…What are these
So withered, and so wild in their attire,
That look not like th'inhabitants o' the earth,
And yet are on't?
Our children occasionally behaved unlike the inhabitants of the earth. In the dark, one early morning, Jeanne heard a slight noise, and when she looked in the boys' room, she could just make out Tim's foot rising up and down in bed, like a dreaming place-kicker's. On closer inspection, she discovered a string attached to his big toe. The string went out the window and down to our patio, where Tim's friend, Kevin Poindexter, was tugging it rhythmically. Tim was a heavy sleeper, and they'd made careful plans to see the sunrise over nearby Tampa Bay.
Maybe because our children were close in age, we were a family who celebrated all holidays, hard. (At one point, 1963, they were ages 4, 3, 1, and Tim just-born: four pre-schoolers!) We often took the kids to a movie before the actual event, just to calm us all down. Holidays involved long hours of family participation in planning, cooking and decorating: gingerbread houses at Christmas, egg-dyeing and jelly bean collection at Easter, costumes for the 4th of July parade, smoking turkeys for the neighborhood Thanksgiving picnic, not to mention birthdays, graduations, promotions and the like.
Naturally, many of our most vivid celebrations came on Halloween, when the children truly looked unlike the earth's inhabitants, thanks to Jeanne's ingenious costumes.They went as lions, mice, chickens, turtles, alarm clocks, and most memorably, a perfectly reproduced Special K Box. These productions weren't without trauma: the lion's tail was quickly stepped on and detached, and, more spectacularly, our son Pete galumphed out our front door as a most amazing papier-maché giraffe, only to be guillotined by a low branch before he got down the front pathway. The Meinke household has always co-specialized in tears and laughter.
In recent years, with our own children gone, we've been disappointed with Halloween. More and more trick-and-treaters, including older ones, appear uncostumed, often car-lifted onto our street, looking for handouts of tootsie rolls and peppermints, mirroring our society at large: aggressive and demanding, doing less and expecting more. Just what we need: fatter and less imaginative children. Still, these are just kids, and it's hard to blame them: our neighborhood is a spooky one, perfect for Halloween, with the pale moon seeping through clumps of Spanish moss hanging from crooked live oak branches.
I'm old enough to remember even worse-behaved times. Nobody believes me, but in Brooklyn, during the '30s and '40s, we trick-and-treated on Thanksgiving instead of Halloween. Back then (also uncostumed, though we used to smudge charcoal on our faces), we'd tip over the tin garbage cans, making a teeth-grating racket as we ran screaming away, punishing those we thought didn't "treat" us well, undeserving delinquents that we were.
In the past few years, we've tried a few mean tricks ourselves. Instead of candy, which after all is bad for kids' teeth, we gave out "sensible" treats, like pencils or fruit, but the disappointment in the children's eyes was too hard for us to take. We've tried ducking the entire event by going out to the movies or lying on the floor in darkness, but these don't help our already shaky self-images. We hereby resolve to act more generously and less critically. It's hard for us to remember, but we were kids once.
All is flux, sage Heraclitus said (c. 535-475 BC). The Celtic festival of Samhain became All Saints' Day became All-Hallows-Even and so on, up to Freddy Krueger. Rituals mutate or disappear, nations fatten and fall, even the weather's changing now. Still, the desire of children to be spooked, to be mischievous, to gently tangle with the dark forces, will always be the same everywhere — even in China, where they celebrate Hungry Ghost Night in mid-July. "Scare us, Daddy. Tell us a story!"
Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn and cauldron bubble….
By the pricking of my thumbs,
Something wicked this way comes.
—Both quotations from Macbeth by William Shakespeare (1564-1616)
—Meet Peter and Jeanne Meinke Saturday Nov. 6, 3 pm. at Haslam's Book Store.
This article appears in Oct 28 – Nov 3, 2010.
