Don't Be Dumb Tonight

I believe in the young, who in many ways are miles ahead of the rest of us. Still, they do make some super-dumb moves at times.Below, four tales by way of illustration. Let's call this a Halloween Night Sermon For Us All.'EXAMPLE ONE : On a morning suddenly overcast, a young person called home from his workplace to ask his dad to put up the windows in his car, which was parked on the street. “Sure! Where are the keys?” his dad asked. “Where they always are: in the ignition,” responded the kid.“You leave your car on the street? Unlocked? With your keys in the ignition?” squeaked the dad in disbelief. “You don't think it might get stolen?”“Oh no,” said the kid. “Who would do that?” Let's see, I can’t help thinking here: Maybe the person who took my neighbor’s bike right from his garage? Maybe the one who took my baby's stroller from off my front porch and pitched it in the lake? Maybe one of the five separate individuals who stole my car on five separate occasions?EXAMPLE TWO: A s16-year-old girl took a notion to go running. At 10 at night. On a street with narrow twisty roads. “But it’s not safe to run now, especially not there!” her mother told her. “Don’t be silly!” replied the daughter. “There aren't even any streetlights!” (Huh?)EXAMPLE THREE: One morning at a convenience store, a young stranger stocking shelves turned to me with a radiant smile and said this: “I get off work at 2:00 every day. Then I take a shower and go get drunk.”  “You don't mean that,” I said. “I do. I get drunk! Every day! Right after work!” “You'll regret that one day," I said. “Maybe when I’m 40," said the kid.(If you GET to be 40, I thought.)EXAMPLE FOUR, and this by way of showing that I have been plenty dumb myself: When I was 18, I used to hitchhike. Kids did back then. Of course I always wore my good blue dress to show I was well brought up. I hitchhiked to western Massachusetts. I hitchhiked to New Haven, Connecticut. But when I hitchhiked to Cambridge to see the boy I would one day marry, he said I showed bad judgment.It took putting my thumb out that next weekend to show me how right he was:The man who pulled over that day had baby gear in his back seat of his car and looked a lot like Mister Rogers. When I approached his passenger-side window to find out his destination, he asked if I would do a particular thing. When I recoiled in horror, he asked if I would maybe just watch.I hung up my thumb then and there.And so, in this final hour before the blowout that Halloween night now is, I would say only this to the young: Sooner or later Time will claim your bike and your baby carriage; your brand-new car and that bright young sparkle in your eye. Earth is a beautiful place and and it's ours to live in. But it's also the place where we will die. It just seems foolish to invite an early departure. Other than that I say have a ball! 

Shake Not Thy Gory Locks at Me!

"Shake Not Thy Gory Locks at Me!" That's Macbeth, talking to the bloody ghost of Banquo who shows up at the palace just after Macbeth has ordered the death of  his old best friend. Scary, that image of a split scalp and bloodied hair..And speaking of scary, here are some images to stop you in your tracks: Pictures of how kids used to look when they went out on Halloween. Worse than any creepshow mask you can buy today eh?Hope you all got through the big night safely and are happily enjoying your loot today. Don't forget to brush and floss after, is all! :-)

Not So Spooky

It’s not just that Halloween comes around now. You’re drawn to the spooky anyway at this season, with the bones of the world emerging through the trees; the branches scratching like dead man’s fingers at window panes icy to the touch.When I was little, we went once with our cousins to a tall old ruin of a house, abandoned and alone on a hill. We stole inside and crept around. We looked down the parched throat of a long-gone toilet. "See that rusty stuff in there?" the eldest among us said. "That’s blood!" We shrieked, and bolted, and ran all the way home.Funny: I live in a house like that now, though it teems with life still. I sit by the hour in the little window seat of its second-floor study.  Just outside the glass, when there’s a wind, the ivy outside waves like the Queen at the parade passing before it.  In summer, the ten-thousand hands of its leaves are shiny-green. Now they are red-tipped, or vermilion throughout. "Ivy rots the shingles!," the experts shout when the talk turns to house-painting.  "Ivy is ruinous!" "Tell it to the birds," I think, the birds who shelter and practice their scales there, all safe and hidden in its rustling depths. Once a decade, the painters come and strip the ivy to the ground. But almost before the year is out, it has grown back, clear to the roof, nearly - and we secretly cheer it on.When David and I were in our twenties and babies still in every way, we bought a little apple orchard way up in Maine that belonged to a dead man named Luce.  This land was inexpensive because it had no electricity and no water on it.  The old man, who had been born on the land, sold it for not much money to some city-slicker who immediately doubled the price and sold it to us. Shortly after this, Luce died. Some said it was the humiliation that killed him. A neighbor that first year asked us if he could graze his cows on our land; it would keep the grass down, he said. Sure, we told him, and went back to building a cabin that looked like the Three Little Pigs’ House of Sticks. We used to go there for weekends, and cows as big as oil burners watched us as we set fire to our steaks, to our marshmallows,  to our very selves, on some nights. After eating, they watched us walk the orchard’s 20 acres.We often stopped to wonder at the clump of vegetation growing together by the road -  birch and aspen, and a riot of blackberry - a strange sight on this land, cleared but for the tidy rows of apple.  Finally, one day we looked closer: The growth sprang from a cellar-hole, the foundation of the house where Old Man Luce was born.Structures crumble, the message seems to be, but loveliness grows up from the ruins. And though Winter seems like death to us now,  it is only Winter. Would the noble geese leave us had they not made reservations for next year’s visit?The part of our house covered in ivy is a small turret capped at the top by a pointy princess-hat of a roof. Under it, on the second floor, is my curve-ended study with its window seat. Under that is the equally arc-shaped end of the living room where we put the Christmas tree each year."When I die, lay me out here inside the curve of this turret," I used to tell our kids. Never mind rented men in a set of rented parlors, I say. "Invite the world, give 'em lots of food and drink, and laugh as much as you like. ""OK!" they answer in chipper fashion. They don’t find it strange or macabre, because they were kids, and kids understand this truth best of all: the Old Growth dies to make way for the New.  Scary? Nah, it's not scary.That little cat at the top is mostly just ...curious!

Today It's All a Lovely Blur

I’m sleeping like the dead now. Our little guys and their parents have been here since Sunday morning and it’s lively times all right. Their power went out at 11 the night of that freak October blizzard. There was a kind of pop! and then that eerie silence.No clunking of the ice-maker in the fridge.No purring furnace.Just the shrieking  wind and the ticking of the slowly-cooling house. They said it was freezing by morning, yet for hours they couldn’t get out: fallen trees across both ends of their road. Finally they did get out, and came here with bags and boxes of food rescued from their fridge. Also, play clothes, work clothes and - of course! - costumes. So Sunday we ate their food, did loads of wash fluffed a whole bunch of pillows, and were all IN OUR BEDS by 8. Then yesterday the day bloomed and faded and Halloween came and as the picture shows, it was all a lovely blur.Two gangs of kids came to our front door and then immediately afterward, to  our back door. (We live on a corner. They thought it was a different house.) Our little guys got asked to a pre-trick-or-treating pizza-fest by the nicest neighbors in the world and by 7:30 we were all sitting by the fire, divvying up the loot.Whew! I myself was up  until midnight last night, finishing all the work I hadn't done by day - that's me below - but it's been one swell time all the same!

Not Exactly Princesses

Remember how boys used to just Trick or Treat as hobos in outsized jackets with coal smeared on their faces and pillowcases to stash the goodies in?  My sister Nan and I went out as hobos ourselves, but we weren’t your typical little girls. For one interesting period, she used a dead cat in an alley as a departure point for a whole series of lectures on decomposition and the Mortuary Arts. We'd visit that poor Flat Stanley of a thing the way pilgrims visit a shrine. We would have Trick-or-Treated carrying it around with us if we’d been just a little more daring.But to get back to the customs regarding boys’ costumes:Have they ever changed! These days males of every age are willing to don costumes as elaborate as the girls’. They’ll be going out dressed to the nines, as Transformers or Power Rangers, as classically tragic bad guys like Darth Vader, eyeless and wheezing inside his giant black helmet. Some may even show up as poor old Nixon in that hideous mask Christina Ricci wore in The Ice Storm's middle school sex scene. And the point will be what it's always been: To startle. To counter expectation.We had a good friend back in the day. Didn't smoke. Didn't drink. Took old bikes from the dump, fixed them up good as new and gave them to kids who didn't have bikes. On the Halloween immediately following some madman's murder of several people by slipping poison into some Tylenol bottles, this friend took his kids around for Trick or Treat, himself dressed as.....a giant Tylenol capsule. He was actually surprised when another dad offered to punch his lights out.THAT escapade countered all our expectations.Partying indoors on Halloween will of course reduce your chance of getting punched - and you can still surprise your friends, as when the dedicated beer guzzler comes as a Mormon elder, or the biggest Don Juan in the group comes as the Pope.I never went in for a super-girlie look; never wore makeup. But for one Halloween party we threw, I came as Cher, in heavy mascara, a leopard skin body-stocking and a giant wig exploding in cascades of inky curls. I looked ridiculous. It was great. And Old Dave dressed like Sonny and looked even better in a peasant shirt, baggy harem pants and a Prince Valiant wig. He actually looked more like the early John Denver, or Moe of Three Stooges than either of those two, but still - he SEEMED to himself as Sonny Bono.And that's the fun of Halloween, getting to seem like someone else for a while.Maybe I’ll dress up myself tomorrow night. I like this costume quite a bit. And what's nicer than dining out on one of your major holidays?Now let's watch that cute pumpkin video from Google and all turn to each other and yell "Happy Spooky Day!" (And I'll just run and get that cat. :-) )[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=FPAa7BqgSbw]