HomeMy WebLinkAboutClinton News-Record, 1985-10-23, Page 321;1enal. Value Spatter, October
ay Sarah Overstreet
1985
1.1
ive Halloween
ome childless people
seem to miss children
most at Christmas, but I
especially miss having a
child on Halloween.
Halloween delights me
in ways no other holidays
satisfy. First, I adore being
frightened as long as I know
nothing's really going to happen
tome; and second, it's carte
blanche to dress up as your
wildest fantasy and ask total
strangers for candy.
Since I'm too old to ask
strangers for candy, a child
would be a free ticket to go
trick -or -treating (to protect them,
of course). But more than that,
having a child to experience
Halloween with would give me a
chance to relive the innocent
shivers and and excitement
through the eyes of one who
hasn't seen everything as it
really is.
Three yearsi ago I was lucky
enough to have a group of
11 -year-olds to take
trick -or -treating, and it was
wonderful. I was going to a
"come as you were', adult
Halloween party later that
evening anyway, so I was
dressed as I'd been when I was
8 years old. People tried to give
me candy. I took some. (So sue
me.)
This year, as with most
Halloweens now, I don't know
any 11 -year-olds willing to drag
adults along. I'll just have to get
into the holiday mood by
reliving some of my own
childhood Halloweens, which is
probably safer, anyway. No
33 -year-old with night blindness
and easily -turned ankles belongs
in other peoples' dark yards.
I fell in love with Halloween
when I was 6. We lived on a
lonely farm about six miles
outside a small southwest
Missouri town, where the
October winds blew leaves in
accommodatingly ominous swirls
toward the little white house
every day at dusk.
All during the month of
October we first -graders made
construction -paper witches and
listened to scary stories in my
classroom. After school I'd walk
to the Frisco Railway depot
where my father was the agent,
to wait in the waiting room for
him to get off.
As the sun lowered and the
sky turned deep orange, I kept
company with the old men who
came to visit and fill the
waiting -room spittoon. When it
was dusk, my father and I would
drive home.
By the time we'd leave the
city limits, the sun would have
almost completeiy set and the
trees cast malevolent shadows on
the gravel road. I imagined that
ax -murderers, who killed their
wives and got rid of the
evidence by sticking the
dismembered pieces in tubs of
lye like 1'd seen on "The
Twilight.Zone," lived in the
groves of trees lining our lane.
The highlight of my day,
during Halloween countdown
week, was running from the car
across the dark, unknown
territory of the yard to the safety
of the house.
On Halloween night that year,
I watched an animated version
of "The Legend of Sleepy
Hollow" on TV and was
frightened witless. My mother
made caramel apples. I was in
heaven.
tsut it was the next year that 1
experienced the real sense of
Halloween — the taste, smell,
feel and tingle of it. (It smelled,
by the way, a lot like the scent
of dead, wet leaves thrust up
your nose by chill winds. It felt
— at least in the stomach —
like it does when you think you
see something peeking out you
half -opened closet in the middl�
of the night.)
We had moved to a southwest
Missouri town of about 95,000,
and my mother was bent on
forcing me, the youngest of her
three children and the only one
left at home, out from behind
her skirts. She enrolled me in a
Brownie troop and dutifully saw
that I attended every meeting. I
didn't take to it.
I disliked the baggy brown
dresses everyone had to wear
and refused to wear the little
brown hat anywhere but in
Brownie meetings. We met in
the basement of an elementary
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