Anyone who knows my wife will tell you that she is even-tempered,
fair-minded, and emotionally generous.
As you might imagine, this isn't easy to live with.
Me, I am more of a fan of the adage: "If you don't have anything
nice to say, come sit here by me." I am the sour to Jessica's
sweet.
Call it balance.
The reason I bring up Jessica's maddening tendency toward
insufferable kindness is that, up until recently, she has always
dressed as a witch at
Halloween. Not a princess. Not Cinderella.
Not anything that might be seen as an extension of her basic nice
self. Instead, each year, she would don a pointy black hat, paint
her face green, and stand over a bubbling cauldron, stirring
wickedly.
I wasn't into the theater of it all. But I must say I liked the
ensemble.
Some guys like French maid's outfits. I happen to enjoy a nice
witch's costume.
Her get-up was part of our overall approach to Halloween. Ours was
one of those houses that took the night a little too seriously.
We'd cobweb all the windows, hang plastic skulls and rubber bats
from ceiling fans, and play a tape of spooky Halloween sounds -
creaky doors, anguished cries, that sort of thing.
We didn't do this because we were big fans of Halloween. I, for
one, never really liked costume parties. No, our immersion occurred
because our son,
Sam, was born the day before Halloween. Actually,
about an hour and a half before Halloween. Starting early on
Halloween morning, friends in costume visited, transforming our
hospital room, already aglow with the magic of new birth, into a
giddy wonderland of
baseball players, fairies, ballerinas, and
fantastic monsters. One couple brought a pumpkin with the words
IT'S A BOY carved into it, which we lit and let shine in our window
for the whole world to see.
Sam must have thought he was born into a Frank Zappa song.