Halloween Die-ary #5
I woke up this morning with the oldest two of our three kids
in our bed. Apparently, they spooked themselves in the night. It’s not like I
took them to an abandoned amusement park yesterday, while letting them listen
to true crime podcasts on the way. One of those choices was mine, the other
theirs, by the way.
I spooked myself a lot as a kid. Part of that was because I
struggled with insomnia. I would lie in bed, staring at the outline of a
dresser against the light of the hallway, thinking it was the profile of a
monster, a monster keeping still because it was waiting for me to move before
it could attack me. I would lie there in a self-induced paralysis until my
entire body ached. Man, I hated going to bed. Still do, actually.
I remember one night, my mom let me watch The Private
Eyes, that screwball mansion-mystery comedy with Don Knotts and Tim Conway.
That last scene, with the Wookalar? I watched those 45 seconds with my fingers across
my eyes, only catching snatches of what I now know to be a relatively, well, still
terrifying lunch lady-boar and slept on mom's bedroom floor that
night. Right. A Don Knotts movie terrified me.
And, of course, all my childhood nightmares are vivid.
And I didn’t even have parents steeped in the spooky, so I
don’t know how my own kids are handling it. What if, after a particularly blood-chilling
nightmare, I ran to my dad’s room only to find myself face-to-face with a bunch
of plastic human skeletons and a life-sized Vincent Price cutout? Or Big Face? My
poor kids.
I have this one photo of my eldest back when she was almost two years old. It looks awful, and I want to post the whole image, but Lindsey won’t
let me, so I cropped the kid out and left the monster. And turned
it black-and-white for some reason. I don’t question my muse (see photo at the beginning of this essay). But the context
was, we were in Salem, visiting friends one October and they showed us their
Halloween costumes. My daughter was loving it all, the monster masks, the attention,
so Lindsey lifted her camera to take a photo and just as she did so, the kid’s
face crumpled and her body withdrew into itself in animal terror at just the monster
arm. Not even a full costume or a mask. Just the arm. Lindsey took
that first photo before registering the change in her baby.
So the photo looks like we’re torturing a kid, but really we
immortalized half of a half of a moment. She was laughing and playing in the
next photo that we didn’t take because we were rushing to her apologizing
profusely and promising her skull-shaped chocolates from Ye Olde Pepper Candy
Companie.
These days that kid, who’s almost 11 now, won’t even let me
finish the phrase “horror movie,” much less watch one with me (although she’ll
read anything scary). Every once in a while she’ll try, but she inevitably ends
up sitting in a different room from, but in direct view of, the TV, putting as
much space in her eyeline with it as possible. My six-year-old has a bunch of bravado
about scary movies, but that’s mostly because she likes watching her older
sister’s overreaction (Six-year-old: “Dad, let’s watch that Pennywise movie!” Eleven-year-old:
“No!!!!”). The six-year-old will say yes to anything spooky or scary (and went
through a phase where she only wanted to watch the 2010 The Wolfman with Benicio
del Toro, for some reason) but it’ll always get to her later that night when it’s
time to go to her bedroom. Alone. In the dark. With the spiders.
So I always wonder if I am in the process of either messing
up my kids or messing up my chances of having a scary movie buddy in the future. Or maybe
they’ll grow into them like I did.
Then again, there’s always the two-year-old!
