It took a step past the outcropped rock and I saw it up close. It looked at me. It looked *like* me, and as our eyes met, it smiled this terrible, lopsided smile that made my stomach fall away. I screamed, and hit it as hard as I could on the head, again and again, and then it started screaming too, but in a voice that was high and shrill; and then it ran away, back up the creek.

Steve and Kevin came out from behind the fallen tree where they had been hiding, and we booked it back to my parents' house as fast as we could. I held onto the branch the entire time, in case we needed it.

We got home, and my mother didn't need to ask a thing. She looked at us, and she knew. My dad hadn't held a weapon since he'd left the Army in 1968, but that night he went next door to the neighbors, and borrowed a shotgun. My mom set candles in each of the windows and left the lights on in our rooms so we could go to sleep, and all night that night and the next she and my father kept vigil to make sure it hadn't followed us home.

And from them on, we made sure we were back on the block before dark.

Copyright © 2018 by David Learn. Used with permission.

Good Friday in America today

It was, of course, an injustice.

Police found Stephon Clark in the back yard of his grandmother's house after he reportedly had climbed over the fence to get there. They were looking for someone who had been breaking car windows on the street, and when they caught up with Clark they ordered him to show his hands. An officer shouted “He has a gun!” and Clark was struck with a hail of bullets.

He was holding a cellphone. There was no gun.

According to an autopsy, Clark was shot 8 times from behind or from the side. Police have yet to provide any evidence that Clark was the window-breaking vandal they were looking for.

Fatal incidents of police violence have been a matter of routine horror in the news for years, compounded by our rush to assure ourselves that, while unfortunate, there's really nothing we can do about it. It's just part of the cost of having a safe society.  Sometimes people get killed, but it's their fault anyway, because they didn't follow orders, because they acted aggressively, or because police felt threatened. And besides he had a rap sheet.

That reaction should chill the very marrow in our bones. I can think of no reaction further from the heart of Christ and the heart of the Good Friday story that we celebrated in our churches today.

Even those outside the Christian faith know the Good Friday story. Jesus Christ, an innocent man, was arrested under cover of night. Denied the due process of law, he was deprived of his basic human rights, brutally tortured and finally executed.

Preachers often play up the story of Jesus' trials and execution for the moral affront that they were. To convict, all the priests needed was for two witnesses to agree on a charge. The gospels note that they couldn't even manage that. For his part, Pilate, the Roman governor, couldn't find any basis for a charge. Neither could Herod.

So why was he executed? The chief priest was afraid that Jesus was disturbing the peace and getting people riled up. Pilate wanted to maintain order. Herod just didn't care.

Christianity used to be a religion of the powerless, but after 1,700 years of holding the reins of imperial power, we've become far too comfortable with the way those reins feel here in the West. We treat the execution of Jesus as though it's an aberration, a once-in-history occasion when the justice system failed in its duty and killed an innocent man. The effect is that we treat the Crucifixion as a one-time failure, an especially heinous act of evil. We always stress the innocence of Jesus to stress how shockingly unjust his death was.

I wonder, if we were to survey his contemporaries, how unusual they found it that Rome would kill an innocent man. I wonder how many peasants, carpenters and bricklayers there were who felt they couldn’t get a fair shake either. I wonder how many people could point to the mountaintop of Jerusalem, to Mount Gerzim in Samaria or to the rolling hills of Galilee and tell the story of family members, neighbors and friends who had been unjustly executed by the state.

It wouldn’t have been hard. After the riots that followed the death of Herod the Great in 4 BCE, when rioters burned the city of Sephoris, the Roman legions restored order through the process of decimation. One man in every 10 was pulled out of the crowd, taken outside the city and crucified as a warning against unrest, without benefit of trial.

Good Friday wasn't a once-in-history event for the people whom Jesus lived with and walked among. It happened all the time.

It's the same in America now. Remember the names of those who have been denied justice by the authorities and killed without a trial. Can you even remember them all?

Michael Brown.

Eric Garner.

Walter Scott.

Philando Castile.

Alton Sterling.

Tamir Rice.

Terence Crutcher.

Sandra Bland.

Freddie Gray.

Laquan McDonald.

Unarmed. Shot by police, their murders justified just as the execution of Christ was. They were disturbing the peace. They were resisting arrest. They had a history. There were extenuating circumstances.

We were afraid.

When we in our fear excuse, allow or approve the death of the innocent, we take the reins of Caesar in our hands, give them a familiar grip, and we say to ourselves, “This isn't so bad.” When give approval to their deaths, let us remember the words of Jesus.

“Whatever you do to the least of these, you do to me.”


Copyright © 2018 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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This is the sermon on guns you probably won't hear

There is a sermon you probably won't hear in church tomorrow, and that's a shame, because it's a sermon that needs to be preached from every pulpit in this nation, from coast to coast, from North to South, from city to city, from the highest mountain to the lowest valley, until we understand and our leaders finally listen.

It's the sermon that says that a society that claims to value life and freedom but brushes off death as casually as it puts on a new coat, is a society that has shaken off all semblance of morality and justice, and values nothing but power. It's the sermon that says that our nation has come unmoored. It's the sermon that says our guns have become an idol, the NRA has become the priesthood of a false religion, and our government has been bought lock, stock and barrel.

It's the sermon that says "In Christ's name, enough."

Seventeen students died at Parkland school in Florida earlier this week. Add those to the 58 murdered at the Las Vegas Strip last October, to the 49 mowed down at the Pulse Night Club, the 20 first- and second-graders at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Remember the 33 college students killed at Virginia Tech in 2007? How about the 15 killed at Columbine High School in 1999? That number seemed so large at the time; now it almost seems like it's barely worth mentioning. There have been so many mass shootings in America that it's almost impossible to remember a time when they weren't routine, when Aurora, Colo. (2012, 12 dead); Jonesboro, Ark. (1998, 5 dead); and Erie, Pa. (1998, 1 dead), would be burned into our psyches forever.

Why do we tolerate this?

A long time ago the Phonecians worshiped a god name Moloch. Moloch wasn't a genteel god who liked to collect baubles, hear a few rhyming prayers and let people go about their business. He was a god of power. His priests promised the people wealth and good crops, military might and protection from their enemies. If you followed Moloch, you didn't have anything to worry about when other people came into your country and tried to take your place, they promised. You didn't need to be afraid of thieves, or home intruders or any threat to your well-being. If you worshiped Moloch, he had your back. All he wanted was your children.

Moloch was a right bastard of a god, but the Phonecians trusted him. There are remnants of their architecture, their literature and their art. The Israelites, when they came to the land, were appalled at what they found, and did their best to eradicate all trace of Moloch and the other gods of his ilk. The ruins we've found indicate that he had a tremendous appetite for the blood of humans, especially children.

The stories that his priests told are the same ones the NRA tells today about guns. There's a lot to be afraid of, but if you have a gun, you'll be safe. There's no need to worry about immigrants, inner-city gangs or even your own elected officials if you're armed enough. The bigger the gun, the better off you are, so why not own the kind of hardware professional troops use in combat zones? And if someone comes to town and massacres a dozen or more children? Well, that's just the price of being free. Anyone who opposes the exaltation of firearms is someone who hates freedom.

The Israelites didn't get rid of Moloch. He just hung around a while and opened shop under a new name with a new priesthood.

Our national religion makes a big deal about guns, and it's managed to convince a number of people that our embrace of gun culture is something that squares well with Christianity.

It does not.

The NRA and its acolytes spread an atmosphere of fear. There are bad people out there, and no one is coming to help you. The only way to stop them is if you are armed yourself. If they are armed, you need to be too. Put guns into every church, into every store, into every school. Fire first, and don't back down. When everyone is afraid and everyone has guns, and everyone is on edge, then we will know peace.

Jesus warns that those who live by violence will die violently, and he tells his disciples to put away weapons of violence. Rater than fearing the alien, the outsider or the stranger, he encourages us to take the risk, welcome them, and befriend them.

This is a message the church needs to shout, and that it needs to live out as loudly as it can. I don't expect to hear it.

This Sunday, most churches are going to offer noting more than an anodyne prayer for the latest victims of the latest horror show. Some will offer even less. There may be a few churches that collect an offering, but that's as far as it will go.

Six years ago, Trayvon Marin was murdered by a vigilante who stalked the teen to the point that he feared for his life and felt the only chance he had was to fight back. (Zimmerman, who was armed, shot Martin and killed him.) Few churches said anything about it that Sunday; my own pastor made a throwaway comment about it in the beginning of the sermon where pastors usually use their bad one-liners as warm-up material, and seemed surprised that anyone responded negatively.

The truth is, we live in times that are marked right now by profound spiritual darkness. Our federal government has embarked on a relentless campaign against immigrants of color, it has placed abusive and racist men in positions of power, and it is led by a man of vulgar appetites with no regard for the truth, nor for justice. The church in America can choose either to embrace this darkness and call it "light"; to focus on ""spiritual things" like truth, morality and principles of clean living; or it can call out evil in high places.

The NRA's tireless advocacy to sell more guns is one place we can start. The casual acquiescence of our leaders to the NRA's culture of death is a second.

It's a sermon our country needs to hear. Let's start preaching it.


Copyright © 2018 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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