start Let me guess.You want to know why I killed myself. Chick.Bernato's first words to me. This is a story about home.The story talks about a ghost, so you can call it a ghost story.Yet every family is a ghost story.The dead still sit at our table despite being gone for so many years. This particular story belongs to Charles (Chick).Bernato.He is not the ghost in this story.He is very real.I spotted him in the bleachers of a minor league stadium one Saturday morning, wearing a dark blue trench coat and chewing peppermint gum.Maybe you remember he used to play baseball.I was a sportswriter for a while, so the name felt familiar to me on several levels.

Looking back now, meeting him was really a fate.I went first to Pipewell Beach that day to dispose of a cabin that had been in my family's name for many years.On the way back, on the way to the airport, I stopped for a coffee.Across the street was a field where kids in purple T-shirts were practicing pitching and hitting.I still have time, so I swayed forward. I stood behind home plate, fingers on the wire fence.An old man drives a lawn mower across the grass.He was deeply tanned and wrinkled, with half a cigar in his mouth.He saw me, turned off the mower, and asked me if any of my kids were playing there.I said no.He asked me what I was doing here.I told him about the house.He asked me what I did for a job and I made a mistake and told him that too.

Oh writer is it?he said, chewing on his cigar.He pointed to a figure, who was sitting alone in the stands with his back to us.You should talk to that guy.His story is good enough. I have heard this kind of talk a lot. Yeah?What kind of story is it? He played professional baseball. oh. I think he played in the World Series. oh. And he committed suicide. What? right.The old man sniffed: I heard that it was because of his good luck that he survived instead of dying.Chick.Bernato, that's his name.His mother used to live nearby, Percy.Bernato.He giggled and said: She is crazy. He dropped the cigar on the floor and stamped it out with his foot.If you don't believe me, you can go up and ask him.

He walks back to the lawn mower.I let go.The barbed wire was rusted, and bits of iron filings fell from my fingers. Every home is a ghost story. I go to the stands. What follows is written that morning by Charles (Chick).What Bernato told me was a conversation that went on for a long time and was supplemented by his personal notes and pages from his diary, which I later found.I've combined the above sources into the following story, in his own voice, because I'm not sure you'd believe it if you hadn't heard him tell it in his own voice. Maybe, you won't believe it anyway.

But ask yourself this question: Have you ever lost someone you love and longed to speak to them again?You thought your loved ones would always be there, and now you wish you had another chance to make up for lost time?If so, you know that you can spend the rest of your life cherishing various moments, but none of them compare to the ones you wanted to get back but never got back. What would happen if you regained that time?