Janus on Halloween

One of my earliest childhood memories is on Halloween, I must’ve been three or four. My dad and I are on Third Street. I’m wearing a glow-in-the-dark skeleton costume and carrying an orange plastic bucket shaped like a jack o’ lantern. We come to the first house. My dad stops. “Ok,” he says. “Go up there and say trick-or-treat.” The walk up to the porch seems very long. I have to keep glancing back at my dad for reassurance. My mom would’ve gone with me. As I get closer to the porch, I notice a scarecrow in a rocking chair holding a bowl of candy in its lap. I can’t tell if it’s someone in a costume or just a dummy. I find this incredibly disconcerting, this not knowing if something has life or not. I stare at the bowl, at the scarecrow. I am afraid to reach out toward this thing, but my dad is waiting back on the sidewalk. He will be disappointed if I run back without trying. I swipe wildly at the bowl, already turning my body to run. My fingers close on a fun-size Snickers and I am off the porch running back to the sidewalk and my dad who is grinning. He takes the Snickers from my hand and drops it into the orange plastic pumpkin with a hollow sound. I am exhilarated for having faced something unknown and won. We go on to the next house and I am ready to walk to the porch alone, the orange plastic bucket swinging in the air….

In the first trimester, last winter, I often joked about my desire to have a Halloween baby. It would’ve been fitting. For years, I’d told my friends that the best thing about having a kid must be going to children’s trick-or-treat functions. They laughed when I said it, but I wasn’t kidding. The end of trick-or-treating was the closest thing I had to a coming of age ritual. When I went out that last time and people kept asking if we weren’t a little old, it was the first time I was made to confront the change that had come with puberty. On one side of that night, I was a boy, the other, not quite a man, but somewhere in between the two. Getting a driver’s license or moving out didn’t feel as significant as the end of the Halloween ritual, one that I’d been participating in nearly since birth.

Since the last time I went trick-or-treating—I was 13—I’ve always looked upon the holiday with nostalgia. I participate from the periphery: reading ghost stories, eating autumnal food, carving pumpkins, but the evening of the 31^st is always anticlimactic. I stay at home, where an adult should be and remember running through the streets and the adventure of the holiday which, when compared to the other sedentary family bubble holidays of the US is even more significant.

Even as a kid, I didn’t care about the candy. It was the opportunity to run around at night, in costume with 100s of other unsupervised kids running around at night. In a way, it’s a mock-up for making your own way in the world: You put on a costume and go from place to place asking for food and novelty, but everyone else is out doing the same thing, which can be both frustrating and exciting. Your parents can’t help you, nor would you want them to, but they’re back at home rooting for you. When you’re told you’re too old to participate in this make-believe adult world, the only other option is to consider the real one.

After my 13^th Halloween, I never went back. I stayed at home, passed out candy, dressed up, put on a spooky sound effects record, but it was all for the benefit of the kids acting out their coming of age. I went to a few Halloween parties, but sitting in a bar or leaning in a kitchen with a bunch of adults in costume getting drunk seemed more infantile than trick-or-treating. We weren’t even acting anything out. We were resorting to the cliché adults rely on to make life interesting. It was no different from any other night minus the face paint and the pumpkins.

Every Halloween I go as Janus. I don’t dress like the Roman god of transitions and time, but I spend the day looking forward and backward. I look backward to my childhood, remembering the sounds of basketball shoes on wet streets, the ambient giggles and little girl shrieks echoing up the block, the crinkly cellophane heft of the pillowcase and the waxy smells of make-up, rubber spiders and melting candles. I look forward to the day when I’ll be able to return to this world through the eyes of my own kid. Certainly, for many years I didn’t expect to ever have a kid and go back to Halloween, nor was I sure I wanted to; but, I couldn’t let the day go by without at least considering what it would be like to take a little hand, walk into the street together and point to the porch with the scarecrow and say ‘go, try out the adult world.’

Halloween was said to be the time of the year when the border between the worlds of the living and dead became vague and inhabitants of either world mingled, especially at night. This is still true, but the border has been shifted and now the forbidden gates that creak open connect the worlds of adulthood and the childhood. There is no other time of year, when children masquerade as adults, and adults spend the day remembering their childhoods.

I had secretly hoped the baby would be born on Halloween, but now that the day is here, I find I don’t mind. Today will pass as the other Halloweens of early adulthood. I’ll go to work, wish people a happy holiday, come home, make chili, listen to black metal, read a ghost story and go to bed. For seventeen years, this, with slight variations, has been my ritual. The baby will come when it wants, probably in a few days, but next year and for years afterward, I will be out there again on the wet streets, between the choruses of ‘trick-or-treat!’ But the focus won’t be on me. By then my role will only be to wave a hand over the scene and say ‘this is something we do; what do you think?’ The kid will make up his/her own mind and I, having thrown open the door between the realms of the adult and child, will have done my part to keep Halloween alive.