BEHIND THE MASK

~ a Halloween reminder that some hauntings are happy ~

With all respect to fathers everywhere, it’s often our mothers who make holidays so special.  They’re usually the ones doing the cooking, shopping, decorating, and everything else that sets the stage for family celebrations and the memories they inspire.  That’s why for those of us who have lost our moms there is that little extra ache that comes with the heart of special holidays.  Some of us feel it most on Christmas, or at Thanksgiving, or of course on Mother’s Day.  It always feels a bit dark for me to admit that in my case it’s hands down Halloween. 

My mom loved Halloween, and she passed that down to my siblings and me.  She decorated the house from top to bottom, both inside and out.  Nothing electrified, no animatronics; these were paper and plastic decorations she bought at the nearby (and long-gone) Five & Ten store on Avenue U in Sheepshead Bay near our house.  Inside there were skeletons with long legs that would touch my head when I sat in certain chairs, and cobwebs with spiders that dangled from the entryways of each room.  From outside you could see the witches, vampires, ghosts and goblins she placed in every window.  Each day when I came home from school, I would swear some of them had switched from one window to another.  I still can’t say if that was my childhood imagination, or if she actually moved them around while I was out, but I was fascinated.      

I remember the lion costume she made for me in second grade, when she sewed her faux mink stole into a headpiece to make a convincing mane.  And the scarecrow costume she made for me in third grade, replete with straw hat, pipe, painted nose, and even strands of hay sticking out from a matching shirt and trousers.  Were my consecutive costume choices of two characters from The Wizard of Oz a coincidence or an early tell?  If she suspected the latter, she never let on.  At least I didn’t ask to be Dorothy, which I guarantee would not have been as easy for her to indulge. 

She did indulge me in the later years of elementary school when I wanted store-bought costumes like the other kids.  In those days (late 70s/early 80s), store costumes were either hilarious or sad depending on your point of view.  They were basically just sweaty plastic bags that covered your body with a picture of the character you were supposed to be, accompanied by a cheap mask with tiny slits for your eyes (that you couldn’t see out of) and your mouth (that would cut your tongue every time you tried to talk).  They were a complete waste of money, money that in retrospect we probably didn’t have, but she bought them for me anyway.  I honestly can’t remember what any of them were; likely random superheroes I picked to fit in with the other boys.  It’s funny how I forget those but can vividly remember the costumes she made for me when I was much younger.   

I also vividly remember the games she would play with us after we finished trick or treating.  These included bobbing for apples, which terrified me because for some reason I was convinced that I could drown putting my head in what was literally inches of water.  Another and more legitimately frightening one was apple swinging, where an apple was strung to the ceiling and then swung aggressively at your head to see if you could catch it... in your teeth.  I don’t think that one is recommended any more, but this was back when many dentists advised against flossing because they thought it created gaps in your teeth.  My favorite game was the penny push, where a penny was placed at one end of a table and you had to push it with your nose to the other end.  Whoever nosed their penny to the other side in the least number of pushes, without it falling on the floor, won.  In the event of a tie, you nosed it back to the other side and then kept going back and forth until there was a winner.  There was some uncomfortable nose friction involved in that one, but it never felt as imminently dangerous as the apple games.  

As years passed, it was a joy to see my older sister and brother play those games with their children, and now a new joy to see those children as adults doing so with kids of their own.  In the crazy, circular tapestry that is life, I even had the privilege of switching roles with my mom when Alzheimer’s disease reverted her final years to a second childhood before claiming her life.  All the mystery and magic of Halloween – and indeed of childhood itself – I was able to give back to her because she had instilled it so lovingly in me.  Love is the ultimate, eternal ghost and when we keep traditions alive, we are inviting our loved ones back to haunt us again and again in the best ways possible.  Tradition is what keeps their spirits active and present, rather than receding into the past tense of memory.

My mom must have felt that way too.  Those games were traditions passed down to her from her Irish mother, and undoubtedly to her from generations before, and which – like all of Halloween – have origins in the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain.  This festival coincided with the autumnal harvest of apples, which figured prominently in the feasts of the day, and so the apple games are derivatives of that.  The penny push is a reference to another practice in the early times of Ireland and other regions of Western Europe and one that dates back even further to ancient Greece.  The dead were buried with two coins as payment for transport between worlds.  Because there were two, this often gets misrepresented in modern literature and cinema as one coin to cover each eye, when in fact both were placed inside the deceased’s mouth for safekeeping.  So why two?  Well, one was for passage to the other side.  The second was in case they found a way to come back.       

Maybe it’s not so dark that Halloween is the holiday when I most feel both the heart of my mom and the ache of her loss.  Samhain represented the time of year when our loved ones could find their way back; when the boundary separating life and death became blurred and the veil between worlds was at its thinnest.  Tombs were reopened and surrounded by candles embedded within hollowed turnips (a precursor to pumpkins) to preserve their flames and light the way for the dead as they exited their graves.  People dressed in costumes – it was called guising – not to scare the real ghosts away but to make it possible for them to blend in and walk freely among the living again, if only for a day. 

So look closely this Halloween.  You never know who might be looking back from behind a mask.