THE SEASON OF FEAR!

The Season of Fear
By Giosue Santarelli

When was the last time that you had a good scare? Don’t count the kind of bone chilling that has you reviewing at your depleted 401K account and looking for the nearest bolder to tie around your neck. Halloween rolls around every year and as dependable as the decline of the stock market in the fall, autumn’s ghoulish goblins conjure up all sorts of haunts.

So many years ago when trick or treating was more simplistic, so were the kids and their imaginations. Jumping out from behind a bush could make a youngster scale the nearest tree in two seconds flat, but spending time with crazy Aunt Helen was a more dicey experience. Her propensity to wear oversized droopy stockings always made her appear as if she had elephant-skin legs, not to mention her propensity to leave the bathroom door open at the worst possible time. If you thought Halloween was frightening, that kind of stuff could scare the heebie geebies out of you.

The fall is our time to fear. It seems to parallel hurricane season. Perhaps it is the winds of change blowing in the remnants of old dead sea-faring pirates ashore. Their spirits, which have found no rest (and no buries treasure), stir up frightful notions. Those pesky Jack Sparrow look-a-likes are everywhere leading up to the end of October. You wouldn’t want Johnny Depp showing up at your house either. He’s always got a far away look in his eyes and his demeanor can be more like Edward Scissor Hands than the regular guy next door. Here’s a guy who prefers to live in France, a place that has even more ancient haunts and creepy castles than the U.S. How sane is that?

The season of fear often starts during back to school shopping. Candy corn often starts the trend. Can there be anything more Hellish than candy corn or more frightening than the prospect of having to eat more than a hand full of the sickeningly sweet harvest colored confection? I think I still have some candy corn from my trick or treating days back in 1966. The stuff never goes away! It is like the cockroach of candy. It has always been around and would probably survive a nuclear holocaust.

Scary displays of skeletons that only use to be available in the school science lab show up in store aisles too. Something that looks like Ferdinand the peg-leg sailor who donated his old dried carcass to medical science so that he’d have enough money to be buried shows up regularly in the Halloween displays. What kind of a school accepts a peg leg skeleton anyway? Of course old Ferdie would have preferred to be buried at sea, but he splurged his after-life money on big bottles of booze and wenches with big boobs. That is why skeletons always look as if they are smiling!

Pumpkins show up in stores as if they belong there. In decades past there were simple triangular eyes, nose and a few teeth in a hastily engraved mouth. Today there are kits with elaborate templates that require more carving skill than Jack the Ripper. With the right kit you can make your Jack-O-Lantern look like Vincent Price in the aftermath of a Michael Jackson video. Now that’s scary!

If you’re cable connected there are plenty of ghostly shows about real life encounters with spirits and other deceased wanderers. These programs often look like they were filmed by the same demented crew from the Blair Witch Project. Some whole networks are devoted to paranormal and use night-vision film to record much of their eerie atmosphere. It is like watching a reality show version of Poltergeist, only it is filled with delusional story tellers named Bubba and Lorleen. It always seems that their haunted houses are in the country highlighted with cold spots and of particular interest is the camera taking parapsychologists who make the Ghost Busters look like intellectual geniuses. These shysters can somehow always find a plethora of slightly deranged citizens to let you know about their basement rattlings or how the ghost of their dead uncle Clyde knocks on the ceiling from the attic space twice a night because he’s looking for his missing pooch, hector. These characters of course display no action at all when the camera is in place. Watching those folks can send a shiver down your spine when you realize that they are the very people listed in political surveys as “likely voters.’ Now that reveals something really scary this Halloween season!

A RAT PACK OF PACK RATS!

Groundhog Day is usually a sign one way or the other of the duration left in winter. To me that means 6 more weeks of hibernation. For my wife however it means SPRING CLEANING! In a normal household the conversation would go like this:
Wife: It’s Groundhog Day!
Husband: Yeah six more weeks to hide in the house and doze.
Wife: No that means spring cleaning!
Husband: But there are 6 more weeks of winter!
Wife: Time to clean; this place is a filthy mess!
Husband: But that makes no sense…
Wife: Help me straighten up or else.
Husband: But 6 weeks…
Wife: If you don’t get off your lazy butt the first thing that will be outta
here is you!
Husband: Yes dear.

It always seems to start the same way. The proud parents push their child to clean her room. If you can open the door to get into the space you notice that it looks like a Toys “R” Us exploded in there. With a path as treacherous as Lewis and Clark’s journey to find the Northwest Passage you risk your neck stepping into the mountainous terrain of the play zone. Everything has been shoved to the edges of the room (that’s my daughter’s idea of straightening up). Another oddity is that during the cleaning you will find 37 and a half dolls (and yes there is always one that is only half of a doll baby) and two thirds of them are naked. Should I be worried?

Part of the clean up phenomenon in this part of the house is that no matter how much is threatened to be “thrown out,” the bags of toys that always end up staying, out ranks the “toss out” pile by 5 to 1. So basically it’s just a straightening up operation which wouldn’t be necessary IF THE KID WOULD JUST PUT THINGS AWAY IN THE FIRST PLACE! My mother, who was one of the foremost authorities on pig sty’s swore to me that my room, like all boys rooms, belonged near the barn and not in the house. I use to try to get my prissy daughter to become a tomboy and gave up because I thought it didn’t work. I was wrong. One look at her room would make a hog proud!

But, not to leave out another pack rat in our “rat pack,” let’s not forget the lady of the house herself. The top floor has an unusually large closet though you wouldn’t know to look at it. Amidst her childhood stuffed elephant set and size AA brazier collection neatly tucked away you will find an expanse full of clothing. Some of them are even packed away inside of a trash can! Are the powers that be sending us a message about this stuff? Dear, take the hint! They’re not winter clothes held there in the summer or summer clothes held there in the winter. No it’s more like clothing of when my wife’s shapely figure had curves instead of cliffs. Why are they here?

Because every woman has a delusion that someday she will get back to her “playing weight” and fit back into that size 2 dress. Honey, that’s back in the day when you had more men interested in you than you could shake a stick at. “They are nice dresses” she says. They will perhaps be passed on to my thin daughter if the moths don’t get to them first. When my girl is a teen I won’t have to worry about her going on dates because the boys won’t come around. They’ll be afraid of her unsightly partially devoured wardrobe. It’s worse at my home because in my wife’s heyday she bottomed out in a size zero! Does a size zero indicate an invisible person? That’s why I fell in love with her (I’m sucking up again in case she didn’t like the bodily “cliff” remark 8 sentences ago). She was so tiny and practically invisible. There was no talk of cleaning back then. She, like most wives who’ve been married for some time, needs her fantasies. And if I keep writing about this I’m sure that all of my “fun time” with her will be made up of only “fantasy.”

Next there is the attack of my things usually most of which have been exiled to the basement or onto the curb like the old wagon wheel coffee table scene in the movie When Harry Met Sally. “It’s outta the way so what’s the problem?” Like most basements the storage space becomes quite a safari to maneuver. The Mrs. doesn’t fancy a good hunt like most of us men do. It wouldn’t be so bad if she didn’t attack those vitally useful, precious items of mine like the old time medicine cabinet which hangs on the wall. It’s the kind with the two blinding fluorescent (sun like) side lights. It doesn’t light, mind you, so no shades or radiation tests are needed. “It is the only mirror in the house that works” I say as if such nonsensical statements will make a difference to a cleaning czar bent on a dust busting spastic mission. That kind of humor seems to prod her the other way. The cabinet which I picked up at a flea market 35 years ago I got for a song (I think it was the theme from Sanford and Son). It’s not even hooked up to the electricity in our home. But it houses my rare potato chip collection that I’ve had since my teen angst years. You know the rare anomalous chips that you run across that have unusual shapes and resemble different people. My prize chip is the one that looks like Abe Lincoln.

Are my children doomed? They can’t be any worse at being pack rats than the 84 year old Annapolis woman who was found in her overrun home. She had so much stuff in her house that when the floor to ceiling mountainous towers of refuse fell she became trapped. Her only comment was “arrrrgh!” It was such a problem the fire department had trouble getting into her house and extricating her. You hear about one of these kinds of stories every so often and it never ceases to amaze me! “Those people” are nuts! Our ability to rationalize our own “mental-ness’ knows no boundaries.

So when warm weather is here, while most husbands battle it out to avoid dusting for weeks I perform my dutiful cleaning because if I don’t the only thing that will get a stick shaken at it is me!