"You will be haunted," resumed the Ghost, "by Three Spirits."
A year ago, I contacted a childhood friend and pondered calling another. The person I'd called I'd been in touch with, sporadically, before and since. The other I've not seen since a Christmas somewhere in the 1990s. He'd crossed paths with my mother, at church, I think, and she told him I was in town for the holidays. He knocked on my door like when we were kids. Preschoolers, even. We went for a drink.
I don't even recall when we met. Both yards backed onto the bush, our term for a piece of farmer's field nature had started reclaiming in the 1950s when the neighbourhood went up. Ours were the two houses on that block without back fences. We could pass freely into our yards, in and out of the bush, which became our childhood playground. A couple times, on summer nights, windows open, I heard voices as older kids slipped through yard for quick passage. Our fathers shared the same first name. Both were men of Italian descent who had married women who weren't, differing us slightly from the street norm. We each had four older siblings: my brother and one of my sisters, as children, had played with one of his brothers and his sister.