Carved Pumpkins with Crooked Smiles

9-15-05

by Diane Sprague

Most of the spooks die down when a person becomes an adult. Even when the trees give up their leaves and leave only brown sticks that reach into the white sullen sky, when the remains of the harvest remind us of a life that is passing away, and when the darkness stays a bit longer every day, we can still leave the spooks undisturbed in corners where they don't bother us much. They are still there though. That is why we have Halloween. Otherwise, they might regain their power and shatter our notions of safety and security in a world that only offers such things when we are not paying any attention.

The spooks under the bed had a wicked means of multiplying themselves when I was a child. Each noise in the night was a sign that the dark creatures split themselves into more and more malevolent beings who were hidden in that unknown darkness beneath me. Soon an army of these spooks reigned in that mysterious region and paralyzed me. I did not want to stay in bed, but I could not get away. I could not move. Only the morning light could drive them away. That and growing up. Becoming an adult removed the little spooks and I could now fall asleep undisturbed, knowing the sounds are just natural settling of the house, the mechanical switching of furnaces, and aging bedsprings. Reason took away my paralysis, but something remained because, for the life of me, I can never let my feet dangle over the side of the bed at night. I cannot even toy with the thought. If my feet become uncovered and even approach the side of the bed, I quickly pull them back. This is because the spooks are still there, somewhere in the depths of the forgotten place in my mind where the ghosts never leave. They just become quiet and unnoticed. That is why we carve pumpkins, fills them with burning light, and leave them outside with the other pumpkins that rule this night.

Even when I was a teenager and reason started to drive the spooks far away, stories kept them alive. I especially remember the one about the babysitter who answers the phone and is asked if she has checked the children and she later discovers the calls were coming from another phone in the house. That one story was a major set back to the psychological progress of my mastering the fears. Here I was, a sane, responsible, reasonable babysitter who were beginning to be trusted with the incredible adult responsibility of caring for some children having to live with nights filled with ringing telephones, a dark upstairs which hid other phones, and children that hadn't been checked in awhile.

We create various types of scary creatures. One type I find hard to take seriously is demons. I was taught that they were up there with my maze of thoughts and emotions constantly tempting me to various sordid ideas and activities. I could never figure out why they didn't have any better to do than poke into my business. Sometimes they are rather amusing. I work on a technical support line and once a customer who was in a rather foul mood insisted I tell him how to solve his problem without telling me what the problem was. I was a bit flustered by his request, but when he kept angrily insisting I give him solution for his unknown problem, one of those demons suggested I give him the instructions for zeroing out his hard drive. Yup, they can be comical creatures those demons. I like having them around. They make for interesting company.

I cannot understand the people who make the so-called scary movies. Most of them are clueless. Bathtubs are not scary. They are places for rubber ducks, bubbles, and good smells. Even so, these horror films are always placing the main characters in a bathtub with rather dire results. Something always appears in the water with the hapless character and I can never figure out how. Drains just aren't that big. Water always shoots out everywhere and of course, turns red and gets everything miserably wet, and nobody bothers to clean it up. I don't know. And who really lights up fifty candles before each bath? One or two should be sufficient. The only scary thing about those scenes is the total lack of originality of the people who write that garbage.

Now and then they get it. They place the ghost out of reach, only giving us the slightest suggestion of there presence. A noise, a shadow, a small movement are enough to trigger our memories of when these creatures were real, huge, and powerful. I don't think anything will be as frightening to me as the eye in an old Phantom of the Opera movie I saw as a child. Some of the rooms in the opera house had walls in which there was a small opening. In some scenes, the eye of the phantom could be seen looking through the hole. Darn that was scary. It was just an eye watching, but for weeks after the seeing the movie, my imagination made it follow me everywhere, into every room, watching me with some kind of malevolent intent.

The images we create from out fears can be puzzling. When my grandfather died when I was four, I had no idea what happened to him. I remember seeing his body behind a glass window. He was still, silent, and going somewhere far away. I did not know where and I did not know why, so I created a giant who lived underground. He would try to come up to us again, and smalls hills or mounds were his head pushing from underground to come back. I did not want a giant to come into my world, so I would jump on the mounds to push him back. I remember getting my friends to jump with me. We found a way to keep our world safe from something we did not know, from something we did not understand.

But nothing was better than Halloween. I loved that night. I loved the rich smell of pumpkins, the gooey guts they have inside, and the crooked smiles carved on the hard orange skin. The wonderful prize of a bag full of candy was a fit reward for our going out into the darkness and going to strange houses to ask for treats. Our street seems endless and the night stretched into another realm. It was full of myths and wonders. As an adult, I can only watch the children in their wonderful costumes and remember. I can carve a small pumpkin, give him a crooked smile, and remember that everything scary is still there. We may have gained some power, jumping on our spooks and sending the deep underground, but it pays to remember them a bit before the stillness of winter takes over the world. The rich and magical feeling of touching the mystery and vulnerability of our existence still remains in the gentle glow of the candle inside our carved pumpkins.