Legend of the Flowerdy Ghost

I had a request to tell this story from my sister and I said I would never tell it!  But, since my daughter asked for this story….I’ll tell it.  But, oh!  The mental scarring that will occur as I re-live this horrendous event in my life!  My life has been mis-shapen from this event and I don’t know if I will ever recover!  (HA!)

When I was growing up typically we did not get to do much of the Halloween thing for a couple of reasons:

1.      It cost money

2.     We lived a long way from town

Since it cost money to buy costumes, ours tended to be of the home made variety.  Normally we were cowboys (best costumes ever, right?), wore our hats and chaps, carried ropes and real live guns to school.  Heck, Dad would even take a black marker and draw some really cool looking mustaches on us (probably the only time in my life I was able to have a handlebar mustache on my face!) 

But the year I was in the second grade, I turned into a rebel.  I had listened to all my friends brag about their store bought costumes and I decided that is what I wanted.  I managed to convince my brother that this was the road we should go down, guess I thought we could force our parents to buy said costumes.  I had plans on going as Dracula and had even scoped out the costume that I was going to wear!  All of this was done about a week before Halloween, so we were on a pretty short runaway already.  The day before we were going to wear our costumes to school, we got a lesson in economics.  Just because we wanted it, doesn’t mean there was money available to purchase it! (There’s a lesson our government could learn!)  So for reason number one, above, we did not have costumes and even if we did have the money, reason number two would have come into play as we had waited until the last minute to spring this on Mom and Dad.  So Mom came up with a solution (as Mom’s tend to do in times of stress and strain).  Since I had convinced us that we did not want to be cowboys, this was the best solution Mom had.  She took a white sheet, cut it in half and cut two hole toward the center of each half as eye holes.  BAM, Mom genius!

Now the life scarring part…..

Cully, my brother got his half and it looked ok.  When I got my half….OH, the horror!  As I stood there looking, through the eye holes of my costume, at myself in the full length mirror….all I could see was the blue and green flowers all around the bottom edge of my costume.  A real life horror story was unfolding for me!  I am not sure if this was luck of the draw or I was being punished for being so conniving!  I quickly shucked it off and said, “I changed my mind, I wanna go as a cowboy!”  But, since I was last minute…there was no time!  As Mom hurried us out the door to get on the bus at 6:00am, she said “I’m sure no one will notice just turn it inside out!”  I felt like I was in the Christmas Story….all I wanted was that Red Ryder BB gun and here I was a flowerdy ghost!

As I sat on the bus, with my costume in a brown paper bag…I eased my hand in and flipped the edge of the costume inside out…alas…the flowers shown thru on both sides!  My mind went into overdrive trying to think how I was going to convince my brother that my costume was better than his!  But I must have worn out my tongue on convincing him that we could get store bought costumes because he was having none of it.  He told me in no uncertain terms where I could stick my flowerdy ghost costume!  So I sat the rest of the ride in silence as I thought of all of my buddies to whom I had bragged to about my Dracula costume…however was I going to live this down?

When I got to school, I let everyone know that I had forgotten my costume.  And being the lying conniving little turd that I was, I also told them that it was a Dracula costume I had forgotten.  This held true until my brother’s buddies came around…then the flowerdy ghost story came out!  Once the truth came out…there was nothing else to do, but eat my words!  Needless to say when I came time to wear the costumes I refused to wear mine and just went as myself!

Long story short…if you have the chance to be a cowboy or anything you want to be…always be a cowboy!  There is no shame in being a cowboy….but there is plenty of shame in being a flowerdy ghost, especially if you mouth gets you in that ghost costume!

Keep your tongue from evil and your lips from telling lies.

Psalms 34:13