So good and juicy, it does the Watusi...I found a worm.
This was the line that had me rolling on the floors in my 4th grade classroom, laughing my head off, practically wetting my pants. I just don't find it that funny now. To think that they called me "Giggles" that year. Now there isn't much to giggle about.

Halloween is here. That strange spooky time of year. In true late October form, we have windy warm and damp weather, threatening thunder and lightning, threatening rain. A dreary but eerily balmy kind of day, where the moist air from the Gulf of Mexico is pumped far northward, to taunt us dwellers in the land of orange leaves and bare trees. A day that can be in the 70's some years, but somehow never manages to be cold, even when cold happens all around it. Have you ever noticed that? A spooky night from way back.

Now I remember the Halloweens of the 1960's. We didn't have a big buildup for halloween. It was never talked about on TV. But somehow every family managed to assemble its brood attired in the ghoulish mode of the season, to trudge up one street and down the next, ringing doorbells and collecting an assortment of candies and other treats to include those apples that just might contain razor blades, shuffling through largely fallen dry autumn leaves, without a thought of the impending "holiday season", Thanksgiving or let alone Christmas. That was "months" away in our little corner of space-time.

Of course in school I remember my first grade teacher, Mrs. Rowe. She was quite young and wore miniskirts and I would positively long after her as she would bend and stoop and tiptoe to post various cutouts of Halloween characters on the wall. There was also the time just before, when the 1967 Red Sox were playing the Cardinals in the World Series, when she was listening to the game on a small transistor radio, and each time they scored a run she would run out to the classroom across the hall, her slip flying behind her, saying, "they got another one." Ah yes, the impossible dream. It was a few months later that I saw 2001 a space odyssey with my dad, twice. If I would have been told then, that the Red Sox wouldn't win any world series until 3 years after that, in 2004, I probably would have broke down crying. Of course if someone would have told me that in the year of Kubrick's film's setting that a terrorist named Osama would fly jetliners into two towers that were not to have even been built until 1970, I don't know if my 6 year-old brain would have even comprehended.

All hail the pagan origins of Halloween.
The witches, old women of indeterminate age, stooped over the crushed herbs, plants, seeds, barks, roots, potions, brews, and vapors. Concocting our destiny and our downfall. Cackling, hideously, because they know that they, as women, hold the key to the hearts of men. Heh heh heh hehhhh.....!!!! I am the wicked witch and I will hold you in my spell. You will encounter other demons along the way, others who will try to cast their spells upon you. But only I am the wicked witch, the true perversion of good into evil. You won't taste the bitterness of my fruit until you have swallowed the last delicious morsel. Sleep well, my pretty! Heh heh heh heh heh....

Tonight I cooked supper for the first time in months. I made a spaghetti sauce consisting of frying some onions in olive oil, followed by some peppers. Salt and pepper. Then tomatoes, mainly red but a few green ones from our garden as well, and several cloves of garlic, herbes de provence, allspice, paprika, a pinch of soy sauce, 5 shitake mushrooms (dried, to absorb the excess water) and simmer for 45 minutes. A dash of white wine (in this case, Gewurtztraminer), some diced Mori-Nu tofu at the last minute, et voila! Even my wife liked it. I also microwaved the last eggplant of the season and had that on the side, in cubes...very strong; probably could have made a decent baba ghanoosh after all. And I enjoyed a nice red wine with that.

While my wife went upstairs to view the episode of "Desperate Housewives" that I recorded on my 12 year-old VCR, I cleaned the kitchen. We have a digital video recorder, but with "The Wire" and some other show, our recording capacity had been maxed. Only the TV card on my computer was unused, mainly because I can't get the sound and picture to stay in sync and because my wife doesn't like to watch TV on a computer. I pulled out my iPod and went to work. I was listening to the Christmas Album, by the Manhattan Transfer, and longing for the Christmases of old. That album is from 1992 and even then the holiday was losing its punch. I was dragged forcefully from the leavings of youth into the barrenness of middle age. But in my middle age I have found a home here on the tundra (so to speak) with my wife. And I like listening to Christmas music in October....So What? I have an actual LP record album that I bought on eBay last year, called "Santa's Own Christmas," recorded in the 1960's. Unfortunately I have nothing to play it on. I am hoping I can find someone who will be willing to digitize it for me, since I own no other records. Supposedly there's a stack of 8 or 10 albums at my parents' home, but my chances of getting there are slim to none at best. Now to hear "Santa's Own Christmas" would be a very potent and emotionally draining dose of nostalgia for me. But it will come to pass.

We went out to the local furniture superstore and bought a new mattress...Olympic Queen, it's called, because it's a queen size but hangs over the sides an extra six inches or so, to accommodate the extra 100 lbs gained in the past 10 years between my wife and myself. Maybe we can start sleeping in the same room again! Big bucks thought, folks, truly...sticker shock at its worst!

Then there is the time I was allowed to read in front of the first grade class, from a series of child's science books my parents had bought me. I had wanted to read from the part about the development of the fetus in utero, but my second-grade teacher, Mrs. Seifert, would have nothing of passing around photos of drawings of the various stages of fetal development, let alone what might be shown to depict the stages before the sperm and egg unite. So instead I was allowed to read from a volume entitled, "The Microscope," which was a very bland technical recount of the calibration and limitations of the microscope. I was so upset. I told my mother, I wanted to tell the kids about how cool it is that the baby develops from just 2 cells, which divide and divide and divide to make all the organs and tissues that make you and me. He got you and me and brother in his hands, he got you and me and sister, in his hands, he got you and me and brother, in his hands, he got the whole world in his hands. Feel the baby? It's in here, honey, in here. Feel. Feel the baby? The baby kick? Your little brother is in here. A baby, just like you are. Another baby. And from this, competition was born, in a warm winter's New England home, in a cricket chair that to this day sits up in the barn, 40 years later, waiting for me to return to its inheritance. For I have no heirlooms, O estranged son, no heirlooms, save the memories that fade ever further, fade ever further. Oo Oo, our new baby, our new baby...I could feel him in my arms. I wanted that baby Right Now! But there was not to be a baby yet. It was the left leg, all blue and purple, and could it be a clot? or is the baby just sitting on the vein? Our family disputed that question like a midrash upon maimonides. But it was a blood clot, and would require that a nurse come to hour home and give my mother shots every day to keep the blood, not a too tick, not a too tin... A pretty 60's style chickiepoo would come by our home and take 3 small vials of my mother's blood for "tests" to tell the "doctor" what kind of "medicine' my mom needed. And then of course, the peripuerium. No kids allowed within ear shot of the delivery room. This meant sitting watch from the front seat of my father's 1962 Cadillac Sedan de Ville. And when we got home, scrambled eggs for supper and sleeping so much in the afternoon, that one would awaken at 6:00 p.m only to ask, "is it morning, I feel like having eggs." But one day we dressed hurriedly. We had heard that the baby was born. We were going to see mom, NOT BEING PREGNANT ANYMORE. And there she was, at the door of my grandmother's house, dressed in a thin skirt that accentuated her smaller, boyish hips...my mother, not pregnant. The new baby out at last, life returning to normal. The only remaning burning question among my cousins and ourselves was, what to name the baby. Of course the older members of our family wanted a name that harkened back to the old days: Name him 'Istfean....I mean steven is a nice name. Or Michael...we could name him Michael. Now there was a name I could relate to. A name of someone who had done far more for me in school than I could ever do for them... Everyone liked michael. Ohhh. Pleeeeze. Name the new baby, Michael. Michael, the archangel. But no, it was not to be. Instead the name was a familiar one to me. It was Billy Billy Billy Billy Billy Billy Billy Billy Billy Billy like the incessant pounding of that song I would hear in my head when I looked at the wallpaper my parents had in the living room, of our house. Years before he was even conceived, I used to look at that wallpaper and I'd hear in my head, "Billy, Billy, Billy, Billy, Billy, Billy....."

When I was in the second grade, I found a 6-inch rubber gasket lying around somewhere. I called it my "recording ring." It didn't do much, just lie there in the midst of my plastic toy dinosaurs, like the obelisk in 2001, A Space Odyssey. I used to love to contemplate the perfect roundness of the recording ring. One day I took it to school. My second-grade teacher, Mrs. Seifert, found it and, knowing that I must surely be up to no good, confiscated it from me, seemingly on the basis that it couldn't possibly legitimately belong to me and that she would send the item through the appropriate channels to its rightful possessor.

Someone at work today told me of a nice euphemism for "half-assed," which describes a worker's degree of diligence or lack thereof: the phrase was "half-donkey." He said the speaker who used this phrase was not a native speaker of English. I may have to check out Urban Dictionary to see whether it is already in there. I must say...I laughed my donkey off!

Today had fried green tomatoes, the real thing, not the movie. This was the second time. They are tangy and filling, different from what I expected them to be. The first time was only a week ago, when we picked all the remaining tomatoes in anticipation of frost. That has come to pass, and gone, for now.

A warm night, and a walk through the neighborhood. Every third or fourth house is decked out with Hallowe'en froufrou, from fake pumpkins with lightbulbs in their mouths, to blacklight tinsel, and orange candles at the doors. Although it was 80 degrees today, some have already bought pumpkins, which will surely rot in 3 weeks. But it's nice to have a bit o' Indian summer (woo woo woo...); just where did that phrase come from? From now till the last snow melts in the spring, people around here have everything lit up, to keep away the darkness that spooks each and all.

Today a freeze. I brought in the few remaining plants from the outdoors in. Some are in for the winter, such as the Amaryllis, Ficus, Palm, Bougainvilla and Mandevilla. The tree philodendron is already in by the window. The Hibisci are still subject to being dragged to the front of the garage to catch the morning and noon light and bloom into Fall, and to get dragged back into the garage at night. The Brugmansia are safe in the garage. They'll see the light of outside later this week when it warms up. We turned the furnace on in our house today. It's supposed to get to 26 tonight. The first hard freeze of the season. Some plants won't make it. Any remaining tomatoes are gone. The hostas will wilt. The maples will fight, turn orange, and drop their leaves. We will be buying our annual pumpkins at the local garden store this weekend. There will be a big one for me, one for my wife, one for her baby, and one for her baby's baby. We will also have one for her baby's wife, whom we met last year. We're gonna give these rednecks around here a little something to measure their jaws by when our bunch come tumbling out into the hood. Alas, just 4 days and they're back home. And then a hop-skip-jump to Christmas. Our babies are ourselves and our planties. Does this indicate a problem?