With one week to go, my son has finalized his Halloween costume idea. He will be “Night.” Black pants, black shirt, black hat, black face makeup. If he could be completely invisible, I think he’d opt for that. Out of all the sucky traits he inherited from me, he got the “Halloween under-excitement” gene. For a person like me (and him, apparently), the idea of an entire day (or now, close to a week), in which people do unexpected, startling, scary, eeeeewwwww-y things for the sole purpose of invoking fear, the event grates against every fiber of our fine-tuned, highly sensitive central nervous systems.
We are not the kind of people who magically transform the fear/startle response into the laughter and pleasure we can see all around us. We don’t need the noise of chain saws, the sea of distorted and scary faces coming toward us, and I certainly never needed to stick my hand in a bowl of human eyeballs (peeled grapes, it turns out) at a childhood neighbor’s “haunted house.” What I needed, as a late-blooming, still unpretty girl, was to be beautiful for the night – a Cinderella transformation that for just one night I could have what all the other girls had without any fuss or tricks. My childhood Halloweens were in the cold and often wet Midwest, so I could put on a flimsy ballerina or princess costume, sure, but it would be under my winter coat and boots as I tromped out through the neighborhood. The prettier I hoped to be, the more ludicrous I looked. One year I went without a coat. I’m not convinced that a shivering, red-nosed, flush-faced awkward girl in an ill-fitting tutu got me any closer to what I really wanted in my Halloween basket: a handful of acceptance, some candy-coated loveliness, a roll of Life Savers that would have done just that.
My son’s other idea for this year was a tree. And for a brief moment he considered being a Nebula Galaxy, as seen from the Hubble Telescope. One year, he was a candle. Another year, he was a Fire Ghost Hunter, a character from a book series he was reading at the time. He has yet to be a superhero, a monster, a bloodied/ugly/terrifying/powerful/fantasy figure, which is what many of his 5th grade peers are now in to. No, this year my son will be an abstract idea, surrounded by observable “nouns” in his classroom. The girls are becoming flirty; their princess/devil costumes exuding a naughtiness that is just beginning to veer into the carnal. For now, their awkwardness and innocence saves me from envy, but it won’t be long before they fully transition to the vixens and beauties that I longed to be back then. I can only imagine what that will do to my central nervous system. And what it will do to my son’s.