Happy Fathers' Day to all GNI members!

Thanks and Happy Fathers Day to all the Dads. Have a nice day .  

Happy Father's day to all you dads out there.

Hope you get that extra lil love from your kids today!

Happy Father's Day to all the GNI dads.

Spinning some Elton John for my hubby.

Please thank your dads for bringing you into this world, your mom was probably tired and not in the mood  - just kidding

I posted t his here as a "scary story" but I post it now in honor of a father I did not know very well as he died too young. Over the years I have heard many things of him and in every instance I know I have a lot to do to fill his shoes. Here is my story to him that I at least measured up a bit.

The story is essentially unedited since I wrote it at one sitting the day I posted it and never got around to truly making it tidy. Forgive the errors; hopefully the telling of the  story is satisfying to those who did not read it when it was posted and a nice revisit to those who have.

  The night I became a magician

When I was nine, I asked my dad how I can become a magician. We had just come back from a magic show and there the magician made things disappear, pulled rabbits and doves from his hat, sawed a woman in half and made her whole again, pulled coins from people’s ears and read what people were thinking. I wanted to be a magician. I asked my dad where to begin.

For some reason he had a very scary answer. He said magicians are people who have faced their most primal fears and come out ahead. He asked what my fears were and if I prepared to confront them. Well I knew immediately what I was afraid of most. My most profound fear was walking through our local graveyard at night. I knew there and then I was never ever going to be a magician.

My dad died that year. He was buried in the graveyard which was about a mile from our home we called the “reef”. It is a sandbank that was deposited there eons ago when and ancient sea covered the area. It is the only high point in our community that is  spared periodic flooding. We put our dead ancestors there so we could ensure they get a comfortable bed in the afterlife.

Unfortunately, some who died were never too please to have died and made that known. More often than not a villager would tell stories of harried encounters with the angry dead buried in this graveyard. Many barely escaped with their life after being pummeled or tossed through the air by apparitions too horrible to describe. A few deaths were attributed to these ghastly night things and many a villager who met them were never right in the head after that. Worse; these angry residents were often well known grumps you would not want to have met in real life and then there are  those who met unfortunate, untimely ends and are angry for it.

No one our community is ever surprised if a villager claimed to have been attacked by a ghost since it never doubtful that the dead often can come back  to harass the living. One especially avoided going outdoors too close to midnight on the third day after one someone has died since it is usually the first night in their ghostly reality. Once arisen they usually come home still confused to be dead and are often very angry. We had special rituals, walking in the door backward on these auspicious days so as not to give permission to the dead to enter. To keep them outside we usually placed their favorite meals outside someplace where they can at least get a meal. It is always eaten affirming the did come!

It so happened that on the day of which I speak, there was a public showing of the “Ten Commandments” at the local rice mill. I asked  permission to go and my Aunt said I can if I completed my chores. The show began promptly at 7 and despite having to walk a mile to the site I made it in time. It was a wonderful experience. One cannot but feel a sense of awe at divine grace at the end of it all.


I returned home at about 11. The lights at our home were on. We never have all the lights on that late. Something had happened. As I came in my aunt was crying. I hurried over and asked what the matter was. She said I forgot to lock the stables and my father’s prized  stallion, Reds, had walked off. He was not going to survive the night. He was big but no match for the black Morgan stallion we called Diamond. Diamond was fiercely aggressive to any horse that came around the mares in his brood and had already killed at least two other horses that entered his area. I was deeply distressed. I did not want Reds to die or be maimed. After all, I just lost my father and I could not lose his horse.

I ran out of the house, jumped on my horse Nightwind and rode in the direction of the “reef”. The horses liked to sleep there because the wind howled through the area real hard and it blew the mosquitoes away. Mosquitoes can be torture to animals in this area nights so they come  to the reef at night to avoid them.

I arrived there just in time in time. The stallions were marking each other, prancing and pawing the soil ready to do battle. I rode between them and tried to catch Reds and then Diamond since both knew me. They however did not want to be caught. I decide I was going to lasso one or the other. The horses thought they would play with me and ran ahead of me always beyond range of me lassoing them. Then it happened.

Nightwind got his leg tangled up on something. He fell, I fell. I may have been out for a bit because when I came to Nightwind  was some ways off snorting and frantically trying to distangle himself from a litter made of bamboo and decorated with ribbons and flowers. Hindus used this kind of thing habitually to bring their dead to the reef to be buried. They would leave it over the fresh mound of  the grave of the recent dead as a marker of sorts. This one covered the grave of a grumpy village drunk who in a fit of anger hanged himself three days previously on a tamarind tree in front of the home of his estranged wife’s family. Apparently the cows had moved the litter from the grave and I was unfortunate to have my horse trip on it but lucky or unlucky to have landed squat on the soft soil of the grave at midnight on the third day of of a dead grumpy drunk!

I got up slowly, I was not hurt. The soft dirt broke my fall. I could not see any of the horses.  Nightwind took off f trying to free himself of his entanglement. Reds and Diamond possible ran off to resume their fight somewhere on a distant side of the reef. I was alone. I could hear my breathing. I began to walk home.

I had to traverse a quarter of mile of marshy land before I get to a good road home. On many occasions I could hear strange howls and peculiar sounds or some bird sleeping in the grass would flutter on being awaken and startle me. I almost died a few times from sheer fright. Terror reached its peak  when I distinctly  heard multiple footsteps behind me. I dared not turn around because I knew exactly who and what I would see.

 It would definitely be the fellow with his eyes bulging, and neck all crooked and stretched as I last saw him hanging on tree where we went and gawked after they found him. He possibly had a few dead buddies with out him to practice his newly accursed ghost craft on me. When I stopped the footsteps stopped, when I walked faster, they walked faster. He was toying with me, I could tell. That is what these monsters do before they killed you in the movies. I just knew it.

After about 10 minutes of sustained terror, I could no longer stand his persecution. If he was going to kill me then I was going to die fighting like Moses in the movie I just saw. I was going to tell this ghost to get on with killing me or give him a serious tongue lashing for his attempt to scaring me. I turned around to confront him.

Instead of a fight with a ghost I was confronted with my faithful horse Night wind. He was following me home. Behind him were Reds and Diamond. Obviously they decided not to fight and formed a caravan to follow me home as well. I hugged my horse, kissed him and walked briskly home. All my friends and neighbors were gathered there. They did not know where I had run off to. They never thought I would go to the grave yard to get the horse. It never crossed their minds that anyone would be brave enough to  do that. Yes dad, I became a magician. I made ghosts disappear.

Too tired to lay in bed??/  Well, that would be lazy.

My dad is 85 and may live to 100. In Guyana, he worked at Onverwagt and built all the houses there; on Saturdays he walked from his village home to his Abary Creek home to look after his cattle ranch; then walked back home, about 14 hours total, all in 1 day. When he migrated to NYC, he walked to work for 15 years until retirement and never took the bus or train. He cared for my mom until her death last year. Now he's running his house and doing everything as best he can. All this made him a tough survivor.

Nice...hope to be like that at 85...

Bet your dad is a small thin man.

5'8", was thin in Guyana but filled out a little now. He reminds me of early mankind who took a walk from Africa to populate the globe. His mom was born on the ship to Guyana, of Calcutta origin; his dad's dad was a pandit in UP. He plants a garden every summer; packages and freezes the produce till the following year; and supplies the neighbors, friends and all of us when we visit. He has a bicycle and rides around the block every morning. The man is fit as a fiddle and never been sick.    

God bless your dad...active lifestyles do the trick for longevity.

My dad has gotten into a health freak in his older days -  blame it on Dr. Oz.

Reading the post about the great things said about your

dads,i wish i could say the same,i grew up with out a

father in our home from age 6,alcohol cause the

separation my mom will be 83 in few weeks and still

active.I am a proud dad of six kids two my biological

and four i had to make a bold decision to be their father

all are over eighteen years,and i am the best dad for them.

He and I should take a walk round de carna an tek a smoke.

GNI can be inspiring. I took at least a dozen posts I made here on the fly and turned them from their expression of something I needed to say at the time into into nice stories. I will do the same with the above. I hope to "write" a few more and publish them. I have one about your tennis rolls somewhere! Will post an couple more here later to show you what I did with posts you would possibly remember

Do the tennis roll story in braille, that book could also be used as a door stop or for chocking vehicles.

You know how many people want to know how to create cheap cricket balls on the fly? And that is only one of a dozen distinct applications for your concoction. How about we call the story tooth extraction for dummies...buy Cain's tennis rolls!

We gotta keep it off the net, others will steal it and make $$$$ on this discovery.

I do remember taking one of those things to work for a young Jamaican girl who bugged me to try it, I took it in, she threw it into the air and catching it while laughing.

Next day she told me that it was heated in the microwave, she dabbed some butter on it, voila, brukteeth buns in the making.