Coonridge Digest: It’s not so bad

Greetin’s from the Ridge.

Mike and Nola Franklin leave town every October 31st. They call it their Autumn Holiday. Truth is, Mike’s about the tightest man on the Ridge. (When he and Nola were married she needed a car to get to work. He sold her his.) Anybody who knows Mr. Franklin knows that it’s the thought of givin’ away all that free candy that hastens his escape from town before the sun goes down on Halloween.

Harvey Lipton used to put on a flea-bitten old gorilla mask and hide around the corner of his house. He’d jump out and growl just as the little ghosts approached his door. The rookies would scream and zip down the street in a flurry of white sheets and Butterfingers. The seasoned pros would simply say, "Hi Harvey," and then collect their treats.

Harvey’s demented routine was brought to a quick halt several years ago when the Meyer kids came dressed as Keystone Cops with their dad’s Doberman in tow. They’d made the mistake of givin’ the leash to David, the smallest of the family. The paramedics still talk about the night they had to remove a Doberman from the left thigh of a geriatric gorilla.

The congregation down at St. Literal believes that to celebrate the season of ghosts and goblins is sacrilege, so to pooh-pooh the idea of the grizzly holiday, they hold one of their own, callin’ it a Pumkin Party. They play Halloween games, they eat Halloween treats, and they decorate the fellowship hall in orange and black. Other than the absence of plastic masks and black cats, their celebration looks a whole lot like what’s goin’ on outdoors on the streets of Coonridge. It’s their attempt to hallow the eve by weanin’ their kiddies off anything that might smack of the devil.

This is fine with me…different ghosts for different folks, I guess. And it does help guide the kiddies toward the goal of American Christianity…sacrifice without sufferin’.

I guess I’m in the group around town who grudgingly give in to the annual spook fest while havin’ a few lingerin’ doubts about the moral lesson taught in "Treat me or I’ll trick you." Seems like the I-deserve-this mentality is already bein’ taught by a litigation-happy world of adults and generation of youth that’s been handed the world on a platter.

I suppose it’s a harmless enough holiday as long as you’ve got your head on straight. There are those of us who remember the days when the celebration of Halloween was less genteel…findin’ Grandpa head-down in the pit of an overturned privy, discoverin’ that your cat had been turpentined over night or wakin’ to find your red garage whitewashed. In a world gone loony, we arrest kids for what we used to term childish pranks.

Our neighbor, Linda Parsons, tries to out-do herself every year, makin’ sure that her little ones are current. Last year it was Spiderman costumes. Linda’s closet is a guided tour of infamous personalities from the past with plastic likenesses of Castro, Nixon and King Kong litterin’ the shelves. This year she’s wrappin’ ‘em up to look like Osama Bin Laden. Frankly, the thought of three-foot-tall terrorist look-alikes runnin’ around my yard gives me the creeps but I take some solace in the fact that there’s a sweaty smile behind these hoods.

Herb and I wait out Halloween night like a couple of old mares who’ve missed the startin’ gate. He gets up to feed the extortionists while my shows are on and I’ll sit out on the porch and fling Milk Duds at the ghouls if there’s a football game in progress. We buy more candy than we possibly need for fear that we’ll run out and be known at the Crummy Crumps, and as a result our blood sugar spikes the test strip for four weeks followin’.

As holidays go, I suppose it’s still relatively harmless. There’s no July 4th fingers blown off, there’s no obscene glut of Christmas spending, and the crux of Christianity isn’t hopped into silliness by an Easter bunny.

Frankly, I wonder if we need somethin’ else to scare us. Seems like there’s fewer and fewer things we can do with some sense of security. Whacko snipers prowl the suburbs, West Nile skeeters haunt the front porch, tall buildings crouch under the constant threat of hijacked planes, airports have become the staging ground for terrorist attacks, madmen harbor biological weapons, and we’re all in for a monthly spookin’ when we open our 401K statements.

Maybe Halloween’s not so bad. At least you can take consolation in the fact that these terrorists have to be home by 9 o’clock.

You ever in Coonridge, stop by. We may not answer the door but you’ll enjoy the trip.