This week will end with the increasingly bizarre American custom of dressing children up in costumes inspired from our mass media iconography, to scare the demons away for another year. I wonder if squeezing little Johnny into a plastic cartoon suit has a mythic relationship to the ancient revelers in their deer skin cloaks or costume imitation of saints, devils and angels. When I was five and my father made a foam-rubber robot out of me, I was’nt not feeling an ancient kinship to my Celtic forbears… I was falling all over the place feeling so ridiculous to the point of tears. Of course, my little brain had no context at all for what I was doing, Little did I know that as I stumbled down those Delaware suburban streets looking like a Dr. Who prop, that I was engaged in a ritual meant to clear the way for the parting of the veil between this world and the next, to make way for the spirits of our ancestors come to see us with our earthly pleasures and piles of candy on All Saints Day.

I always wanted to be a ghost. For one thing, it’s easier to identify who you’re “supposed to be” with a white sheet over your head, stalking neighbor’s houses like a black cat and going “boo,” then as a yard-high, bumbling box of foam-rubber. But also because I grew up with unusual happenings in a house nearly three centuries old. The town itself was a ghost, a billowing reflection of the past with crumbling headstones and a haunted churchyard. As a child, the night was full of visitations, creaking floorboards, whispers and faces. I had no clue then and even less idea now who or what was responsible for all the goings on… it may have easily been the back of my own mind inventing shapes and playthings out of the dark.

I was twelve when I walked up to my church one night for confirmation class, and found it was locked tight and dark. As I turned on the worn brick walkway, I saw a man in a tricorner hat, leaning over a grave with a lantern. I shuddered, as if an electric current ran through my brain, and the specter took flight, blowing through me and up into the sky. I nearly peed my pants and ran to my father’s house, lungs rasping in an asthmatic fit, my memory replaying the scene and trying to find the logic in it. There was none. Something happened, and to this day I don’t know what. One night, I was paralyzed in bed, unable to breathe, as the shutters outside banged about as if in a gale, though the trees were still. I have many such stories cobwebbed in my history, and the live without conclusion, and are made of commas and ellipsis…

Last night, I went to my mirror, to see myself in it, to momentarily regain a sense of body and cohesion. As I made eye contact with myself, I heard a low female moan very close by, and despite the rigorous picking over by my analytical mind, I again was at a loss to explain and fell asleep with the light on purposefully, reading Shel Silverstein.

Could ghosts be wandering thoughts that are “made” by belief, a subconscious image waiting to happen, or the footsteps of a parallel dimension, a mere visitor passing through? Was the moan a spectator instead of a specter? How many thoughts have I lost this week?

November 1st, the say the veil parts between the worlds, and the ancestors come to see how we’re doing, and maybe to impart wisdom through the nature we grow oblivious to. The world waits for a cleansed path for those who’ve gone before, and these rituals, no matter how tacky can help rake the illusion from the spirit path and clear the way for memory. As kids carve their Jack-o’-Lanterns and adults apply heavier and darker-than-normal makeup, we somehow manage to spook the lost thoughts out of our minds, chase demons while we’re bedecked as a cartoon, and renew a promise between worlds and all the life that passes through the curtain toward renewal of the mythic and the magic, the unutterable mystery of soul.

All preceded in the guise of children stumbling awkwardly down the streets with swinging baskets and a slight willingness to encounter fear, or giggles from tacky costumes.