a Halloween memory

                                               Halloween

    Among all events of my life, among all holidays both real and imagined, this odd time to which we have assigned the name Halloween, the eve of All Saints Day, the night of ghosts and goblins, the time of spells and tricks, of costumed visions come door to door... of all the lasted, quick, and ever enduring celebrations, among all events and after all else, I cling with unreasoned fondness to this most unlikely of holidays.  Christmas is excess and Easter too heavily colored with torture and death.  But, oh, Halloween, and first grade cutouts of black cats and yellow moon-slivers, of witches and brooms, of orange crayons blending pumpkins across off-white construction paper.  That blissful promise of enough candy to keep me sick for two full days.  What mere church spectacle could compete with clowns and lions and wolves and dancers and tramps and ghouls, trooping together along our road? 

     I remember black-rain evening, soaking-feet, and bags of Clark bars and cinnamon apples, licorice and popcorn balls. Once there were pennies from old man Vetter, whose wife had died and who had nothing to give us but pennies, which we accepted with loud praise, for we were children, blessed with morality unfettered by time.  Oh, Halloween, long-lost time under inky night, long-lost dreams in the pale moonlight.  Oh, sweet, autumn-ending evening.

     My mother constructed me once as a terrible leopard.  She had a charm about her that manifested in her ability to sew up anything I could imagine.  I imagined a leopard, and a leopard I became, with spots and fangs and whiskers and, best of all, a long, fat tail.

   On the cherished day, we were allowed to wear our costumes for the playground parade.  I was a leopard in the bus on the way to Davidson School.  Stan Bennett, A boy from the neighborhood, was a store-bought Mighty Mouse, older and bigger than me.  He proclaimed his hatred for all cats and tore off my tail.  I carried it in my hand all day, a most unleopard-like sight.  However, my mother reattached it before dinner and off I went.  Oh, it was darkest Africa there along our road that night.  I growled myself hoarse and ate myself sick and slept along the edge of dreams.   How I fought to stay the night, to keep it near me long enough that it would forget how to become morning.

     Even now I can feel the knife that cut my finger the first time I was allowed to make the eyes and teeth of our jack-o-lantern.  I can hear Danse Macabre on the old phonograph at Al Wagner’s when he danced around, half full of bourbon, making terribly wonderful noises that haunted my sister and filled me with visions of skeletons and graveyards and gray, marble tombstones.  I remember the smell of leaves fallen wet along the road, the barking of dogs, candlelight pumpkins on porches, and old people who made us impatient with their guessing of our masked faces.  I remember the Kaufman’s shopping bag with handles my mother gave me for my candy, forbidding me to ruin a pillow case in the rain.  When we reached the end of our road, we walked the mile and a half back home, eating peppermints and licorice whips in silence.

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     Somewhere in my storied past there is a moon, ivory and full, low along the edge of the world, shadowed with winded, dark clouds that pass across its face, harried shades in that autumn-ending blackness.  There in the after-rain, where the road is slick obsidian, I walk, little person, clown or dragon or sword-sheathed hero, down our narrow road, filling my bag with the past, forgetting to politely refuse the fancy-wrapped bundles of time placed so carefully in my hands.