A Little Halloween Story

I wrote this memoir a couple of years ago for a Jordan School District inservice writing class.

Countdown to Halloween, 1953

Lordsburg, New Mexico
a memoir

Thursday evening, 22 October: The four of us are in the darkened kitchen surrounding the table. Light from Mrs. Kip’s back porch silhouettes the cut out paper shapes of pumpkins, black cats, and witches taped to the window panes. The table is bedecked with presents and a two layer, home-made chocolate cake covered with dark red-orange frosting, a shade of orange much darker than the one my mother painted the living room last year.

“It complements and sets off the brown and orange pattern in the fabric of my ‘early American’ maple furniture,” she said proudly when I asked why she painted the walls orange. The Winebrenners, who live across the street, came running over thinking the house was on fire the first evening she turned on the lights in her bright, orange living room.

The frosting orange, which she mixed with paste food coloring, is a bit more reddish than real pumpkins, but I think the cake is perfect with a jet-black jack-o-lantern face and six yellow candles on top. I want a cake just like this every year from now on! The light of the candle flames flickers on our faces as I take a huge breath and blow out the pale light plunging us into deep October darkness.

Me and my little sister, Jill.

Thursday evening, 29 October: The Methodist church is having a carnival tonight, so Johnny Winebrenner and I decide to take our Saturday movie money and go. Since Saturday is Halloween, we won’t be going to the show. Our moms expect us home early because we still have school tomorrow. When we arrive at the back door of the church, a costumed lady takes our thirty-five cents and gives us a small bag of candy and ten tickets to use at the booths.

We jumble down the steps to the noisy basement where children are running between the booths yelling, laughing, and sometimes throwing paper at each other. My mother would call it “organized chaos” and avoid it at all costs. The basement has an open central room that amplifies the noise, with six classrooms: three each on two opposite sides where the activities are in full swing. There is a fishing booth, a fortune teller, a cake walk, games with prizes, and a spook alley all decorated with crepe paper streamers.

We skip the fortune teller and try out the cake walk and fish pond a couple of times. We finish at the spook alley where some high school boys tell us we will have to walk through a dark room and put our hands into different bowls that have eyeballs, brains, finger bones, and, they snicker, other body parts. They tell us we will be too chicken to make it through without wetting our pants, and we babies should go find our mommies and head for the fishing booth.

We hand them our tickets anyway, and with maniacal laughs and grimaces they slowly open the door for us. Another boy inside the black room flips on a flashlight and aims the light into our eyes. Then he grabs us and yanks us inside. The door slams shut behind us. Pointing the flashlight beam at the floor, the boy guides us to the tables and tells us in a ghoulish voice what is supposed to be in each bowl. After putting our hands in bowls of pealed grapes, cooked macaroni, gelatin, pumpkin guts and seeds, boiled eggs and other things we can’t identify, we are brusquely ushered out of the room. Our hands are wet and sticky.

Johnny Winebrenner, Jill and me.

Friday evening, 30 October: We are sitting in the pumpkin colored living room when we smell a noxious odor like something burning. My mother runs into the kitchen to see if she left something on the stove. We troop in after her. The smell is stronger here, but there is nothing burning in the kitchen. There is a flickering glow out the back window, and we rush to the window afraid the old barn is on fire.

Our eyes meet the glowering jack-o-lantern face of a huge pumpkin impaled on the corner fence post by the back gate. Thick, acrid smoke from burning pumpkin and smoldering manure is billowing out the top. My father starts laughing and says it must be a “gift” from the boys on his high school football team.
Halloween evening: We have hamburgers over at Winebrenners as we usually do on Saturdays, but we don’t stay to watch television; they have one, we don’t. Rin Tin Tin will have to wait till next week. Trick-or-treating rules tonight, and Johnny and I have to get into our costumes. He is going to be a cowboy, and I am going as the headless horseman. The headless, horseless horseman my father says.

I am wearing a large coat buttoned up over my head and carrying a jack-o-lantern carved pumpkin as my lost head. I use the pumpkin as my candy holder because I can’t manage to hold a sack and carry the pumpkin at the same time. I meet the cowboy on the street, and we start our rounds.

As we gather loot, the heavy pumpkin becomes harder to carry. When I put it down and reach in to try a sample, my hand finds the candy covered with slimy pumpkin sweat. No one thought to put a lining inside the pumpkin. We lug the pumpkin back to my house to see if we can save some of the treats. My mother says she can wash the candy bars, but the cookies, popcorn balls and the loosely wrapped candy are ruined.

It is not too late to go back out, but I don’t have a head now. My mother paints my face with makeup and pushes one of my father’s old hats down on my head.

“There,” she says, “no one will know you’ve been there already.” Then she paints a Lone Ranger mask on Johnny, puts a different bandana around his neck, and sends us out the door again.

After an hour, we head back home with our paper bags heavy with Halloween treasure. Too late to avoid them, we see five big high school boys shambling down the sidewalk toward us. They look like giants to us in their boots, blue jeans, white tee shirts, and letterman jackets. They are smoking. A couple of them are not too steady on their feet. When they see us; they stop. We stop.

“Hey, looks like you two made out like bandits,” says one of them as he flicks his cigarette into the street and ambles over to us. “Show us whatcha got.”

He leans down toward us. We back up and tighten our grips around the bags.

“Just give us a look,” he says, while the rest of the boys encircle us so we can’t escape. One of them looks a bit like Johnny’s high-school-football-playing brother, but maybe not. Anyway, he doesn’t seem to recognize us, so it must not be him.

Johnny and I slowly open the bags and hold them out so the guy doing the talking can look into them.

“Share?” he asks nicely.

“OK,” I say hesitantly, and before we can react, he grabs both bags and tosses them to his buddies who burst out laughing and howling.

“Thanks, suckers!” He pushes between us and punches one of his friends playfully on the shoulder. The big men continue their shamble down the street jostling each other, laughing, and eating our candy. “Couple a looosers,” laughs one of them as they turn the corner.

We just stand there, Johnny and I, two little six-year-olds in the dark of the last night of October, 1953.

So Much To Do, So Little Time Left

Well, one more day and I will reach one of those big mile stones of life where one looks at the past and wonders how it could have passed so quickly, and ponders the future wondering if there is enough time left to finish what you haven't started yet. For some, turning thirty or maybe forty or fifty is a traumatic anniversary inducing a crisis of identity. Those calendar ticks were not traumatic for me, no mid-life crisis for me; no changing horses in mid stream; no selling everything for a red Ferrari (or that sky-blue Edsel convertible with push button transmission I saw in the LIFE Magazine in 1958 or 59). Turning sixty-five is a bit different, though. It gives much more pause for thought, an almost where-am-I-and-how-did-I-get-here moment.

Last week I sat at lunch with a substitute teacher who had been a student at Union Middle School in the late 1980s when I was a teacher there. He did not have me as a teacher, but asked me about some of the teachers who had been there at that time. My answers to a couple of those he asked about were: "He retired. I see him occasionally." Or: "He retired. I don't know what happened to him." But for most of his queries the answer was: "He died." Or: "She died." Those answers were repeated over and over with a few variations of the details as I know them.

I taught at Union for 25 years before I transferred to Mount Jordan Middle School in 1998. I was fifty years old and had literally spent half my life teaching at Union when I transferred. While I had an enjoyable time there and made some wonderful friends, I have often wondered if I made any difference in the world by teaching there or if anyone will ask, "What ever happened to Mr. Goodman?". Well, funny I should ask. Last Thursday after visiting the UEA convention, my wife and I were finishing up some shopping at Costco with a Polish Dog lunch. A young man asked me if my name were "Goodman" and if I had taught at Union Middle School. After answering in the affirmative, he introduced himself and said I was his 8th grade English teacher. (That was my last year at Union.) He said thank you. As I shook his hand he said, "You gave me an 'F,' the only one I ever got." Ops, I thought, where is this going? He continued, "I earned every bit of that 'F,' and it changed my life, thank you." He is now a teacher himself as well as his wife. As I left, I stopped by his table and met his wife and two little boys, and he said thank you for the third time. Wow, I guess mean, ol' Mr Goodman did something right-once.

Here is my school picture for year 40 of my career. Not too bad except for the shinny top and the chubby cheeks. My goal of losing sixty-five pounds by age sixty-five was a bust. I lost twenty-five pounds but gained back ten. I fell off the healthy eating wagon and then had the torn meniscus. The knee problem has cut out my walking two to three miles a day for the last three months. Oh well, time to set a new goal.

Five Postcards

Here are the last five postcards I have received through Postcrossing.com. Quite a variety.



This is a hand made card from Belarus.

This is one of many cards I have received from China.

This card is from Great Britain.

Another hand crafted card. This one is from The Netherlands.

As if you couldn't guess, this is another card from China.

I haven't sent out any cards with postcrossing in over a month. I have been posting with Swap-bot lately. (It is time to request some more addresses.) All the addresses I receive from postcrossing are international, which costs $1.05 per card, unless the address is in Mexico or Canada, which is $.85.  All of my international cards have arrived. One of my two U.S. cards never arrived or the recipient never registered it. The longest time for one of my cards to arrive was to China-151 days. The second and third longest delivery times were to Russia-52 days and 33 days. The shortest time was to The Netherlands at 4 days.

The longest send times coming to me were from Russia-95 days, and from China-33 days.