Driving past that old adobe in El Cajon with the red tile roof, I often think of what I saw that Halloween night in 1964 when we lived there.  The narrow lot with many orange and lemon trees looks as I remember and someone has cut the spreading pepper tree away from the shed while the high concrete wall still shields the occupants from view.
  My daughter was a student at San Diego State University at the time, and our son was away in Texas in the Air Force.  Vicki had announced that she and Mike, her fiancé, would be going to a costume party that night at Mike's sister's.  We saw them off, sans costumes, as they were dressing up there later.
  Bob and I spent our usual Friday evening, tired from our jobs and the long work week, he at GD and myself as the RN Super at 32nd Street Naval Clinic.
  It must have been around 2:00 AM, when something woke me.  I could discern two figures at the foot of our bed, one taller, both wearing big sombreros, hiding their faces in the dim moonlight; in typical peasant wear, with rebozos over their shoulders.  They didn't speak or gesture and all I remember is falling back on my pillow asleep, thinking Mike and Vicki wanting to show off their costumes which I was too tired to acknowledge.
  "They were here, alright" I mentioned to Bob the next morning.  Our heavy bedspread had been lifted from the foot of the bed and draped in the hall on the telephone table.  He had slept through the "visit" but no Vicki to be seen; her bed untouched.
  That afternoon, Saturday, Vicki came running into the house.  "Why did you and Mike come into our bedroom in your costumes last?  I was too tired to wake up."
  She looked at me quizzically and said, "Mom, it was so late when the party ended, I spent the night with Mike's sister. I didn't come home."
  Strange . . . odd?  Since then I have tried to analyze the seemingly solid two figures I saw plainly and the obvious fact they were there, with the spread moved but no sign of anyone entering the house -- doors securely locked and windows intact.
  Were they peasants who had owned and occupied that space in another time or had they been buried in the area under the old adobe?  Why did they not gesture or say a word if they could speak and why so obvious a clue as moving a heavy spread?  Why Halloween?

  The only conclusion I could reach was that Time, as Stephen Hawkins a cosmologist puts it, flows back forward and backwards and somewhere in that flow of events, a curtain is now and again lifted, and what I saw were two figures from a long ago period who found themselves in our room, our house and maybe wanted us to know they had been allowed a brief visit to the present.