Life. Tricking.

At my mom's house there's a photo of me, my little sister, two sheets and two amazing masks. The little sister and I stand close to each other, little white bodies against a white wall, completely obscured in costume except for the smiles on the bottom halves of our faces. We could be anybody. We are dressed as what, ghosts? Wrapped completely in white, swathed and twisted, we're mummies? Masked accident victims? We're David Linn people. The masks are are flame-shaped and elongated, galactic cat's eyes, metallic green and gold and pink and silver. I think, as masque and draping fell to her, maybe those masks were my mom's idea of a perfect costume, unusual, beautiful, showstopping and baby, you just buy it, plunk it onto a sheet and call it wonderful. Never mind what it may or may not represent. This year you're going dressed as Halloween, kids, as Masquerade itself.

Or maybe it's Mardi Gras.

I don't remember trick-or-treating in those costumes, I do remember my dad taking us around our block in the semi-dark, soft San Diego air, passing older, bigger trickers who seemed to me very serious, professional. They scared me not because of their costumes but because of their competence. Not that their costumes weren't frightening, glimpsed through the deepening darkness as the big kids brushed past they were frightening, truly. Semi-clear masks, altering face but revealing enough feature underneath to slide the whole countenance sideways into a vague nightmare place. Painted faces, with wounds and trickling blood. Demons, witches, murderers, dead people. I was seeing dead people and my dad just walked on among them, parting the current, his hands at our backs when the going got thick. I remember one group of boys, some seemed nearly as tall as my dad, dressed up together as a graveyard. Most of them were tombstones, painted cardboard front and back, there were a couple of ghosts, an amazing dead and blackened tree-boy with a hangman's noose dangling from one of his branches who was so cool I wanted to give him some of my candy and then a terrible, hunchbacked old man with only one eye, carrying a lantern and a shovel. I had no earthly idea what he was supposed to be or what he was doing hanging around with the rest of the graveyard but I knew for sure I never wanted to meet him again, ever, waking or sleeping. It never for a moment occurred to me he had to be a young boy, like the rest. I couldn't look, couldn't look away. Last night I watched my youngest swirl away in the darkness in a group of friends and realized the graveyard boys must have been about her age, just out of elementary school. Their tombstones bewildered me.

The little sister and I walked carefully down our sidewalk, on this night become a river of the undead and the unholy, the impossibly sparkly and improbably muscled and we hoped, assumed, my dad would steer us safely; I knew he could on any other day, but Halloween dissolved and shifted boundaries, altered my child-real. Nobody I was related to ever walked these sidewalks in the dark, we certainly never knocked at a door unless we already knew who would answer. But here was our dad, pushing us to walk, alone with only each other, through the dark and scary ten or fifteen feet up the tributary walk from the sidewalk river where he said he'd be waiting, to the looming stranger door, our passage lit only by street lights, bright windows, porch lights and glowing pumpkins. Anything might have happened, we might have had to pass unaided, tiny and trembling, close by horrifying big trickers leaving the door with their take, or we might have stumbled all unawares upon a bony and strangling something just the far side of the bushes from which those colored lights and scary music were emanating and been devoured before our dad could take the five steps to save us. But there was candy behind that door, or we had reason to believe it was there, and the strangers of that house wanted to give it to us, and our dad wanted us to take it! And everybody else was doing it! Delirious, feverish. Some of those doors now, Dad came all the way up to them, ward against some elusive danger only he could sense. We knew then that here, this door was some way stranger than the others, here we went into peril for the candy. We were grateful he navigated the river for us, wise to snags and bars.

Back home Mom was watching over the baby too young to gather its own candy and she was handing out candy too, to who-knows-what might be outside when she opened the door. She told my father stories that really were not for our hearing, after we got home, after our legs were aching and our fingers were nipped by the evening chill (whatever. We thought it was cold. We were little, we lived in California and we had no idea) and tired from hauling our loot. Mom told our dad of mean and pushy teenagers, demanding more candy, asking if she didn't have something better. They came from some other neighborhood, these brash and pushy big kids, not from our well behaved newly built housing development. You may have stay here to give out candy next year and let me take the girls, she told him, and at her words we paused in our cataloging, inventorying and eating. Could she? Could our mom, could any mom, part the stream, the hoards and crowds of over-painted evil and cloyingly glittering good to get us from house to house? Could she sense the hidden dangers which might require her to walk the whole way, accompany us from the main sidewalk clear up to the most scary doors? But, then, if it were too frightening for her to be at the house alone with trickers making menacing requests for better treats...and there was that baby to think of...we were conflicted, we were exhausted. We had to just brush our teeth and go to bed, trusting to inevitable, returning sunshine that makes everything right and normal and boringly safe again. But the morning stunned and betrayed us, our pumpkins smashed and scattered, the bodies hastily gathered and hidden by our parents, almost as it the bits and pieces were the mortal remains of family pets, tortured and dismembered in the deep of the night. Halloween lingered, twisting itself into the real of day and the normal of routine. Who would do that hideous thing to a nice pumpkin that belonged to a family, a pumpkin we had chosen for our own, labored over, given a face and purpose and almost a name? Frightening, truly, and we mulled and brooded but only to ourselves, silently, feeling much less at home in the world while simultaneously and conveniently disregarding our own gutting and dissecting of the family pumpkins.

Pumpkin victims into the trash cans. Costumes into the linen closet and the toy box. Candy checked for altering and tampering, these being the days of razor-blade-in-your-apple stories, LSD in your chocolate, all the more reason our dad took us to the doors, made careful calculations. Once approved, our candy was saved and was savored, in the flow of the year we didn't see much candy. And it disappeared more quickly than seemed right, possible. More was coming at Christmas, fortunately, the Christian calender tipping wildly between stiff arming evil and embracing newly born, soft and holy saving goodness, both ends of the swing tipping generous piles of sugar into our open mouths and reaching hands. Mardi Gras it was to us, Fat and Unholy.

Why The Wizard of Oz, so perfectly attuned to this darkening and unsteady time rather than to the stabilizing and happifying Yule, made its yearly television appearance at Christmas instead of on All Hallows Eve was a mystery. Mean adults who turn into witches, wildly costumed bigger kids who turn out to be best friends, flowers that make you sleep, flying monkeys that make you crazy. And that movie was so scary! With Wizard crashing our Christmas parties we'd have to wait all the years till The Watcher in the Woods before there was a safe-to-watch Halloween companion for The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, that one also too scary for me to watch except from between my fingers. Charlie Brown felt more like it belonged at Christmas, friendly and safe and only slightly depressing, not scary. Sincerity, we all knew, was the passive sort of virtue which resulted in a delightfully filled but limited stocking, whereas pressing on against physical weariness and freezing temperatures (remember, we thought it was cold) while constantly risking attack and abduction by evil forces, these efforts put the candy in your pillowcase no matter what that blanket-carrying weirdo said, and only the limits of your own endurance determined the size of your prize. No, Dorothy defined my childhood Halloween, where everything felt terrifying but was mostly alright in the end and turned out to be actually sort of run by the friendly adults hanging out behind their curtain, except for the sorting out of the witches of course, that the kids had to manage on their own. I felt a strange sadness when we bought our kids a copy of The Wizard of Oz, stripped it from its steadying spot in the calendar. I wondered if they could possibly grow up balanced and appropriate, watching it any time they chose, never looking forward to any terror, albeit through their fingers. But it was too scary for them, as it had been too scary for me, and I felt almost gratified when my children drifted into watching it in the fall of the year, in the murk where things settle when they can't help being scary.

And then I got old and it was right to push the kids to walk ahead, in the dark, alone, but to walk all the way up to some of the doors with them, to skip some houses altogether, to tell little people three more houses and we're finished, to bring inside our home any pumpkins we had labored on too long and too lovingly to bear their untimely and violent deaths at the hands of strangers. Last night I tricked with some baby cousins, the three year old butterfly chugging steadily from house to house, complaining that her purple plastic pumpkin was getting heavy and banging her knees, informing us where the witches lived and where the dance party was being held. She looked around at us all, walking along on the wet, wet street after the rains passed over (in answer to a thousand, thousand, baby prayers) and said authoritatively "No one here is tired or cold." One year, ages ago, I made costumes for some little boy cousins and for my youngest sister, so they could go tricking in a group. My sister was Dorothy and you could see the ruby glow of her shoes even in the dark. Noah was the lion. Cute? Oh baby, you should have seen them. You could have peeked from behind your curtain, watched them walk cautiously all the way up your drive, plastic pumpkins held out as wards, as signs. We come in peace, give us candy. You'd have seen me, waiting alone in the scary night for them to come running back, ready to chug on to the next house, willing to trust me against the dark.



some Halloween photos