A Sixty-Year-Old Mystery

We all have memories from childhood we’ll never forget: fun stuff like all the adventures and misadventures while growing up with the neighborhood kids. But then there’s stuff from childhood that remain a mystery. This story is about one of those. Recently, in the middle of the night, Yours Truly solved a mystery…a sixty-year-old mystery.

For the start of the mystery, we must travel back to the place where most of my stories originate: that simpler place a long, long time ago on that old familiar street not so far away called Flamingo. 

To say that Valentine’s Day in Old Mrs. Crabtree’s third grade class had been a disappointment would be an understatement. It was a total disaster – at least for me. Candi Samples hadn’t answered my question about being my Valentine, and it was devastating. It wouldn’t be until the fifth grade that I learned she’d never gotten that last card I sent asking the question because she went home sick. Such information would have let me sleep that night. Instead, I was still fully awake at midnight. And, if I’d been sleeping, I’d likely never have heard what I heard. 

The sound of a sixty-year-old mystery being born.

At first, I thought the constant banging was Twin Brother Mark playing yet another game in the middle of the night to bug me. I was about to throw my pillow at him when I heard, “Did you hear that?” 

Throwing my pillow anyway, I answered, “Yeah. Thought it was you.”

“Nope. What is it?”

In the darkness of our bedroom, my pillow returned with force right to my head, “Ouch…good aim. Don’t know.” My return volley missed its mark (no pun intended), instead hitting the desk lamp and sending it to the floor with a crash. While we were arguing whose fault it was that the lamp was broken, the banging sound grew louder…and closer. 

Mark leapfrogged over the dark void between his bed and mine and landed square on top of me. “That sounded like it came from right outside!”

Immediately I thought of three things. First, Mark had gotten much better at jumping in the dark from his bed to mine so I should move our beds a little further apart each night until he misses. Second, he was right. The sound was coming from outside, and it was close. Third and most importantly, Mark should be the “brave one” to open the sliding door, walk out onto the deck in the darkness, and investigate.

When I proposed that he should go and find out what was making the banging noise. He answered with a resounding, “No.”

“Chicken.”

“Not chicken. Smart. You go.”

We agreed that the loser of the pillow fight would be the one to go outside and find what was making all the banging noise. And that’s how Dad found us as he flicked on the bedroom lights – in the middle of another epic midnight pillow fight. This went on for another six nights: the midnight banging, not the pillow fight. The pillow fight ended right after Dad finished yelling, “STOP fighting! Who broke that lamp again? Never mind. We’ll talk about this in the morning.” He turned, flicked off the lights, and slammed the bedroom door, leaving us in the dark again. We heard him stomping down the hallway and calling back to us, “You kids, go to bed!” 

With Dad gone back to bed and the banging outside ended, we finally went to sleep that night. The same banging returned, just around midnight for the next six nights, without us knowing what or who was causing it. We even braved stepping out into the darkness of our deck. We never saw anything but determined the sound was coming from the edge of the woods in the backyard. Neither of us told our parents about the midnight noise, partly because we didn’t want them to know we were up at midnight and partly because we didn’t want to admit we were really scared.  

I’d never forgotten that week, and ever since, I still get an uneasy feeling standing on our back porch at nighttime and looking off into the darkness. I listen to the many sounds, but I’ve never heard that banging noise. That is until two nights ago.

Restful sleep is elusive when you pass a certain age, and unfortunately, I passed that age a long time ago. This explains why sometimes I wake around midnight and find it difficult to return to the world of slumber. Such was the night I heard the banging sound emanating from just outside our bedroom window. The more I listened, the more the sound became strangely familiar. It was the very sound the eight-year-old me was so fearful of and couldn’t identify. After an hour, the banging ended. Just like it had so many years ago.

The next night I was better prepared than back on Flamingo. Sitting in my recliner I was armed with battery-operated spotlight and the latest iPhone. Right around midnight the banging started, and it was coming from our backyard. Carefully I opened the door to the deck, crept out and over to the far side. In pitch black I waited. The leftover warmth of the rare eighty-degree day wrapping its hand around me gave little comfort. 

Suddenly the banging started again, I aimed and pushed the button flooding the woods with a solid beam of white light. What I saw solved the mystery in an instant. The banging had come from a giant, red-headed woodpecker, a bird native to Georgia and found in suburban areas year-round, especially in the spring. The next day I spotted our new friend and took a few pictures of not only him, but his new home he had banged out in our back yard.    

And finally, for the record, I told Dad it was Mark who broke that lamp some sixty years ago this week. And if Mark is reading this story, sorry, not sorry. That’s what you get for hitting me in the face with that pillow…a long, long time ago in our bedroom, on that old familiar street not so far away called Flamingo.