I love Halloween. Always have. As a kid I spent days planning my costume. Originality was important and of course other than one of those plastic masks from Woolworths - the kind with an elastic band to hold it on, no one really bought costumes. They were put together from hand-me downs, or thrift stores, or mom stayed up late a couple nights on the sewing machine trying to figure out a Butterick pattern.
We wore our costumes to elementary school in the afternoon and had a parade around the block, before sharing room-mother baked cupcakes at the classroom party.
I remember dressing up as American Gothic with my younger brother. We were in Jr High. He wore the dress and I wore the overalls and carried a pitchfork. We were a hit. In college, I was a carrot and the orange VW bug I drove had been decorated to look like a jack-o-lantern. I remember that first Halloween of adulthood for three specic reasons: 1) I had to drive with my carrot top head stuck out the top of bug's 'sunroof' (you rolled it open with a handle), 2) there was a guy at some college house Halloween Party dressed up as Bugs Bunny; he had an interesting play on words that he just wouldn't leave alone all night, and 3) in costume but underage - I didn't get carded at local bars. A coup of questionable but memorable accomplishment.
Tonight people were in the streets. Not to protest. Not to yell. There was no "US" - there was no "THEM". Just my neighbors. Neighbors I did not all know, but still MY neighbors. Out with their myriad of little, princesses, Freddy Krugers, scarecrows, 1 - Elvis, 1 Slash (guitarist - very cool), 1 10 year old "Can of Beans", and at least 1 "old man with a scar." A wonderful, cool, brisk, classic autumn Indiana night.
Tonight is the first Halloween in almost 20 years I haven't bundled up a little boy to hold by the hand, or later nagged an emerging young man to dress warmer, be careful, and behave as he ran out the door dressed in his own version of something goofy, bloody, or of questionable taste. They're men or almost men now.
Tonight I missed that part of Halloween. Tonight I had a plug in jack-o-lantern with a light bulb on the porch as the flu and too many hours of work limited decorating ambition. But today for the first time, I think, I realized that I was celebrating something so deeply Amercian. Halloween requires no explanation from anybody. No blogs, or cable, no commentary necessary. Not from the middle aged guy dressed in a Toga pumping gas on the corner, not from the guy trying to blow man-made fog in his yard down the street, not from the teenage girl with red-ruby slippers - picnic basket on arm - running around WalMart. We get it. All of us - regardless of age, region, gender, race, education, party affiliation, or wealth.
Soon the young men who swore 'they woudn't eat one piece of candy' until I could scrutinze every wrapper like a surgeon stitching microscopic nerves, will have their own princesses and ghoulies by the hand. And like me, and their grandparents before me, they will eventually and nervously guide a little hand holding a big knife to cut a triangle eye into a slippery pumpkin. They'll bundle up and hope they are the only Can of Beans out tonight.