Mark Anderson. Making do at Halloween

Mark Anderson, Citizen Special
Published: Wednesday, October 22, 2008

The city has the nightlife, the restaurants and the pizzazz. The playgrounds, the soccer fields and the two-car garages belong to suburbia. And Halloween. Halloween lives amid the avenues and drives, the crescents and culs de sac, because, well, that’s where the kids are. If I were a dad and my son asked me to buy him a costume, I’d say no. “Make one,” I’d tell him.

And here’s what I bet would happen: He finds a box, a narrow rectangle of cardboard. He crams it over his head. Ow. He pulls it off and cuts two holes on either side so his ears can stick out, so they’re not squashed against his head. That’s better. He cuts two eye-slits and a slit for a mouth, an inch wide and three inches long, perfectly straight like the mouth of a robot. He crams the box over his head. He looks at himself in the mirror. Frowns. Thinks.

Empties a Q-tip box and tapes the halves to either side of the robot head, covering the ear holes. Puts the head back on. Better. But not finished. Not scary enough. Thinks.

Empties a box of toothpicks, the flat orange ones that taper to a point at one end. Rams them into the corrugations of the cardboard mouth, staggering them top and bottom to make teeth — pointy, orange tyrannosaurus teeth. Puts the robot head back on: scary. But not finished.

Roots around in his box of wires, batteries, switches and lights; salvage from a hundred no longer used and abused toys. Punches a hole in the top of the robot head and pushes a small red light through. Takes a battery pack that once powered an electric car and runs the leads up to the light. Drops in a couple D-cells, presses the button, and the robot head lights up red. Presses the button a bunch of times really fast and the light flickers on and off. Now the robot looks scary and can talk in Morse code.

Gathers the loose Q-tips and toothpicks and stuffs them in a bathroom drawer where they’ll go missing for weeks. Come on Halloween.

As for Dad, he’s got work to do, too. Stop at the grocery store on the way home from the office. Pick up a bag of mini chocolate bars, a carton of mini potato chips, a bag of Twizzlers, a bag of suckers, and two bags of those disgusting, orange-wrapped kisses — hey, what goes around comes around.

Also: a cardboard spider web (complete with fanged, multi-eyed black widow) and a grinning, metre-tall skeleton. Spend a few minutes hefting pumpkins, appraising them for uniformity of colour, symmetry of shape. Think. Are you missing anything?

Phone home. “Am I missing anything?”

“I don’t know,” says your wife. “What did you get?”

Run down the list.

“You didn’t get those horrible gooey kisses!”

“Hey, what goes around comes around.”

Drive home. Tape the spider web to the front window and hang the skeleton from the tree. Gather the kids together to carve the pumpkin: No. 1 son, the robot, is tasked with scooping the goo out with a spoon, and No. 1 daughter (perhaps she’s the artistic one) transforms the gourd into a jack-o-lantern with a twisted, ghostly mouth, vaguely reminiscent of Edvard Munch’s The Scream.

The daughter’s too old for trick or treating; she’s going to a party with her friends instead. You ask her what she’s dressing up as.

“A witch,” she says.

“Seems about right.”

She sticks out her tongue. She does that a lot these days.

“A sexy witch,” says your wife, raising an eyebrow and making a point of it.

Great.

Later, after the kids have hit the hay, you walk out to the back deck and survey the yard. The leaves are off the trees, the bare branches silhouetted in the moonlight. It does look spooky, and will continue looking spooky and dead and spirit-ridden until the snow falls and the Christmas lights go up and the page turns on another season.

Shortly your wife joins you with a glass of deep red wine. “Did you see what your son made?” she asks. “The robot head? It’s fantastic.”

“I told you he’d come up with something.”

The air is still and cold. She folds into your arm. “Don’t forget, we’re going to the Johnson’s party after trick-or-treating.”

“Hmm. What are you dressing up as?”

“A cat.”

“A sexy cat?”

“We’ll see.”

Mark Anderson is an Ottawa writer.