All Hallow’s Eve

I remember dragging shopping bags through the damp grass, bags filled with Halloween candy, praying that the bottom of the bag wouldn’t give way like it did on my cousin Debbie that one year, and how she lost all her candy in the weeds outside old lady Hutt’s house, and I didn’t care, because I never liked Debbie anyway. I remember wearing my costume to school, and how my breath condensed inside the cheap plastic mask, and how scary and powerful I felt when we prowled the streets in a mob of ten or twenty, back before the idea of vandalism or violence had ever crept into our minds.

I remember being invited by those polite and retiring gentlemen in the curious headgear to stand on the yellow footprints at MCRD San Diego, and realizing that my treat was that I’d been tricked, and that I really was going to be under the control of those maniacs for the next three months.

I remember seeing Yngwie Malmsteen open for Triumph in 1986, feeling so lucky that I’d found a good concert in Japan after arriving there as a civilian to study martial arts full time after my time in the Corps was up.

I remember rolling my eyes as my fellow Presbyterians planned their Reformation Day campfire cookout, encouraging each other to come dressed as their favorite Reformer. And I remember wondering how much Servetus enjoyed HIS Reformed bonfire.

And now I have put those things away, and I am an aging man, full of aches and regrets and musings, and I am preparing to light candles and lift prayers in preparation for the observation of tomorrow’s Feast of All Saints.

In one week, daylight savings time will be gone, and we will be back to what my grandmother called “God’s time.”

October is my favorite month of the speeding, spinning year, and now it is gone. And where did it go, and how did this happen?

Vincent Price and Roger Corman were every bit as important as Lennon and McCartney, but there remains only a miniscule group of us who watch those movies as if they were revealed truth.

The air here smells of pine and cider, of the coming ice. Snow is forecast for this coming Friday. Jinx got into a howling contest with a coyote tonight right after Mrs. Orr and I took him for a walk, and a bat flew just over our heads, and the gravestones glistened in the fading light, and I was so very sure that Peter Cushing was going to step out of the trees and ask us for a brandy.

My wife’s face is soft and somber as she reads across the room. Her nightgown looks like one of the ones the girls in the old Hammer horror movies used to wear. Her toes look like little sausages, and the dogs watch her for reasons of their own, and I have never read Cujo or Pet Semetary to them, at least as far as I can remember.

November is here. How? The noisy, hot, dank months squat over us for long, long stretches, but russet and yellow and frosted October is gone before it registers in my soul, quicker than a screech owl’s call, briefer than the snore of a dog on a couch.

Hallowe’en. And now All Saints Day. How and how?

~ S.K. Orr