Wednesday, November 9, 2011

Trick or Treat


Hello, Dear Readers.  It’s good to see you.

When my sisters and I were kids, my parents tried to instill a lot practical wisdom in us.  And I’d like to think that at least some of it took, too.  My parents always were and still are big believers in the idea that you just have to use whatever is at hand to get the job done.  That’s one thing they really drilled into our heads:  you have to be resourceful.   And they’re rather ingenious people themselves.  My mom is the kind of person who could build a life raft out of nothing but old Ziploc bags and guile.  And these days, my father is planning out how he’s going to use the tank from an old water heater to create a super-compressor for his paint gun.  I think his ultimate goal is to be able to spray paint the patio furniture from outer space.  Trust me, when it comes to being resourceful, these people aren’t fooling around.

I don’t think either my sisters or I have ever been quite that resourceful or had such cosmic plans, though.  I especially tend to think on a much less grandiose scale.  I mean, as a small child, my greatest talent was the ability to turn virtually anything into a hat.  Of course, all that really involved was putting the thing in question on my head and saying that it was a hat, but still, at least it fell within the family tradition.  The real test of resourcefulness in our family, though, came every year on Halloween.  For me and my sisters, it was the greatest challenge of how to work with whatever you had available.  And one way or another, we always seemed to find some way to get through it.

Growing up, we had two Halloween costumes.  One of them was a tiger outfit with a striped pair of flannel pants, a matching striped flannel top, and a mask.  Without the mask, the whole outfit looked a lot like a pair of pajamas.  In fact, it might actually have been a pair of pajamas at one point.  I mean, it would’ve been just like my mom to dig up an old tiger mask somewhere and then convince us all that the whole getup was a Halloween costume.  She was kind of crafty like that.  And we were kind of gullible.

No one really remembers what the other costume even was.  It was probably something completely inappropriate like an old Santa Claus suit or a pilgrim’s outfit.  So, of course, nobody wanted to wear it.  I mean, what little kid wants to go out on Halloween dressed as a pilgrim?  No one wants to give you candy if you look like that.  If you’re dressed like a pilgrim, everyone expects you to knock on their door and just hand them a turkey.  And can you imagine being the little kid who has to go out trick-or-treating as Santa Claus?  Grown-ups would open the door, take one look at you, and be like, “What the hell?”

Anyway, the strangest thing was that we had two costumes, but there were actually three kids in our family.  So, I’m not really sure what that was about.  At one time, of course, only two of us were old enough to go trick-or-treating, but after that, I’m not really sure what happened.  I guess we probably just had to go out in shifts.  One kid would put on the tiger outfit, do a block of houses, and then go home so the other kid could use the costume.  Then the second kid would go out, and the neighbor would say, “Weren’t you just here?” “No.”  Then his wife would call out, “Who’s at the door, honey?”  “I don’t know. Some kid in a pair of pajamas.”  “You mean the one with Santa Claus?”  “That was my sister, damn it!” 

Then the neighbor would look you up and down with more than a little suspicion and finally drop some candy into your bag just so he wouldn’t have to waste any more of his time trying to figure out if he was being played by a 7-year old over a roll of Smarties.  After all, trying to decide who’s who on Halloween can be tricky.  I mean, kids aren’t usually that hard to tell apart, but a kid in a mask and a pair of pajamas is a whole other story.

Anyway, after we finally outgrew the tiger suit and whatever the other outfit might have been, we just started making our own costumes.  That required a completely different level of ingenuity because we didn’t have a lot to work with.  Basically, my parents would let us make costumes out of just about anything that they were otherwise going to throw away.  So if you wanted to go as a ghost, you ended up a in sheet that likely had a giant tear going right through some mysterious stain that even three cups of bleach couldn’t get out.  You looked like a ghost who’d been mugged and then thrown in the gutter.  It wasn’t scary so much as it was just sad.

Of course, there was always the robot route.  Being a robot didn’t require much more than a couple of boxes, and my dad always had boxes in the garage.  But that was the problem—my father has never willingly parted with a cardboard box in his life.  To him, a good, sturdy box is the key to surviving pretty much any disaster situation.  Now, exactly what sort of crisis one could fend off using nothing more than a cardboard box is a bit beyond me.  I mean, seriously, when was the last time you saw a superhero named “Box Man”?  When did anyone anywhere ever defeat a criminal by smacking him in the head with a cardboard box?  

But in my dad’s world, those boxes were his first and last line of defense.  If there was a tornado, we could hide underneath them.  If there was a flood, we could float away in them.  If there was a nuclear attack, we could use them to build a bomb shelter.  That man had more faith in cardboard than he did in God.  The way he figured it, those boxes were all that stood between him and utter chaos.  And there was no way he was giving up that kind of security just so some kid could be a robot for Halloween.

 Luckily, my grandparents had a trunk of old clothes that they kept around for us to play dress-up in, so if my parents weren’t throwing away anything that would make a decent costume, you could always just go as someone from the distant fashion past. The problem was that most of the clothes were my grandfather’s, and they didn’t exactly fit.  So, I’d head off to trick-or-treat in a pair of old pants cinched up somewhere around my armpits, a vest that ended somewhere around my knees, and a jacket that fit me like a full-length dress.  And it always went the same way with the neighbors.  “Trick-or-treat.” “What the hell are you supposed to be?”  Then the wife would poke her head around the corner and call out, “Who’s at the door, honey?”  “I don’t know.  Some kid in a tweed evening gown.”

I suppose it could’ve been worse, though.  If my mom had let us go out dressed in my dad’s old clothes, I would’ve been trick-or-treating in a floor-length Nehru jacket.  I would’ve looked like a tiny Communist dictator.  And I can just imagine how that would’ve gone over.  “Who’s at the door, honey?”  “I don’t know….I think it’s Mao-Tse Tung.” 

I imagine the neighbors started to miss the days when the strangest thing they had to deal with on Halloween was the untimely appearance of Santa Claus, but no matter what you were wearing, they always gave you some candy.  These days, of course, a lot of parents are pushing for healthier treats, but back then, if someone had given you a carrot stick, you’d have given it back.  I mean, back in the late 1960s, most people believed that sugar actually was one of the four food groups, right along with red meat, lard, and caffeine.  And if you were a grown-up, nothing topped off a balanced diet better than a cigarette and a martini.  So, it’s not like anyone thought that a little candy was going to kill you.

To me, though, Halloween was never about getting the treats.  After all, not all of the candy you got on that night was good.  There were always a few pieces of no-name, cut-rate candy that you just knew someone had fished out of the clearance bin at some seedy-looking convenience store.  That was always the candy that was either so hardened by age that it would actually break your teeth or so off-brand that it tasted faintly like dirt.  Either way, it wasn’t something you wanted to put in your mouth.

Every now and then, too, some joker on the next block over would slip you a throat lozenge and try to pass it off as a mint. And honestly, there are few things more disappointing than thinking you’re about to enjoy a delicious cherry treat and then finding out that it’s really just a Sucret someone dug out of the bottom of old purse.  I mean, if you actually had a sore throat, I suppose it was quite a find, but otherwise, it was a big gyp.

Besides, eating candy wasn’t that big of a deal at my house.  My mom always kept a little bag of Brach’s candy in the cupboard, and we were allowed to eat some most anytime we wanted to.  So, I spent my allowance on stuff that my mom didn’t keep around, like beef jerky and pepperoni sticks and tiny wheels of processed cheese.  When I was a kid, I didn’t have time to rot out my teeth or mess with my blood sugar.  I was too busy clogging up my arteries.

Anyway, we lost interest in our Halloween candy after about three days, and my mom would finally take whatever was left in our candy bags and dump it all into the Brach’s sack in the cupboard.  Then we’d all nibble away at it until one fateful evening when my dad shook out the last piece, popped it in his mouth, and then spit it out with a loud “Who the hell put a throat lozenge in here?”  Then he’d turn and look at me.  “And why are you still wearing your costume?”  “These are my pajamas, Dad.”  “Oh.”  And at that point, Halloween was pretty much officially over at my house.

The funny thing is that despite all the hassles that Halloween inevitably brought with it, I always liked that holiday.  There was never any telling what any of us kids might show up as—a World War I pilot, a secretary from Cleveland, a pre-pubescent version of Jesus.  It all just depended on what we had to work with.  It was the ultimate exercise in catch-as-catch-can.

In the end, though, I guess trick-or-treating really is good training for life.  I mean, what really happens when you go for a job interview?  You dress up in a businessperson costume, knock on the door, and go, “Hi.  Can I have a job?”  Then they give you a treat, or they say, “What the hell are you supposed to be?”  It’s just like trick-or-treating.  But more than that, Halloween has a great way of reminding us that a little resourcefulness, a little talent for making something out of nothing, is ultimately a good thing.  And it’s ultimately a fun thing, too, because let’s face it—deep down inside of all of us, there’s a little MacGyver just itching to get out.

Philosophy for a hungry planet.

Enjoy.



© R. Rissler, 2011.  All rights reserved.