Trick or Treat

When I was young, I always began Halloween with aspirations to fill my entire pillowcase with candy.  We lived in a neighborhood simply crammed with streets, with houses upon houses, all set close to one another, almost all of them, really every one, with a bright light on, signifying yes, this house was participating in Halloween.  You could knock on a stranger's door and take the Three Musketeers bar, or the Tootsie Roll, or the Lifesavers, and it was okay.  Unlike all the other times in the seventies, when a stranger offering you candy signified danger.  Which is not to say that strangers with candy are any less dangerous, but for many of us, we mitigate the risks for our children with our presence.  In my seventies, we children were often alone, walking to school alone, walking to the playground alone, biking to the pool, coming home from Girl Scouts, trick-or-treating with friends--alone.  Our mothers worked or didn't work, but we weren't chauffeured to activities, we didn't have a parent waiting outside the gym in a running car, with a snack for us, after practice.  We ran around the neighborhood until dark, playing tag and ghosts in the graveyard and catching fireflies in jars.  Sometimes that was scary.  Sometimes that was great.  I knew how to take the city bus and go downtown to have lunch with my mom at her office.  I knew how to brown ground beef for spaghetti sauce.  I called Time and Temperature to find out the weather, and I started babysitting when I was twelve.  People paid me a dollar an hour to watch their newborns and none of us batted an eye about that.

In other words, the possibilities for candy on a middling dark evening in the suburbs of Ohio in the seventies seemed endless. Candy was coveted in our house.  We didn't have a candy drawer, like I do now.  Candy was hard fought for--nickels and dimes saved to go to the candy store.  The occasional bridge mix my mother bought for actual bridge parties--that candy was dark and full of nuts and raisins, but it was still candy.  

I could be misremembering, and what other kind of remembering is there, but I think costumes were not as gruesome then.  Ours weren't.  We had a costume bag, with old outfits one of our neighbors donated. We might go as a princess, or a witch.  A ghost in an old sheet.  You could always go as a hobo.  Think of that.  A hobo to us was a man who wandered, in jeans and a flannel shirt, with a red or blue bandana knotted up at the end of the stick, which contained, who knew? Seemingly his worldly possessions.  A hunk of bread and some cheese, a dollar, a book. Hobos were mysterious.  Hobos were not homeless people, or the strange people you might see downtown, sitting against a building, begging for change.  Hobos were costumes.

Wealthier children had store-bought costumes, and I remember Wonder Woman, and Superman, and Donny Osmond, and Scooby Doo.  Did kids wear masks that had a rubber pump that sent blood up and through the mask so the kid looked like a bleeding skull?  I don't remember those.  But Asher wore one for Halloween this year.  I could hardly look at him, it was so disturbing.  Halloween is Rabelaisian and I accept that in an intellectual sort of way--a holiday where we celebrate the macabre, death, where our world is turned carnivaleque upside down, a community shedding fear by mocking it.  But on the ground, where skeletons emerge from the manicured front yards, and nine-year-old children are dressed like serial killers, and it's impossible to get a tracksuit in order to dress up as one of the participants in Squid Games (a show about killing people for money in a grotesquerie of the games we played as children) because the factories in China cannot create enough Squid Game costumes fast enough to feed the desire for them, I sometimes falter.  A fake knife plunged into a child's skull is meant to scare us in a friendly way, but I find myself at the edge of tears.

Especially since cancer.  My diagnosis plunged me into a world I was in blissful ignorance of before--a world of chemotherapy, and radiation, and surgeries, and the normalization of pain--and I can't take these bloody masks so lightly now. But of course, I swallow my discomfort, and walk the streets of my small town with my bloody twins, and wave at neighbors, and admire the decorations, and worry about Asher's peanut allergy and the propensity of candy to be Reese's peanut butter cups, and take joy in the fact that Elijah still wants to hold my hand, some of the time, in public. Avery is with us on Halloween, too, dressed up as a kind of metrosexual goat creature.  I look for my giant sloth costume but can't find it, so I wear a burnt orange sweatshirt.  I get tired and go home early, and Kyle takes the boys to Tall Pines, a development with big homes where the legend is they give our full-size candy bars.  And still, the boys don't fill up their paper bags.

The pillowcase filled with candy at the end of that Ohio night.  Part of the thrill was thinking this was all mine to measure out, to admire and order, to choose to eat when and where I wanted. We didn't live in a house that policed our Halloween treats--no parent doled out a single piece after dinner.  Of course I made my way through the "good" candy in short order, leaving the Jolly Ranchers and the strange straws filled with colored sugar that immediately got wet and untenable when you put it in your mouth and the disappointing mini bags of pretzels to sustain me over the long winter.  The twins easily give up their Milky Ways to me--they aren't enraptured by the caramel as I was and am.

I'm starting my fifth year of being a stage four cancer person.  The emergency that was the first year has left the building.  Is this a chronic condition? A little? 

I think I have recovered from the shock of finding out I was not going to have this long second chapter of my life, wherein my kids grew older and self-sufficient and I got wiser and wealthier, and I had a second home by the sea, and wrote poetry after I retired, and my body remained in the background: sturdy if not beautiful, perfectly serviceable. With an incurable disease on board, my body claimed its rightful place in the center of everything, needing to be scanned every three months for the inevitable progression.  Things have shifted from you're going to die this year to a strange dance with that possibility on a regularly timed basis.  As if I'm dancing on a cliff with death, and at some point, soon, I'll twirl over the edge.  The question of how to live in this way is of course the question.

I don't live a life of grand gestures or big activities.  I spend an inordinate amount of time walking the same two miles outside my house.  If Sebby needs a short walk, I turn to the left, turn on a podcast and walk past the cornfields, and the pasture where the five deer live.  If it is dark outside, and a clear night, I can simply tilt my head upwards to see the sky filled with stars, just like everyone else who has lived on this planet.  If I am going for a longer walk, I turn to the right.  Sebby and I navigate past the barking dog trapped behind an electronic fence, and then we are at the bog.  The other day, Sebby snuffled into the water hidden by tall grasses on the slope down from the walking path.  A massive heron broke free from the water and the air carried him up and away from Sebby.  He just flew, as simply and more beautifully than I just walk.  I watched him float across the bog.  Sebby was splashing around and hardly noticed.

I don't need the math to add up to more these days. It doesn't feel like I need to travel the world. I don't have any desire to leap from a plane, or ride in a hot air balloon. The sense of an ending that is bequested by stage four cancer has deposited me in this place where I am radically content on my street, with my people, in the woods outside of Boston.  Which is not to say I am living deeply, as if each moment is a poem.  I just have found myself letting go of the desire to do anything big.  I am drawn to the small right now.  The heron swooping up into the air.  The dog against me on the chair as I talk to my daughter on the phone.  This cheesecake I made the other day that had goat cheese in it.  The ratio of goat cheese to cream cheese was one to four, so you couldn't exactly taste it, but it made this creamy, creamy cake. I really hope this feeling stays.  I don't want to crave what I don't have.  I'm not Thoreau, and neither was he.  I do covet a specific warm, gray sweater and hope I get it for Hanukkah and I know that is wasteful--I have plenty of sweaters, even plenty of gray and black and ivory sweaters.  But I also am doing less and less each day, at least less in a mathematical sense of wanting more, at least in the sense of measurable progress, and I am increasingly comfortable that way.

I think getting sick broke open my delusional questing, or broke me through to this second chapter in my life.  I can still make myself a little queasy when I think about the promotion to a new role I wanted right before I was diagnosed that it turns out I was not going to get.  I think about that crestfallen woman, who would have dragged herself through the dirt about that failure, who can still kindle a little burst of indignation thinking about it.  I think about how strong I thought I was, how capable of making choices, both personal and professional, that would serve me well.  I think about what that younger woman wanted out of life, and how I measured a good day.

Figuring out my body was on a completely different path than my mind startled me into an active consideration of my tenuous life, which is another way of saying, I fell into conscious love of my life, which of course only makes it more painful to consider leaving.  But otherwise, there I was, sleeping in the parking garage for a few minutes before heading into work, driving through the spring with a brief glance at the tulips, setting aside vacation days for swimming, putting off poetry for another day.  Please don't think I am scolding you lovely ones who are ambitious, who are inhabiting your work in a mission-based way.  I am speaking for myself when I say that getting cancer made me aware that I was in love with my specific life.  My specific curving road, and the specific mourning doves who come to the bird feeder.  My specific children and wife and parents and aunts and cousins and friends.  I loved you all before, of course, but the grief and fear which entered stage left, are now center stage with the joy and love which was ushered in as well.  I am not deep and profound, grateful for every moment--my dog ate a pile of sticks a few days ago and we are all living with him as the sticks work their way through his system.  I am worried about the high deductible we will have on our health insurance plan in January.  I am paying attention to the pain in my spine at the end of each day. I can't live in a state of heightened awareness and gratitude at every moment, any more than Thoreau could (he who still took his laundry home to this mother for washing).  I love you all now, in a way that is much closer to unconditional than before.  Which is not to say that I don't fly off the handle at an unexpected tantrum about bedtime.  But it is to say that I ache hard in the middle of the night over that chastened child, and want to press into him and all of you the deep, deep love.  Let that be your memory of me, with the cheesecake and the words, not the swift anger or the plodding work product of yore.

A bucket list is a little like that full bag of Halloween candy (said Forrest Gump).  The bucket list suggests an end, a life that can be wrapped up when all the things have been crossed off the list.  A bag that is actually full, to the brim, with Milky Ways. I do think of the Northern Lights, and what it would be like to tilt my head up and see the night sky lit with the brilliant colors and shadows and light dancing, with the deep snow around my wonderful sleigh, with its down comforters and thermoses of hot cocoa.  But I don't like the idea of checking off a box. I'm not trying to finish this life. 

I did start out on that Halloween night, say in 1976, the country's bicentennial in those years before the 1619 project, dressed like a hobo on Medbrook Way, in Columbus, Ohio, a faded pillowcase in my hands and the world before me.  I imagined the end of the night, with candy practically spilling out of my pillowcase, my exhausted and triumphant return.  But my fondest memories have nothing to do with coming home, or even with eating that coveted candy. I remember trick-or-treating.  The small anxiety after ringing the bell--am I interrupting? Might this person be mean? The relief when the voice pitched out into the night: "What have we here? A hobo? What do you say?"

Trick or treat.  We say trick or treat.  And it is one, or another, again and again and again.  It's an unremarkable cliche: there is not treat without the trick.  There is not joy without the grief.  Broken open, we recognize we are on the journey. Coming up to each house, with fear and hope, waiting with our bags and hearts open. It is not the end that we hold dear.  It is the knocking, and the walking, and the hand of a small bloody monster in mine, navigating the dark night.