It takes a big man to admit he was wrong.  Not being a big man, I've borrowed one for the occasion and have just now signed the papers authorizing him to issue the following statement on my behalf:

     "Yesterday the author of this journal said that the purpose of Halloween was to scare people.  That was a mistake."

     There.  Now that that's out of the way, I can move on to other things.  Or at least I thought I could.  Alas, seems I now have a big man beside me, demanding that I reveal exactly what I think the real purpose is of Halloween if it's not to scare people.  Seems he refuses to let me move on to other things until I do.
     Life is just one unexpected problem after another, isn't it?
 

     Halloween is the one day of the year when we can be someone or something else.  Race, gender, nationality, and even species all melt away.  You want to be a Martian, you can be a Martian.  You want to be Henry VIII or Mary Todd Lincoln, you can be Henry VIII or Mary Todd Lincoln.  Your choices aren't limited to this earth or this time.  Even the boundary between life and death - so firmly enforced by nature and society alike the rest of the year - is erased.  Your choices are limited only by your imagination. 

     As a boy, I found Halloween the only holiday that was liberating rather than merely one more cultural imposition. 
     I lived in a tense, racially mixed neighborhood.  Most days I could stand at my window and hear the white flight occurring.  On many nights, no one could go out because of curfews enacted to prevent riots. 
     Come Halloween, none of that seemed to matter as we all donned horrible masks and left the horrible real world far behind.  If that gremlin over there was a descendent of slaves once owned by the ancestors of the Bugs Bunny hopping across the street, for once it didn't seem to matter in the least....

     Halloween was liberating in other ways, too.  It was the one time of the year when Night was a friend to embrace and not a danger to hide away from.  Walking the streets blocks from home after dark any other time would have been crazy, but on Halloween the sheer number of make-believe horrors on the sidewalks and porches chased all real ones away - or so it seemed.
     And even as Night lost its power to keep me in my home, so did Society temporarily relax its demands that I not set foot on stranger's property, that I not ring the bells of Busy Others, that I always Know My Place And Stay There.  Halloween created the illusion that the entire world was fit for wandering, and that everyone with a front door could be my friend.
     That's why I went even to those homes without their porch lights on; and why when no one came to gladly share a bit of their greater bounty of the world's wealth with me, I assumed they were terribly sick in bed, or called away on regrettably critical business overseas....
     It was they whom I felt sorry for, not myself.

     This, too, was unusual.  As a kid I felt sorry for myself a lot, and never more so than when bumping up against another boundary.  I hated boundaries as a kid.  I hated having to learn them, and I hated having to learn that to ignore the differences between the sidewalk in front of my door and the busy road beyond it ran the risk of ending up crushed beneath an 18-wheel semi truck like a certain 12-year-old boy I never knew and now will never know. 
     I hated going to a neighbor's home to be walked to school my first week in kindergarten by a girl just a year older than I was, and wandering into her kitchen to look for her when she didn't appear in the living room as quickly as the day before, and being angrily told by her father to get back to the front door and wait there exactly as if I were a mutt bearing a highly contagious disease instead of a naturally curious and basically harmless human being....
    On Halloween, people were far more welcoming.  Even those who handed out corn balls or fruit exactly as if these awful things were worth ringing a bell for were forgiven.  They clearly meant well, they were just a bit touched in the head....

     I think Halloween is our most social holiday.  New Year's Eve isn't much of a social occasion unless you're old enough to drink.  Valentine's Day is for couples lost in a bliss that separates them from everyone else and makes singles feel like shit.  It's been my experience that St. Patrick's Day works best if you're Irish.  Memorial Day is an obligation, and a reminder of history's absurdity and the fact that death really can't be escaped, not even by handsome young men in top physical condition and pretty costumes.  It is the Anti-Halloween, a bowing down to predecessors forever trapped behind their assigned hero masks, a sad duty to be performed for those eternally trapped in an unchangeable, regrettable past.  The 4th of July is a lot of heat and noise masquerading as love of country.  Even at its best, as a celebration of freedom, it verges uncomfortably close to nationalism, to jingoism, to "We're #1 and You're NOT!" Thanksgiving and Christmas are really family holidays; they have little appeal for one whose family is as messed up as mine is. 
     Halloween has none of these drawbacks. 
     That it's nestled in the prettiest time of the year when the weather tends to be neither too hot nor too cold is just frost on the pumpkin. 

     Not that it's perfect, of course.  The freedom it bestows is more illusion than not, and I forget that at my own risk.

     I hit my head a lot as a kid.  I know, I know - no major surprise there for anyone who's read an entry or two.  What not even my wife knows, however, is that many of those blows to my noggin occurred because of Godzilla.
     Every weekday the local CBS affiliate ran a movie, 4-6 pm.  Often these were cheesy monster movies from the '50s, and the Godzilla flicks were among my favorite.  Watching the climactic eating-of-Tokyo scenes invariably inflamed my own innate desire to do the same.  The personality of Godzilla simply left the cathode ray tube and entered my brain.  Before a single badly dubbed line of English could alert the authorities I, too, was rampaging across a cityscape.  The architects who had designed mine just happened to favor Pop Art-ish buildings built in the shape of end tables and chairs. 
     The good news is that the US Army never had to nuke me to make the world safe for the springs of our couch.
     The bad news is that end tables and coffee tables have terribly hard undersides and sharp corners which easily raise bumps on the scaly heads of young boys who forget their place in the grand scheme of things.
     At least I had enough sense even as a young boy not to re-enact the most exciting part of any Godzilla movie: The slow, lumbering walk into the high-tension power lines....
     Not that I never thought about it.

     Anyway, the moral of the story is this: On Halloween there are no limits, and any place in the grand scheme of things we want to be is exactly the place we ought to be. 
     No costs. 
     No risks. 
     And with any luck at all, we'll come back to reality on November 1 with a few more M&Ms in our pockets than we had before.

     The annual buying of a new coffee table can wait until November 2.