Halloween Knocks

I have been whacked seriously hard in the head twice in my life. (Okay, I see some of you nodding like you knew it all along. Stop it.) Both occasions were my own doing, and both happened because of HALLOWEEN.

The first time I was nine, dressed in some ridiculous costume with a mask that obstructed my view, floating across lawns with my friends in tiny swarms, descending on doorbells and screaming in mock terror at the frights of the night. There were of course houses that were dark and the unspoken rule is don’t ring the doorbell of a house with no porch light. A pair of older boys set the stage with a few creepy taunts and dares, and so the doorbell on the darkened house got rung not once but several times. When the door finally opened we expected an angry homeowner to come out and yell at us to get off his porch. That’s not what happened. The door opened, but we saw no light inside, just a dark house and a tall figure staring at us (I know, everyone is tall when you’re nine.) Someone screamed ‘Run!‘ and that’s all it took to send us fleeing in a frenzy of shouts and screams, dropping bags of candy and parts of costumes in our wake. The mask on my face prevented me from seeing the support cable of the telephone pole in the corner of the yard. I literally clothes-lined myself on that cable, face first, feet flying up in front of me and landing oh so hard on that chilly ground. Oucha magoucha.

The second time came during a visit to a haunted house, the kind you pay to go in and get scared. My companion and I had just crawled through the open doors of a hearse and emerged from the other side when some deranged banshee with a scream like a Bavarian yodeler chose that moment to erupt and I leaped away toward the next entrance, an actual aircraft door. I dangerously misjudged the height of the door and while the lower half of my body charged through, the top half of my head did not. I couldn’t speak to tell my companion what had happened and by the time he realized I wasn’t behind him, I was already staggering toward him and moaning like a Sunday night extra on AMC. I don’t remember much more from that particular haunted house.

All my lumps come on Halloween. Still love it.