Bruce’s Ghostly Story
It was 50 years ago, but I remember it like it was yesterday. It was a Sunday morning in the spring, my next-to-last semester at the University. I was in my bed in the house where I was raised. It was during a weekend visit with my parents in a small town about ninety miles from campus. The dream was so vivid, I laid in bed trying to make sense of it before getting dressed for breakfast and then church at the small Methodist Church my parents had attended for almost 40 years.
My dream was about Calvin who was four years older than me and had dropped out of high school at age 16, so the last time I would have seen him other than in my dream would have been seven years earlier. There were only 650 students, grades 1-12, at my school in those days, all in the same building so there was a good chance Calvin, and I would have crossed paths in any given week, but we never socialized. Calvin hung out with a rough crowd, and the last I heard he was drinking to excess.
In my dream Calvin is wearing a black suit, white shirt, white socks, and black shoes while walking very slowly across the front yard of my fraternity house at the University in the dead of night. I watch him from the front porch as he walks to the edge of the yard and disappears. There is no one else in my dream which then ends.
Sunday School at my parents’ church began at 10 AM followed by Preaching at 11 AM and in the early years of my youth there was a Sunday evening service at 7 PM. As a teenager I also attended Methodist Youth Fellowship at 6 PM. I may have experienced religious overload because to this day my mind wanders during sermons in any church. By my college years, I had graduated to the adult men’s class in Sunday School, which was led by an elementary school principal who had the very disconcerting habit of giving the entire one-hour lesson with his eyes tightly closed.
On this morning, at about the half-hour mark, my mind was in full wander mode when our teacher shared news that made the hairs on my neck stand up. This was during the “repent and be saved” part of his lesson. To stress the urgency of the message, he mentioned a young sinner whom we all knew that he had been invited several times in the past to come to our church, but to no avail. The teacher then announced it was now too late because the young man was killed last night in an automobile accident. Word traveled fast in a small town even before cellphones and the internet.
That young sinner was Calvin… the same Calvin whose ghostly image had walked through my dreams only hours before.