Copyright (c) 1972 by Ray Bradbury
|
Halloween.
Sly does it. Tiptoe catspaws. Slide and creep.
But why? What for? How? Who? When! Where did did
it all begin?
"You don't know, do you?" asks Carapace Clavicle
Moundshroud climbing out of the pile of leaves under the Halloween tree.
"You don't really know!"
"Well," answers Tom the Skeleton, "er--no."
Published (then) by Bantum Books, Inc
Fifth Avenue - New York, NY - USA - 10019
who are NOW Bantum Boubleday Dell 1540
Broadway - New York, NY - USA - 10036
http://www.bdd.com/
|
This book is no longer in print but is worth the effort to locate
check out other books by Ray Bradbury at the website above
|
|
"Be wary of strong drink.
It can make you shoot at tax collectors---------and miss."
from: " The Notebooks of Lazarus
Long" by Robert Heinlein
|
 Halloween
(a recollection from childhood)
This was (and is) my favorite
holiday - I have always enjoyed dressing up in costumes and going trick-or-treating
- (yes, we had to look in the apples that we got, for razor blades even
then - and just who are these people who give out apples anyway - don't
they know that it's supposed to be CANDY?) - now I get to do it with my
grandkids - the first one (Halloween) that I can recall was my kindergarten
year - mom dressed me up in a devil costume (of course) and I really liked
the mask that I got to wear with this - we wore our costumes to school
for a party and we went out into the school yard so that all of the kindergarten
kids could parade around in a circle to show off their costumes -
dad was really good at carving scary jack-o-lanterns...
Once we had a Halloween
party at the Methodist Church in Elba (late 1950s) - they probably wouldn't
allow that now, but people only thought of it as fun then - the adults
even put together a scary spook house in the basement of the church - they
put mattresses on the steps and at the bottom of the entrance and tossed
kids down these to enter - the spook house was fairly scary with some of
the adults dressed up as monsters and using luminous paint on their faces
and hands (pretty good special effects for those days) - there was the
usual pot of cold spaghetti, grapes for eyeballs, etc...
My first Halloween night
in Metamora was very different - I had been used to going out in the country,
from door to door or going to a church sponsored party - that year, when
I went into the village, it was pandemonium - it seemed like the
first part of the night was devoted to soaping every store window, completely
- there wasn't much in the way of damage and things really weren't very
malicious, but there were always a few outhouses knocked over and pumpkins
smashed everywhere -fireworks were not a Halloween tradition in Michigan
at that time, but there were always a few firecrackers that got set off
every year...
Mike Skellenger
|
