Dia de los Muertos

Day of the Dead, All Saints' Day, cleaning smashed pumpkin off the streets day.

Also my dad's birthday, 68 years ago my grandmother had to slam the door on the trick-or-treating kids in gangster and hobo and witch costumes while my grandfather pulled the car up for the mad dash to the hospital. She always told this story with a snicker, how the bowl of buttered popcorn on her gi-normous belly started moving down and she realized this was it.

One 10lb 6oz baby later...my 5'2" grandmother came home to rotting pumpkins on the front porch, a sink of dirty dishes from the week of bachelor living and couch sleeping my grandfather had been doing, and all that candy still there from October 31st. She dove in to that project first.

It's been fun to see the swing back to door-to-door trick or treating, and last night the adorable bobbing little costumed gnomes started swimming from porch to porch, and all that delayed evening gloaming of daylight's savings time made the usual beer-in-hand of the dads in the street rather un-PC. Too bad, really, because the beer keeps them from eating all the best candy out of the loot bags and plastic pumpkinhead buckets. Maybe it will be moms with Starbucks cups glowing in the twilight instead. My neighbors' son was dressing as a scary tiger, all 2 and a half years of him, to scare the little kids, he said, rawrrr! Too funny, I think his Gran made his costume, which is the absolute best.

I used to have a picture of my dad and me, on Halloween, carving and drawing on a 3-gallon pumpkin. I had on my golden rayon satin tiger jumpsuit, probably about 3, but I'd taken the stiff plastic mask off some time earlier. My dad had my mom's dark brown waxy eyebrow pencil in his hand, and he had just finished drawing some tiger whiskers and eyebrows on my face, with a round dark circle on the end of my nose. I'm looking up at him, and he's leaning over, with his black crewcut and white crewneck t-shirt on, putting the finishing touches on the devil face of the pumpkin, a focused look on his face. It had sharp horns drawn on, and he had cut out the jagged sneer of an evil smile, arched narrow eyes, all menacing. He was good at this, a prelude to his birthday festivities every year. The neighbor middle-school boys would come over for my dad to help with their pumpkins, to be r-e-a-l-l-y scary. Then we'd wash, salt and bake the seeds on cookie trays, crunchy snacks, a great contrast to all the candy.