The Former Anne Spollen's Author Blog Is Being Retitled to "Notes from Living Upghetto": Halloween

Showing posts with label Halloween. Show all posts

Monday, October 4, 2010

Halloween Choice

My kids change their Halloween ideas a few times before settling on one costume. It's kind of a ritual that they go through. Well, I should say Emma and Philip do this. They always loved costumes, dressing up, all that stuff when they were little. Christopher wore a Batman suit as his sole foray into dress up world, and every Halloween he knew what he wanted to be by Labor Day and he stuck to it. Of course, his particular weirdness was to eat all of his Halloween candy on Halloween night and well...you sort of know the rest if you've ever run a highly necessary wash at 3 am.

But not being able to make linear decisions is genetic. Emma and I went into the basement to look at all the Halloween stuff we had lying around. I saw a bunch of coats in a box and remembered the coat drive for the homeless. I was trying on a coat that I once really loved: this red, wool coat with big buttons that I haven't worn since I was maybe 25. I thought I looked pretty good when Emma looked over and said, "Wow, Mom, you look just like Clifford in that." In case you haven't traveled with the under 12 crowd recently, this is Clifford:

I put the coat in the box. Then Emma announced what she wanted to be for Halloween. "I need a new wig," she said, "since Snooki has long, black hair."

This is my interpretation of Snooki:

Needless to say, I got judgmental. The Jersey Shore is everywhere around here, particularly since we live at the Jersey Shore, only here's the thing: they act and speak just like people from North Jersey or Brooklyn or Staten Island do. They don't act at all like the folks down here who spend a lot of time quilting and quadding and thinking about ducks. After explaining to Emma all the reasons why she shouldn't go out dressed as her, she shrugged and said, "That's my final decision."

I appealed to Philip. "You talk to her," I said, "since she'll listen more to you." I was going on and on about what a terrible role model she is, how I was not happy, and he looked at me and smiled.

"You don't get it all, Mom. You act like this is serious. It's Halloween."

"Yes, but..."

"You're acting like she's going to be Snooki as a career or something. Emma thinks Snooki is a joke. She laughs when she sees her clothes. She's going out as her to make fun of the whole thing."

I was thinking about what he said when Emma walked in, her face red. "Philip, there is no way you are going out as that."

"As what?" I had been so preoccupied with Emma's choice that I hadn't asked Philip about his.

"A clown," she wailed. "An evil clown. I can't stand clowns. I won't go in the parade with you if you do this. Clowns are like my worst nighmare."

I'm fairly certain neither one will budge about their costume choice. This should be an interesting Halloween.

Maybe I should dig out my old favorite coat and just get a pair of big red ears.

Saturday, September 25, 2010

Getting to be That Time

About two weeks ago, this was "our" beach, but now it's definitely getting to be Halloween around here. Right after Emma's birthday, in late August, my kids start talking about costumes, and today we are going to start figuring out how to make them. I know it's more than a month away, but already our neighborhood is all orange and golden and there are plastic tombstones jutting out of lawns, lots of hay bales, and those gigantic blow up things that flatten out in a way each morning that is far scarier than when they're inflated into a twenty six foot Pumpkin Snoopy.

Last year's six foot werewolf; I finally found the picture that shows the tail.

Is it me, or has Halloween gotten to be a much bigger celebration than it used to be?

Ghosts don't scare me. Nothing mystical or spiritual does. Teen driving, that scares me. Boy teen driving in particular scares me, especially when there are other boys in the car. Philip and Emma conspiring also scares me. I think that thumbs up is a cover up because he looks plenty guilty.

Actually, when any of my kids acts quiet, I feel fear. Quiet is never good in this house. I think of other quiet things like lurking murderers in the basement or bugs waiting to pounce.

And I am not really big on crawling things like snakes or spiders. And my eel phobia is legendary. Come to think of it, I've never seen an eel costume for Halloween...

Speaking of spiders, here is my pick for scariest pre-Halloween video: five foot spiders. I kid you not. A spider the size of Emma. Good Lord. I mean, really, say you're in the basement dusting off the Halloween decorations and you see an actual five foot spider. Just typing that creates a sleep-depriving image in my brain.

I once had a literature professor who told us that autumn has always been the time when the margin between the living and the dead gets very, very thin. It was one of those archetypal patterns in human existence. Sometimes I look at the blow up Draculas, the ones that are purple and green, and think that we haven't really made all that much progress in adhering to our archetypal patterns. I think we've gone in a whole new direction.

I include myself in that. I am going to spend at least part of today figuring out how to transform one of the classic Schwinn bikes into Ghost Rider. That's after I get the decorations out of the basement.

And if I come across one spider down there, even if it's smaller than a bottle cap, I'm out of there.

I realize we're early because my kids love Halloween second only to Christmas, but has anyone else begun Halloween or plans?

Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Happy Halloween!

Last night, I had to grade two folders of college essays (translation, people are paying for my judgment, so I had to be focused), catch up on the never ending stories of laundry and food shopping after teaching a nearly three hour class. I went to bed around 2 or so, and at 5:30 this morning, my fourteen year old woke me up with this sentence:

"Mom, is it possible to give yourself a tattoo with a Bic pen and a lighter?"

Now, if you recall, he is the same fourteen year old who recently pierced his lip with a needle and a match; he currently sports "snake bites" -- double lip piercings-- after the proclamation by a bevy of eighth and ninth grade girls that he looked, indeed, "way hot" with the one piercing, he decided to go for it. We now have a pact that if any other punctures appear on his body, the computer will be brought from his room to the basement - for the rest of his mortal life.

So that's what's new here. And we finished our costumes. His younger sister has been obsessed with fairies for most of her very young life, and has trick-or-treated as a fairy every year. This year, she fell in love with a half angel/half devil costume, and for the first time, I thought, a little wistfully, we won't have a Halloween fairy.

But fear not in the life of raising teens: my son, the six foot one inch basketball center who is currently tugging on size 12 1/2 sneakers, decided it would be really funny if he went as a fairy. Borrowing one of his sister's creations (and adding several new layers for length) this is the result:

Happy Halloween!

Books

Light Beneath Ferns

"I have this strange sense that my silence is preparing me for something I can't name . ."

Elizah Rayne is nothing like other fourteen-year-old girls. More interested in bird bones than people, she wraps herself in silence. Trying to escape the shadow of her gambler father, Elizah and her mother move into an old house that borders a cemetery. All her mother wants is for them to have "normal" lives. But that becomes impossible for Elizah when she finds a human jawbone by the river and meets Nathaniel, a strangely hypnotic boy who draws Elizah into his dreamlike and mysterious world.

Only by forgetting everything she knows can Elizah understand the truth about Nathaniel—and discover an unimaginable secret.

Teen made trailer for Light Beneath Ferns.

Order Light Beneath Ferns here.

Foreword Magazine's Review of Light Beneath Ferns

Excerpt from THE SHAPE OF WATER

CHAPTER ONE
I discovered windows one afternoon and after that, nothing was ever the same. They had always been there, of course, glass panes shimmering in the color of rain, but that spring for the first time, I was able to open the windows in my room. For years, the locks had been painted stuck, and during the winter, heat from the radiator beneath my windows finally steamed off enough paint off the metal wings of the locks could be twirled open. Knowing that I could open the windows attracted me to them, and I began sitting under the windows, staring through the glass at the sky. From that position, on a chair in my room, the sky did not seem real; it seemed a place I was making up, so I watched it.
The white wood of the window panes acted as frames so the sky came to me slowly, and the huge openness of its space did not touch me. All the window glass in our old house had wavers and bubbles inside it, so at times the clouds moved like water, melting and blurring until they passed outside of the warp. After a few afternoons of sitting, the heavens seemed too quiet to keep watching so I began watching a small patch of woods next to our yard that housed little more than trees and a scatter of bony, mean-looking rabbits.
I started gazing at the sky and the woods in March when the branches were still wet and it was then, with nothing outside my window but trees and rain, that I noticed a shine inside darkness, I noticed colors glimmering within the darkness of the wood. I watched birds come and go, I watched rain nipple down from buds to the grass. The water dripping from branch edges and leaves created optical tricks; I could see that as I watched leaves melt.
Then one day I ventured into the space outside. I did not think about doing this much beforehand. I simply opened the window and dropped to the ground below, uncertain as to why this should be such a more satisfying exit than simply using the door; my father worked until seven o’clock and I could do whatever I wanted until then. But I liked the solid sound my legs made when I landed. Leaving via a five foot drop seemed so much more a decision than just using a door. The sense of escape made my heart pound, though all I escaped was the soundless spread of moss-colored light inside my house and the silence.
I had come to know silence well during those months after my mother died. When you sit in silence long enough, you learn that silence has a motion. It glides over you without shape or form, but with weight, exactly like water. Its color is silver. And silence has a sound you hear only after hours of wading inside it. The sound is soft, flute notes rising up like the words of glass speaking. There comes a point when you must shatter the silence, when you must shatter the blindness of its words, the blindness of its light. I did this by going into the yard. Once I stood there, in the grass next to the trees I had been watching, I found silence outside as well. But I was happier outside than I had been in the house, so I stayed for a bit. I stood beneath my bedroom window for a few minutes, looking up at the branches and the crooked pieces of sky colliding between the branches. I believed I could identify the scent of the sky as I stood there, a blue menthol fragrance similar to the scent of seawater that sprayed into my face when I first dove into the ocean. That initial scent smelled much more subtle than the ocean’s heavy, fishy aroma, a whiff of salt and mint that warned a more powerful scent would enter my nose just as I approached the water on a dive. It was the scent I dreamed in. And it was the scent of that spring sky as I stood in my yard.

***