Trick or Treat
It’s Halloween and I’m out on the mean streets where the kids are going store to store with their mom or their dad or even both before sunset. They’re pint sized fairies and waist high pirates, sawed off goblins and short skeletons. They’re way cute, mostly 4 or 5 years old, still unspoiled, I’m guessing … or just hoping. My bartendress where I’m currently holed up for a pint of my own spirits is garbed as an Old West hooker. Ah, innocence.
I suppose I could reminisce about my early Halloweens, packs of us kids in sheets and homemade outfits, going door to door, trick or treat, mostly treat. But I’m remembering instead my first weeks at the Univ. of Wisconsin in Madison, fall of 1968. Everyone seemed to be in costume. Bell bottoms and hippie gear, wild hats, long hair, biker boots, an academia of Fellinis and Timothy Learys, strange trips, acid music —- Halloween every crazy day before the riots and the bombings and the rage. I was the kid from the small northern town, naïve as a polyester fairy holding out my pillowcase.
I’ve grown old since then, but occasionally find myself in a place cast adrift from normality, wide-eyed, a little fearful, the ground grown mushy. Who knows? The world isn’t what we think — we just pretend. We hole up, stay put, find routines, all in the unstated hope we won’t discover our life wasn’t what we thought, wasn’t what we thought at all!
It’s Halloween. By dark the kids will be back home watching TV, eating too much crap candy. I’ve still got chores, places to be, a long drive back down the highway where the giant goblin maple leaves will skitter and swirl in the rain and wind, ghosts in the headlights. The lights will be out when I park at the top of our hill drive. The house will be nothing but a creepy silhouette in the moonless night. Fir trees will tower overhead. In a dark corner, barely discernible, a shadow might move, a future just imagined, a dream not yet dreamed. Trick or treat!
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