BOO!

I have a ghost in my casa here in Mexico. I call her Julia because she steals my jewelry. She especially covets my wedding ring. Forgive me if I have already told you this story but, hey, I'm a drunk and you know how we like to repeat ourselves. Julia will take my wedding ring and hide it in the damnedest places and I won't be able to find it for weeks. One time I found it behind the toilet paper under the bathroom sink. But this last time she was really tricky. I had left my ring on the bathroom counter right out in the wide open, if you could call any place on my bathroom counter "wide open" with its jumble of beauty, pain relieving and digestive paraphernalia. She swiped it. I came home later that night after a night out at some bar and it was gone. I surreptitiously moved bottles and appliances around so not to alert the cap'n that once again my ring had gone missing. I went through all of the drawers. I looked behind the toilet paper. Nada. After days of telling the cap'n that I was cleaning, he knew better so I confessed to him that Julia had struck once again. Being the doubting Thomas that he is, he looked himself. He moved and shuffled everything that I had moved and shuffled five times by now and he finally admitted that I was right, the ring was gone. It will show up, he reassured me. As I said, this has happened before. Later on that night I was sitting on the toilet and decided to say one last prayer to St. Anthony, the patron saint of lost things, and when I finished my novena I looked over on the counter there was my ring, shining in the dark. Of course, Julia only comes around when I'm drunk. She doesn't scare me. It's the other ghosts in the house that scares me. Me. I am petrified of the ghost I become. The hag that haunts the house with her uncombed hair and empty eyes after a binge. I don't particularly care for the garish, shrieking poltergeist I become when I'm drunk either. Maybe I need to say a novena for myself.

Dear St. Anthony,

Please come around,

Something is lost and can't be found.