Halloween At The Crappersons'

They say that ignorance is bliss, although some of the most ignorant people out there seem to be pissed off all the time. Still, there's something to it. There are all sorts of things I remember enjoying more when I didn't know as much. And not just pâté de foie gras.

I used to be able to ignore ads for big-ass cars. But now when I see them ripping through a wetland or jolting up a rocky incline to pose like a conqueror on a precipice overlooking sacred scenery, all I can see is ruined habitat and squashed lizards and noise and clamor and poison, like a poster for everything that's wrong with humans.

And I used to like Halloween decorations more. I'm still all for it, old-school. I like when people go to the trouble of making little ghosts out of sheets and hanging them up. Or carving pumpkins for the front porch. The Halloween decoration industry has really revved up though. Everywhere you look there are gravestones, skeletons, and fake cobwebs. I approve of the sentiment. For one thing, it's all liable to scandalize Christians. Not the Jesus kind, but the kind you don't mind pissing off.

So while I generally approve of the effort involved, now it just looks like more consumption, with all that entails. It's a lot of oil. It's plastic. It's fun, and it's trash. Turns out the polyester cobwebs even snare birds. I would never scold anyone for it, but I wouldn't buy it either. Thirty years ago, if I'd seen a Tyrannosaurus skeleton, I might have wanted one, but I think twice about every such thing now. The kids' costumes are troublesome too. Lots of plastic masks. Glitter: microplastic. The coolest costumes I ever see are all homemade and have a lot of thought in them. Couple years ago we saw the most compelling pint-sized girl in a voluminous long white dress and prim collar, her hair bundled into a bun, carrying a small white book and a candle. I had to ask.

Emily Dickinson's ghost, as I live and breathe!

Well, one of the over-decorated yards in our neighborhood is at a house that gives me shivers all the rest of the year too. It's not haunted. It's just not nice. The people who live there make a point of turning away as you approach, when everyone else smiles or pauses to chat. Their lawn is an unholy green in August with the tell-tale brown patches that betray there is no healthy life therein and the only thing propping it up is frequent infusions from Chem-Lawn. Their dogs are out in a kennel. And the Halloween decorations that aren't completely plastic require power to inflate.

I mentioned the dogs to their next-door neighbor once and she told me she finally went over there one night around 11pm, in her pajamas, when their dogs had been barking non-stop. She knocked at the door, and the lady of the house appeared in the window, jutted out her lower lip and bobbled it with her finger--the poor-baby mime--and withdrew. Really? Holy shit.

When the gigantic Trump signs appeared in their windows on Insurrection Day, yes, that day, it was almost a foregone conclusion.

But they didn't have the courage of their afflictions. The signs were down the next day. They had to figure in this neighborhood someone was liable to leave a Public Radio tote bag full of shit at their door. Or seed their lawn with arugula.

Also? We know real witches.

I Used To Be Fun-Size

We have a situation.

I can only compare it to the similarly trauma-induced Toilet Paper Closet that my mother maintained faithfully until her demise.

Mom sailed patriotically through butter rationing and she was fine with painting the seams on her legs in lieu of stockings but she never got over the toilet paper shortage in World War II, and as long as I can remember her linen closet was stacked to the ceiling with toilet paper.

We, on the other hand, are living with a pile of Halloween candy that could block out the sun. The new topography of our kitchen counter shows up on LIDAR. The center of the pile has probably achieved composting temperatures by now.

It all goes back to a Halloween forty years ago when we bought what we thought was a reasonable, even plentiful, amount of candy and discovered, an hour in, that we had way undershot. Worse, most of the kids on our porch were dressed up as eighteen-year-olds with scowls and pillowcases. Some of them held out second pillowcases and demanded "one more for the baby at home." This wasn't fun. We phoned our neighbors to see if they had any extra candy and they were panicking also. Someone made a trip to the store to find shelves bare of everything but Tic-Tacs and tiny eyeglass screwdrivers. It didn't occur to any of us that we could turn the lights out and hide under the bed.

So ever since, we've gone way overboard, even though nothing like that ever happened again. Dave wanted to buy candy early, but I know that trick, and I held him off until about two weeks ago. Then we got a few dozen full-size bars. Dave likes to give the immediate neighbor children full size bars, and then it doesn't seem fair so he gets a bunch more full-size bars, and really we don't have that many trick-or-treaters anymore so they might as well ALL get full-size bars. And then we got a couple bags of fun-size bars just to be on the safe side. And we waited.

Then I noticed that the bagged bars were not fun-size after all, but even smaller and presumably even more fun. They were basically only a square inch of candy bar each. Which meant that it wouldn't be that big a deal to go ahead and open it up and pop a few in our mouths. A few here, a few there. How much trouble could I get into, especially during World Series season when I'm already eating salted peanuts in the shell for dinner and praying for a sweep so my colon can recover? The day before Halloween, after we'd gone ahead and opened up the second bag, I was at the store and decided to restock the stash just in case we ran low. The lady right around the corner said she'd gotten five times as many kids as we did last year, and on the Alameda Ridge a few blocks away word was they got 300-400. I got another couple bags of actual fun-size bars, and then another couple just in case.

Not sure what happened after that. We stuffed all we could into the cabinet and some of it whelped. There was a Baby Ruth and a Snickers left out on the counter and Jesus showed up in the middle of the night and loaved and fished them. Then we had three bowls the size of God's satellite dish filled with fun-sized bars with itty bitty bars to spackle up the spaces plus a solid forty full size candy bars not including the twelve we thought were full size but turned out to be packages of eight fun-size. Each.

The six small children who showed up did real well.

Six. Real well.

The good news is I'm finally out of salted peanuts in the shell. Should have bought some more toilet paper, though.

Things That Go "Just Dump The Bowl In The Bag" In The Night

Hands down, the Halloween costume I loved best was the leopard outfit from fourth grade. And I would remember that costume even if I hadn't peed in it on the way home from the parade. It was a spotted beauty, an all-in-one triumph of plush that zipped up the back, with a separate slip-on head. There was no wire in the tail and no plastic on the face, so all the animation and glee emanated unfiltered from its occupant. I didn't wet myself again until after I was old enough to drink beer.

For the parade, we all marched around the blacktop at John Marshall Elementary, witches and ghosts and fuzzy leopards in Buster Brown shoes. There were prizes, and I was confident I'd be a contender. But, to my horror, the first place went to Cynthia, frothy in pink and white tulle, blond curls bobbing from her recent Toni, a fairy princess with a tiara and wand. Why would anyone, I whined, want to look all foofy like that, if they could have leopard fur instead? Why should that win the prize? It was a startlingly apt foreshadowing of adolescence, which I didn't understand either.

Sadly, I outgrew the leopard suit, and there followed several years of Hobo attire, a costume based on what we had (stick, bandanna, tin cups) and what we lacked (money). My sister Bobbie took me out trick-or-treating and we used pillowcases for the booty, which at least allowed us to outscore the princesses holding out their tiny plastic pumpkins.

As teenagers, we didn't dress up, but Halloween parties started up again in college. I took a page from the hobo handbook by using what I had (vats of eye makeup) and what I lacked (modesty and parental supervision). Gypsy, Mata Hari, Exotic, all were variations on an age-old theme. Eventually my need for this sort of attention waned and I was able to get more creative again.

As an earnest hippie mama in my first apartment, I prepared for trick-or-treat duty from the grownup side of the door. I filled a bowl with polished apples to distribute to a grateful public and waited for my first customer. She was a frothy white angel and she stood before me, three feet tall, feathery wings spread wide, holding out her bag and smiling like a pageant queen. I made suitable admiring comments and dropped a shiny apple into her bag, whereupon she peered inside, looked up and said--batting her eyelashes beneath her halo--"You broke my fucking cookies!" Apples have never been a good idea.

My first Halloween in this house, I was much better equipped to greet trick-or-treaters, and with a large bowl of candy bars in hand, I answered the bell to behold a truly frightening sight. A single child in a cheap plastic mask slouched at the door, backed up by his entire family from older siblings to aunts and uncles and grandparents, none over the age of thirty and all holding out king-size pillowcases like threats. I fed the gaping maws like a finch provisioning a nest of condors, and then the last one gave the pillowcase one more shake, curtly requesting "some for the baby at home." A vision came of the baby, left behind to hold down the fort with the TV, a carton of cigarettes and a sippy-flask. I looked down the street and saw similar hordes on the horizon. Within a half hour I was in a state of panic and searching the pantry for more goods to feed the bag man. I called the neighbors for reinforcements, found them in the same boat and sent emissaries to the grocery store, which was down to crackers and Jujubes.

The next year we laid in an enormous cache of candy bars, distributed them to the fourteen adorable children who came up to the porch, and had several hundred pieces left over. So that worked out.

On those occasions we were invited to parties as adults, we did our best to dress up. My Black Widow Spider was spooky enough. But nothing sent people screaming in terror down the highway like my greatest inspiration: Postal Worker. Behold, and try not to wet yourself.