Things are pretty glum around our house as the kids sit and stare out the window at snow on the ground–on Halloween!
“Can we go trick or treating?” Skipper, our eight-year-old asks.
“‘Fraid not, Skip,” I say, patting him on the back. “It’s too dangerous with the street lights out.”
“We’ll take flashlights,” his ten-year-old brother Scooter offers.
“Sorry kiddo,” I say as I survey the damage from the worst–in fact the only–October snow storm I’ve ever seen. “There’s ice on the streets and downed power lines.”
They both groan so I offer them a little consolation. “That means we won’t have any trick-or-treaters either, so you can eat the candy we bought.”
That cheers them up a bit, and they go to the front door and grab a handful out of the festive pumpkin-shaped bowl.
“Has Halloween ever been cancelled before?” Skipper asks.
“Not in my lifetime,” I say.
“So that’s like back to the 20th century?” Scooter asks. He makes it sound like ancient history.
“Actually, going all the way back to the founding of Massachusetts,” I say, giving them a little bit of the colonial history that is so rarely taught in our local schools. “Back when there used to be real witches on Halloween, and not just the phony-baloney kind you get at The Party Store for your front yard.”
“Were they really real?” Skipper asks, his eyes as big as Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups.
“Of course not, Skip,” I say, tousling his hair a bit. “They were just crazy old ladies who owned property that somebody else wanted, so their neighbors accused them of being witches.”
“Is that fair?” Skip asks. As the younger of the two, he’s been subjected to more than his share of injustice.
“No, Skip, it’s not–but it’s perfectly legal.”
“It is?” Scooter asks, his eyes brightening.
“You betcha,” I say. “Under the Supreme Court’s decision in Kelo vs. City of New London, they can take your home away from you for just about any reason at all, so it makes about as much sense as burning people alive to get another half-acre of pasture.”
Scary!
“. . . or crushing them with humongous rocks!” Scooter adds with enthusiasm. He loves history, and hasn’t forgotten one of the niftier details from our visit to the Salem, Mass. Witchcraft Museum.
“Was it the mean conservative judges who did that?” Skipper asks. He reads the comics in The Boston Globe and has absorbed the Doonesbury world view by osmosis.
“Actually, no,” I say, hoping to provide them with some sense of how complicated life is, how the world can’t be divided neatly into Manichaean halves. “It was sympathetic, sensitive liberal judges.”
“I thought the world was getting warmer,” Scooter says, still down in the dumps even though he’s on his third box of Junior Mints.
“It is,” I say, not wanting to undermine his faith in Emily Mangel-Wurzel, his science teacher who’s a weekend Wiccan. “Global warming is a fact that all decent people believe in, it’s just that global warming can only do so much to fight global cooling.”
“What’s global cooling?” Scooter asks.
“Back in the 70′s, all the smart people said we were on the verge of a new Ice Age,” I say.
“You mean like mastodons and wooly mammoths?” Skipper asks.
See Spot run. Run, Spot, run!
“Right.”
“So which one do you think is winning?” Skipper asks.
“I think global cooling is,” I say. “Look out the window right now, and remember how I had to crawl out the garage and shovel snow away from the windows last winter. That had never happened before either.”
“So every day would be a snow day?” Scooter asks, barely able to contain his excitement.
“Pretty much so,” I say.
“Yay!” Skipper shouts. “That would be so ill!” Unfortunately, he’s started to pick up some of the more outre slang he hears from the junior high kids.
“Now Skip,” I caution, “you’ll find in life that even the best things come with some problems.”
“Like what?”
“Well, we might have to live in a cave, and the pizza man might not be able to make deliveries to our house because of all the snow.”
“What would we do then?” Scooter asks.
“What everybody does when that happens.”
“What’s that?”
“Resort to cannibalism.”
“Before you do anything crazy, could you at least see if there’s a last bag of complimentary peanuts?”
“You mean . . . eat each other?” Skipper asks, eyeing his brother fearfully.
“Sure. That’s what the Uruguayan rugby team did when their plane crashed in the Andes.”
“They did?” Scooter asks, looking a little queasy.
“Yep. That’s why mom and I don’t let you play rugby with Uruguayans.”
I see Skipper’s face start to cloud up, and a second later he’s in full meltdown mode, bawling his eyes out.
“I don’t want Scooter to eat me!”
“There, there,” I say giving him a big hug. “I’m the oldest, so I’d let you and mom eat me first.”
“You would?” Scooter asks. He reads a lot of boys’ books, and is enamored of the idea of self-sacrifice–on the part of others.
“Sure I would. I’ve had a long, reasonably fulfilling if often frustrating life–I’m ready to go at any time.”
“You’d sacrifice . . . yourself . . . so we could live?” Skipper asks as he gets his tears under control.
“Of course I would, kiddo. Daddy loves you both more than anything in the world.”
Even Scooter’s moved by this display of selflessness. “Gee, thanks, Dad” he says as he throws his arms around me.
“Dad?” Skipper asks as he snuggles into my armpit, seeking the comfort and security that only a father’s love can provide in times of trouble–unless he’s sick, in which case he knows to ask mom since she handles the medications in our house.
“What Skip?”
“When we eat you . . .”
“Yes?”
“Can I have cheese on mine?”
