This is a walk down memory lane to the Halloween of my 60’s childhood. Before the pandemic made the boogie man real. Before there were over 200,000 dead to remember on All Souls Day. Before I understood what we masquerade reveals about our true longing for a sweetness this life can never provide.
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Halloween costumes, my mom made them all. Second grade, a hot pink gypsy skirt with black rickrack at the bottom and huge clip-on hoop earrings that I hoped made me look like dusky Mrs. Tuthill, the only mom I knew in my suburb with pierced ears.
Third grade, a glittering green tunic over pink tights, a tight bun, and a magic wand like the one Tinker Bell waved over Disney’s castle.
Fourth grade, Davy Crockett, king of the wild frontier, in a brown cotton shirt fringed at the bottom like buckskin and a dime-store coon-skin cap. Marie, my fourth-grade best friend, powdered her face funereal white and lay down in a Salvation Army wheelchair as a corpse. I marched behind, lamenting the fact that our teacher let another kid, who happened to show up as a grave digger, push my friend in the Halloween parade.
By fifth grade I was a hobo like all the big kids. No more mommy-made costumes. Just Dad’s ripped flannel shirt, a pair of work pants stained with WD40, and a crumpled fedora.
After supper, finally cut loose to dash through the dark with the pack, I buzzed every doorbell to catch the mother lode of free candy pouring from every front door: Baby Ruths, Snickers, Pay Days, Milky Ways, whole Hershey Bars, Almond Joys, Coconut Mounds, Mary Janes, Jujubes, Sugar Babies, Sugar Daddies and more—until the bewitching hour when the last lady of the house said, “Isn’t it getting a little late?” and offered us the bottom of her bowl with only a few puny lollipops and a roll of licorice Necco Wafers.
As every porch darkened, reluctantly, I dragged my loot home and organized it on the living room rug in preparation for serious sibling trading. “I’ll give you all my Mike& Ikes for two of your Tootsie rolls and a Butterfingers.”
Next morning in math, secretly sucking on a Red Hot, how I grieved the return of plaid dresses, saddle shoes and cafeteria ravioli, as my teacher droned on about finding the lowest common denominator.
Looking back, as a second-grade gypsy, I suppose I wanted to stand out from the crowd like exotic Mrs. Tuthill. Little did I know standing out from the crowd was why she fled the Nazis in her native Hungary.
As Tinker Bell, I declared that ordinary life wasn’t good enough. I wanted to wave my wand and fly to a world where goodness always triumphed, and magic never ended.
As Davy Crocket, king of the wild frontier, I marched behind Marie’s pretend dead body, a prescient mourner unable to fight off the savage breast cancer that would one day bring my bosom friend to premature death.
As a hobo, perhaps some prepubescent dawning whispered we are all alike, homeless beggars before a gracious God.
Of this I’m sure, how I loved that one hallowed eve when every child, clothed in their naked hopes and fears, could walk straight into the heart of the Big Rock Candy Mountain.
