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THE LOST HOURSby
George Lester |  |
The
thing that I remember most was standing in the living room and realizing I had
no idea how I got there or where I had been for the past several hours. My mother
was sitting on the couch studying me with a worried look on her face and I wondered
why. For some reason I cannot fathom even today, I didn't want to ask anyone what
had happened. I looked outside and saw it was dark. Somewhere in the mush inside
my head I sensed that it was daylight when I lost everything. Try as I might,
I could not for the life of me break through the fog that blocked out what had
taken place earlier that day. I'm not sure how long I plodded around the house
hoping that something would jog my memory and help me break through the brick
wall that surrounded me. It was as if my life had just begun that moment in the
living room and before that everything was complete oblivion. My parents and my
brother spoke almost in whispers as one does when trying to keep from disturbing
a sick person. Nothing they said gave me the slightest clue as to why I was in
this quandary.
I was beginning to think the rest of my life was going
to be like this when there was a knock on the door. It was the man who owned the
farm next to ours. He exchanged small talk with the rest of the family before
he noticed me standing and staring zombie like. It was obvious that something
was wrong so he asked what had happened. The simple words spoken by my mother
as she answered him was like a bolt of lightning. She told him I had been playing
on a tree swing and when I leaned back to pump myself high into the air my head
had struck ground. It was as if a door had opened into the recent past and everything
came rushing through like a dam had burst. I started reliving those moments in
my mind. There was that awful thump as the back of my head crashed into the hard
dirt. I felt as if the life had been sucked out of my body and I was being taken
somewhere else. It wasn't one of those pleasant "tunnel of light" experiences
you read about. It hurt like crazy. My brother was shouting at me but he sounded
as if he were far off in the distance. He was telling me to pour some cold water
over my head so I walked to the back porch where the water bucket sat. I looked
down into the water and then the next thing I knew I was standing in the living
room. About four hours had been taken out of my life that I had no accounting
for. I never passed out or even lay down to recover. I just walked around in a
daze all that time.
I never connected the story related here to another
strange occurrence until I started writing. It happened more than ten years later.
I had been discharged from the Marines after World War Two and I was relaxing
on the front porch of my parent's home in New Boston, Texas. I saw some young
people I recognized walking by out on the street. I shouted a greeting and went
out to join them as they strolled home. I remember walking along and chatting
with my friends. The next thing I knew I was back sitting on the front porch and
the people were nowhere in sight. Leaving them and walking back to the house was
completely erased from my memory banks. I didn't have a watch so I had no idea
how long I had been sitting there but I noticed the sun was considerably lower
in the sky since I had last looked.
To the best of my knowledge this has
not happened since. I hope whatever injuries my brain received that day so long
ago have completely healed. If it happened again at my advanced age I'm sure it
would be credited to senility. | | |
