Huddled under a blanket in the basement with my well worn Fozzie stuffed animal is when I realized I had made a very big mistake. The cheery pinks and greens of the hand-knit fabric did nothing to soothe my anxiety and Fozzie had the same dumb, wide eyed look on his face since we started the movie. Crouching on the prickly, cheap berber rug, I tucked one end of the blanket under each foot so that I could use my hands to shield my face, save for a tiny slit I made with my middle and pointer fingers over my right eye. Originally I thought I had flipped the tv to a channel about a boy who had a doll. "How refreshing!" I'm sure I thought. Until that ugly piece-of-shit decided to kill everyone and I was too ashamed and scared to stop watching. Being 7, I was sure that this was actually happening somewhere outside my protective blanket bubble and it was only a matter or time before this "Chucky" disposed of me as well. If I ran upstairs crying, like I wanted to, my parents would know that I had been watching something I shouldn't have. I couldn't take that chance so I stayed put and convinced myself that if Chucky popped out of my toy chest I would suddenly develop Care Bear type powers and kill him with a rainbow of kindness that would emit from my tummy. This was a solid plan. To be sure my efforts weren't thwarted, I threw Fozzie at my Teddy Ruxpin with all my might making them both topple behind a tall bookshelf. (Later in the week, Mr. Ruxpin was found with an entire box of Sun-Maid raisins shoved down his throat, rendering his formerly movable jaw sticky and permanently useless. I plead the 5th.) While I survived the movie, something inside me had changed. Maybe this wasn't as large of a mistake as I had thought. Either a seed had been planted or a darkness was realized that caused me to walk up my basement stairs in a daze as I came to terms with just how much I had enjoyed being terrified. Did other people feel this way? Did I have to tell my parents? Most importantly, how was I going to get away with watching more horror movies?
Halloween instantly became my favorite holiday after my secret rendezvous with gore and carnage. My mother, may it have been poor parenting or a realized penchant of her own, fostered my new found infatuation with a fervor. I hadn't wanted to tell her, but she had her ways of figuring it out. She once caught me wrapping up one of my dolls in strips of white towel which I had adorned with smears of red nail polish. Then I slung up my homemade mummified baby on the tree in our front yard. In July. Ideas poured out of my mother's mind that excited me to the nth degree. Stuff a pair of old pants and stick them on poles which we insert next to a tombstone in our front yard so it looks like a passer-by was sucked into the underworld? Sure mom! Sit around watching "The Birds" on a rainy day while eating "bird seed" (granola)? Absolutely! I was hooked. I even went so far as to chair my own "Halloween Club" which included my sister and two neighbor boys down the street. We would meet in the aforementioned tree in my front yard and talk about how much I loved Halloween, what I was going to be for Halloween, and the latest horror movies I had seen. It was a self-indulgent endeavor to say the least. When Halloween finally rolled around I would strut proud as a peacock when my friends would comment on how scary my yard display was. "My little brother wouldn't go near your house because of the giant spiders!" or "Where did you find all those body parts?" Thanks to my mothers influence, I insisted on carving real pumpkins every year and still do to this day. My father was the handiest handyman there ever was, and his abilities plus my mothers ideas made for one hell of a holiday for this little trick-or-treater. One year my dad came home with 3 slats of plywood and cans of black spray paint. "Mookser, come downstairs and help me build a coffin." Music to my ears! I laid down on one of the slats while he traced me so as to build a box to my specifications. I got to run all the woodworking machines while he supervised and critiqued my work. He then took me to Home Depot where I picked out four silver handles that looked like knotty, old branches. We affixed them to my Marissa sized black wood coffin, nailed a cross to the front and presented our creation to the neighbors. The attention I got that year was incredible and only propelled my affinity for all that is dead and ghostly. Even after I was well into my teens, you could find me in our workroom making creepy fences, tombstones and the like.Even in July.
Luckily, what I derived most out of a childhood filled with box-office horror was not fear and violence but acceptance and excitement. Walking my dog down dark and drafty Chicago streets in mid October, I take note of how many fewer houses have a menacing pumpkin face glowing on their stoop than when I was young. I remember the smell of rotting pumpkin and candle wax fondly as a testament to a more jovial society. While I greatly support change and am proud that people these days are giving a fuck about where our future is going... does no one have time to carve a pumpkin? Isn't there something to be said for expending energy and efforts towards celebration and happiness? Making a kid smile (and potentially cry) with a yard full of creepy things? Stand on your soapbox and protest, I support it 100%. But I can't help to think that at times, if everyone were to come on down from political pedestals and work towards making life fun again, there wouldn't be as much time for hate and fighting. I understand that's a broad statement, but look at it this way; if we give our children nothing to remember their childhoods by but protests and demonstrations, where have we instilled happiness in them? We have some very serious situations going on in our world, and I applaud the people with the guts to fight them. But I also notice a correlation between how much less fun we have with our children and how bad the world has gotten. Can you close your eyes and picture it? A world full of political unrest, devoid of holiday celebration and happy children, a non-denominational winter holiday that takes all of 10 minutes to recognize before it's back to the task at hand. Oh wait... Now try to remember how holidays went when you were young. I bet they make up a lot of your memories, don't they? You might say that with all that we have going on, there is no time for pumpkin carving or scary movie watching. To that I say, what a great opportunity to teach our children about time management. Overhearing a conversation at the park recently, I learned that an entire family will forgo pumpkin carving, or even pumpkin purchasing, this year in a protest against the mistreatment of family farms. What? Buy their fucking pumpkins! You are raising a brood of non-pumpkin carvers who will never want to buy pumpkins and who will raise generations of non-pumpkin carvers... Or this family could just buy their kids one, and carve it. Put a real candle in it and teach them about fire safety. Make it fun. Roast the seeds and eat them warm while you take the kids for a crisp autumn walk in a very difficult search for any other house that actually has a jack-o-lantern on display. Sit outside all bundled up and tell a slightly too scary story. So what if they crawl into your bed this once. That is just their imaginations at work. We adults were born with them too, but some of us forgot.
So here I am, cradling my fiercely flickering jack-o-lantern, standing on my soapbox filled with blood and Teddy Ruxpin parts. Don't forget the things, however small and seemingly insignificant, that happily molded your childhood. Don't leave them behind, sad and ignorant to future generations. Bring them back home where they belong and scare your children silly with them. If you insist on making your children fearful of something, let it be your front yard on October 31st, not the state of their future. If you heed my warnings, their futures might not look so bleak after all.
No comments:
Post a Comment