Day of Dew, 56th of Summer, 525 M.E. (Deneb): Strange, the memories that return to us. Was it a forgotten memory or a suppressed memory? If forgotten, how can I remember it now? If suppressed, why does it choose now to return?

Head of the Harbor is a toney, affluent village on the North Shore of Long Island. Perched on heavily wooded hills overlooking Stony Brook Harbor, it's a quiet little hamlet to which the wealthy of Manhattan can escape without all the ostentatious trappings and crowds of the Hamptons. The town was the setting for the weekend home in the American version of Michael Haneke's 2007 film, Funny Games. Its most famous current resident is probably billionaire hedge fund manager Robert Mercer, whose Renaissance Technologies is headquartered there. 

It wasn't always that wealthy. I lived there in the 1960s, the son of a schoolteacher who was able to afford a home and raise four children there on a single salary. I doubt any schoolteachers can afford homes there today, but even back then there was income inequality - some of my classmates lived in luxurious homes on the harbor waterfront, while others lived in houses even smaller than ours. One of my classmates, the daughter of recording artist Mose Allison, lived with her Dad in an ultramodern (for the time) house set back in the woods. But the mother of another classmate became so anxious about money and finances that she literally tried to rob a bank at gunpoint one day. and of course was immediately arrested, bringing shame and embarrassment on her daughter. 

And then there were those big, gothic mansions up on the hills. We kids knew nothing about who lived behind those gated driveways - no children appeared to live there and we rarely, if ever, even saw so much as a car entering or leaving. It was another, somewhat spooky, world separate and apart from ours. Who knew what went on in those big, remote homes? There were even ghost stories about one house involving a Lizzy Borden-style ax murder, a hanging, and a ghost. 

By 13, I was old enough not to believe in ghosts and bold enough that, together with some friends one Halloween, decided to go trick-or-treating at that one, scariest of all gothic mansions, the one that was the setting of that murder-and-lynching legend. It was a fairly long walk from our neighborhood, impractical for trick-or-treating on a return-on-effort basis. But we walked there anyway, in whatever Halloween costumes our parents had dressed us in, and walked through the open gate and up the steep hill to the scary house. We rang the doorbell. It was 1967.

A woman (a grown-up) answered the door and seemed both surprised and happy to see us. I'm sure we were the only trick-or-treaters that year, probably in many years. possibly ever. "Come in, come in," she insisted, enthusiastically. "Honey, come look at these adorable outfits!" 

Her husband (I assume) appeared from anther room and we dutifully posed for a few photographs. They provided some candy for our trick-or-treat bags, but our real, true goal wasn't sweets - it was to see inside the house and to prove to ourselves that we brave enough to go inside. 

"Our daughter's got to see your costumes," the Missus said. "Come in the kitchen and let her see."

We didn't know a child lived there - there was no one from our school from that house. She led us through the foyer and the large living room back toward the kitchen but just before we went in, she whispered, "She's in a wheelchair. She's hydrocephalic." 

I knew only roughly what the word meant - "water on the brain" - but I was still shocked when I met the daughter. She was wheelchair bound, perhaps the first person with that disability I had met IRL, but her enormous, oversized head seemed monstrous and grotesque to me. She wore some sort of large neck brace from which rose metal scaffolding, presumably to help her keep her gigantic head from falling over.  

At 13, I knew better than to gasp or scream, but inside of my head I was doing both. I wanted to run out of the room, out of the house, and back to my bedroom. But we all bravely stood there politely as she admired our costumes, looking us over and commenting on each of our outfits. Her speech was slurred as if she was deaf or mentally disabled ("retarded" was the word I would have used then) but in the playful back-and-forth conversation with her mother, I recognized a healthy, normal intelligence. I could tell she wasn't a monster, just a poor, unfortunate child victimized by a terrible illness and trapped in a grotesque body.

After a few minutes of inspection and discussion, we were allowed to leave and, thoroughly traumatized, we walked down the hill with a Halloween story for the ages. Except that after a few did-you-see-that's and the-size-of-her-head's, we all seemingly forgot about it. Stories thrive on repetition, and as I progressed through adolescence, I made new friends, teenage friends who wouldn't be interested in tweener trick-or-treat stories, even if there was a "monster" at the end. In short, I forgot about it, until for some reason, today. 

But to me now, though, the story isn't about getting the daylights scared out of me for daring to ring the doorbell of the spookiest house in Head of the Harbor on Halloween. It isn't about my shock or the bravery I managed to summon as I presented myself for the girl's inspection in that kitchen. It's about her - I can't imagine that she had a long or particularly happy life. It's about her parents - despite all their money and privilege, the tragedy of a gravely ill child still had befallen on them. Yet, I'm sure they still loved their daughter as much as any parent loved any child, and were so grateful for our appearance that Halloween so that they had something new and different with which to entertain their child, even if briefly.

The lesson I took from the story at 13 was that even if ghosts didn't exist, gothic haunted houses could still contain terrors. The lesson I take today is that there's suffering and sadness - the Buddha would call it "dukkha" - in even the wealthiest of homes. The lesson I learn from this is contentment and satisfaction in my own health, my own improbably long life - the blessing of my own existence.