Thank You Mr. Criswell

Photograph by Kendra Maurer

I don’t remember the first time we met.

Just that he and his wife were the neighbors to one of my dearest friends, Kim.

She had insisted we meet because we all believed in the same weird shit. Ghosts and UFO’s and BigFoot and all the things that people don’t like to admit they believe in. I felt at home there, and I can close my eyes right now and recall every detail of the house; the way the vaulted ceilings played with light and sound, the way his wife’s collected angels were arranged in unblinking congregations. The chill when the front door would open and a stiff, Indiana wind would rip through the house. The smell of carpet and fried food.

His collection was information, stored in overstuffed envelopes, audio tapes, VHS, DVD, thumb drives, floppy discs...a labyrinth of curiosities where I first heard people speak seriously about cryptids in first person.

“I saw a BigFoot,” and “The dogman was right here.”

I suppose that’s why I felt so comfortable with him, but it still took me a while to tell my own first person tale. Some nights we would watch some footage and talk about what we saw, what it meant. Admittedly, some accounts were so hard to believe because the teller seemed so lost, but in the end, it doesn’t matter what I believe. What matters is what the teller believes.

Some nights, I went back to Kim’s place terrified of the hundred feet of darkness between their back doors.

One night, everything synched.

We figured out he grew up a half mile where I lived as a child in Fairfield, Ohio. Along the same creek hemmed in by back yards. He had just graduated from the same high school a decade before I was born (the building he went to was the freshman building when I was there). The priest who married them was the very priest my parents would take us to visit in Oldenburg, Indiana and we talked about the horses and the pond near where the priest had lived.

All of that, and we had never met until Kim. But Kim is her own magic and her own story of love, loss, ghosts, and synchronicity.

In the months before his passing, he had started a small data collection group called IPUS, or International Paranormal UFO Society, and he had asked me to be a part of it.

I was for a short time, but life and my own fears took me in a different direction. I suppose in some ways, I was trying to leave “all that” behind and pretend I could be taken seriously if I talked about grownup stuff all the time. Plus, there were people far more passionate, and much more organized who would take up the reins when he passed. I don’t honestly know what has become of all of that, but I hope they’re still out there.

It took a decade or so before finally just surrendered to the notion that being taken seriously is too much work, and leaves little room for creativity and wonder.

That’s my jam. Wonder. That’s what Dick brought out in people: the wonder of it all and I miss him and the plans we made. 

So, in many ways all of this—my embracing my weird and being public about it is in his honor.

I’m left with a few things he gave me. An ice cold rock that never warms, and this license plate that I am now nailing to my wall to remind me to always wonder. 

Take me seriously or don’t. The choice is yours.

But if you take my hand, I will wonder with you.