The Diatribe * net

Happy Halloween, everybody. I heard something on a morning radio show on my drive into work today that made me remember something I hadn’t thought about in a long time. As a kid, there were years when I had some good Halloween costumes - I was Dracula one year, a pirate another year, and I actually won first prize in my grammar school’s costume contest for one of my lesser costumes ever. I was the grim reaper, but I didn’t have a sickle and my hooded garment was plastic, as was my mask. It’s not like there wasn’t stiff competition, either. There were plenty of kids with much better costumes.

Anyway, I think it was when I was in third grade that I wasn’t really into finding a costume that year. Actually, I don’t remember the reason why, but I had to scramble the night before Halloween to come up with something, anything that I could wear to school and trick-or-treating afterwards. What I scraped together was a half-assed murderous zombie, with ratty, old sneakers, blue jeans, one of my father’s old, gray sweaters, a pair of my father’s leather gloves (way too big for me), and a monster mask that my dad had worn to a Halloween party a few years earlier. It was just a full-head rubber mask with a gray face, gray hair, warts, scars, a big hooked nose, an evil snarl, and quasi fangs (to which I added fake blood).

Something was missing, however. I needed a weapon to appear more menacing. I had learned from my mistake the year prior when I didn’t have a sickle to complete my grim reaper ensemble. There was no time to go to a store to buy a plastic axe, so, without telling my parents, I went down to the cellar on Halloween morning and grabbed a crowbar and hid it in my sleeve. When my sister saw me carrying a crowbar to school, she warned me that I’d get busted. I didn’t believe her or didn’t care. I thought our school would grant a special dispensation allowing me to carry a blunt instrument seeing as how it was Halloween. Well, the nuns didn’t take too kindly to that. The crowbar was taken away, but in the end things worked out alright because the nuns didn’t tell my parents and didn’t give me detention. So I guess even a Pagan holiday celebrating the dead has the power to soften a ruler-wielding nun.