By late October, cooler winds had blown in, or at least cool by Florida standards, and the sun was setting earlier. But neither the chill nor the dark diminished our sense of outdoor fun. We may have had less light for late-afternoon bass fishing, but longer nights enabled us to launch our secret expeditions to Catfish Pond, Hidden Pond, and the all-night convenience store long before midnight. In some respects, that made the days, at least when measured by adventure, last much longer.
Fall is a mystical time of year. You have the proverbial frost on the pumpkin and the fallen leaves infused with blood colors, more beautiful than when they were in their chloroform glory days.
The relief from summertime temperatures alone gave us a sense of renewed life among the dead leaves. Autumn begs one to stay active and soak up the last of the remaining year. Fall offers the perfect temperature in the South, halfway between melting your face off and freezing your butt off. The woods, the grassy fields, and even the water call out for one last exploitation before winter changes the balance of it all. Even now, without neighborhood friends nearby, when the leaves change color, I feel a chilled tractor beam shooting out from the woods and off the river, pulling me out of my studio and into those outside spaces. The smell of an open campfire, of wet, half-mulched leaves, and of dewy sundown are like a wilderness pheromone. They still make me crave the thrill of some wild adventure.
Two of our favorite pastimes on Starmount were running around at night and, of course, eating candy. So it’s no surprise that Halloween gave Christmas a real run for its money as far as favorite holidays go.
All Hallows’ Eve was, to a ten-year-old, the perfect blend of make-believe and reality, a combination we highly valued. The possibility that our costumes and games might nod toward some mysterious truth, be it monsters, aliens, or paranormal happenings, was more real on that one night than on any other night of the year. And that’s saying something because, for us, fantasy was pretty real all year long.
Dracula and any form of the Devil were the most popular costumes in 1977. Both seemed to fit the Sons of Starmount, even beyond that one night. Jim and I both dressed up as Dracula that year. My get-up was a thrown-together homage to vampirism, the basic building blocks of which were blue jeans, worn out at the knees (like every pair I owned); a black cape; a sharp-looking white dress shirt (hardly ever worn); and a short, fat, weird red tie. To finish off my ghoulish, if not manly, chest, I wore a funky wooden red, green, and pink hippie cross. Not only was this cross a bizarre cultural mix of a stoic religious icon and seventies permissiveness, but I somewhat remember Dracula having a serious aversion to seeing a cross, much less wearing one. No matter; it looked cool and looking cool allowed for taking some license when it came to vampire fashion. The last part of my costume focused on transforming a freckle-faced redhead into Bela Lugosi.
My skin tone already leaned toward the undead, but mom whitewashed my face with some concoction of makeup to embellish my already Scottish, anti-tan features.
She applied red lipstick so that it caked under my eyes, dripped from my mouth like blood, and formed several severe-looking varicose veins across my cheeks. Pomade made greasing my hair into a Fonzie-style pompadour a snap. The key was to lean the hair more toward 1850 than 1950, which my mother accomplished by combing a sharp widow’s peak into my forehead. It was perfect, so perfect in fact, that it would have made the vampire Barnabas Collins from the TV show Dark Shadows, with his sawblade-like comb-over, green with envy. The crowning accessory was the obligatory pair of plastic fangs. We bought the teeth a few days ahead of time, so of course, I walked around wearing them 24-7, making an evil hissing sound. That sound was partially an effort to get into character and partially due to the fact that the awkward fangs made my mouth fill up with spit. On Halloween night, I tried to suck that spit back into my mouth so I wouldn’t drip saliva down my face, washing away my fake varicose veins.
The others wore costumes that ranged from the barely-any-different than-normal to levels of scary detail that transformed them into something more than young boys, at least for one night. Eye patches, random black Sharpie slashes, pencil-thin mustaches, fathers’ bandannas, mothers’ headscarves, dining-room napkins and tablecloths, and all manner of cardboard weaponry came together to create the creatures of the night.
We were vampires, pirates, superheroes, soldiers, and, quite possibly, one giant Granny Smith apple.
We never set out to trick or treat before the sun went down. In the late seventies, it was still safe to let your kids loose on the streets at night, or at least, so our parents thought.
Nowadays, the trick or treating exercise occurs, unceremoniously, in either daylight hours or with a parade of parents carrying so many cellphone flashlights that it might as well be high noon. If you’re a particularly unlucky candy grabber, the ghoulish events occur within the antiseptic corridors of the local mall or middle-school hallway. That would have been an unheard-of level of oppressive supervision back in 1977.
I would love to hear what you thought about this essay and if it brought any personal memories or stories to mind. Please feel free to leave a comment. I’ll answer all of them. I would love to strike up a conversation about this piece and your thoughts. Please consider sharing this newsletter with a friend. Thank you. - Mark
Very engaging and fun to read, my friend 😎👍
Homemade costumes were SOOOO much cooler than the store-bought readymades of now. Our house was the hit of Halloween one year when I bought my one and only block of black ice for the punch bowl! That, along with the boombox blair of 'Monster Mash' went down in family history:)