Halloween

Originally Posted Thursday, October 31, 2013

It is pumpkin time again.  I used to have a girlfriend who did marvelous things with pumpkins.  She toasted the seeds and made pumpkin pie from scratch.  She made other dishes, too, but it was all long ago and I can't remember everything.  I've not met anyone who has cooked with pumpkins since.  But I remember how delicious those pies were.  There are millions of pumpkins lying about right now.  Surely somebody I know will make me a pumpkin pie. 

I've been woken the past two nights by a bright light shining through the transom window in the bedroom.  The moon.  It is small but the light is strong and direct like a laser.  It does not keep me awake.  I move my head and go immediately back to sleep.  It does not often shine, though, through my transom window.  It is somehow always welcome. 

I'll need to buy some candy though there are not so many trick or treaters any more.  My beautician was complaining that none of her friends were doing anything for Halloween.  "We are getting old," she said.  It made me think how long it has been since my friends have done anything like throw a party.  On formal occasions, of course, but there used to be something all the time.  It is programmed into us, I think, this need to get into groups trying to find something.  You think it is adventure, you think it is something else, but it is always one thing.  Once you've had it or had it and lost it, or had it and lost it and had it and lost it, you are not so anxious to go looking any more.  There comes a time when you cant imagine standing around a beer keg. 

The boy in the photograph is almost too old to trick or treat now.  I think he is, but you know, with sixty being the new forty, fourteen is the new ten.  Whatever.  I don't know if he will be going out or not.  Perhaps it is time for him to go to parties.  He is on the cusp.  His time for anxiety hormones, the hip-hop jerking of head and limbs, is nigh.  He, too, will want what everyone wants, will look for what everyone else is looking for, and he will think, as we have thought for the millenniums, that if he can reach out far enough, if he can get it in his grasp. . . .

The green light at the end of the dock.  The great green breast of a new continent.  Boats against the current. . . .