After my dad died and I had written a play loosely based upon the life of Sequoyah which was performed by my fourth-grade class, my mother got the position of director of the Ada Arts & Heritage (helpful exterior picture here). It had been the public library, and was imposingly colonial, a marble rotunda, and multiple rooms full of formal furnishings. So I would lounge on couches of seafoam green, reading my Poe and Dickens and L. Frank Baum, watching folks set up for events--weddings, dinners, art shows, DARS meetings. But the room of complete power was upstairs. Upstairs is always a magical place for children, drawing and calling for little footprints.

Only one room, it had the feeling of a board room. A big table dominated the center, and one could almost see cigar-chomping small-town-big-fish talking free trade and corn futures. Perpetually dim-lit, the room was a museum within a museum, tables and walls colored with beyond-yellowed photographs and books and memorabilia, which my tiny eyes could never associate with anything specific, only age.

But the most important feature of the room was the most disturbing for me. Standing firm and staunch at the end away from the stairs were two figures--bride and groom, absolutely headless. Stiff sleeves with no digits, no hands, no rings. Being somewhere around four feet tall, I was still under the height of these Washington Irving castoffs, and warily tried to look away. I couldn't help but imagine heads and hands gone. Scars? Glasses? Firey red eyes? Although it was one of my favorites, Beetle Juice never helped--Alec and Geena's promised amiability added sad history to headlessness. I'd often snuggle some stuffed animal in my bed, listening to the peacocks crying "Help!" and wonder if those clothes animated at night, holding hands and dancing above that boardroom table.