It's Halloween Again

The earliest Halloweens I remember are from my elementary school days. Prior to that, i.e., the first five years of my life, I have no Halloween memories. I have heard stories about an infamous panda bear costume that was passed down from my big sister to my big brother to me, but I can't recollect the actual black and white relic. I wonder if my younger brothers ever got (read "had") to wear it. Strangely though, my own kids had a panda bear costume at one time. My by-then ex-husband bought it for our daughter when she was about 4. She was always his favorite, as he proclaimed to me just 4 nights after the birth of our third child, a boy. Her panda costume came out of hiding when my youngest (8 years younger than his sister) was the right size for it. It was never a matter of the costume being the correct size for you -- you had to be the correct size for the costume. This way it lasted much longer and eventually became worth the ridiculous $20 he had paid for it (in 1986 $20 was a lot, especially when I was getting such pathetic child support).

Back to Commonwealth Avenue Elementary School, still standing in Los Angeles and looking so much smaller than it did that first day I walked into their kindergarten as a transfer student. I was assigned a spot on a rug, where we sat "Indian style." If I try to sit "Indian style" these days, my knees are way up in the air and I sure hope they were lower in kindergarten because this was many, many years before little girls, or big ones for that matter, were allowed to wear pants to school. Perhaps this had something to do with my mother being so adamant about my wearing clean underwear.

I guess 5-year-olds in the 1950s weren't worthy of chairs. Every morning we rolled out the rugs and each was rolled back up at the end of class. Or maybe there was a rug monitor. I forget. Anyway, I was assigned a spot on the rug next to Clain, may he rest in peace. When the Internet was very young I used it to locate Clain, who apparently was the only swoon-worthy kid at Commonwealth Avenue back in the day. Most of my girlfriends also had crushes on him at one time or another during grades K-6. In those olden days elementary school lasted through the 6th grade. Grades 7-9 were held at a place called Junior High School, while those 10th through12th grades happened at the "actual (?)" High School.

So, back to Clain. After finding him online I wrote him a chatty email about my life and what I'd been up to since we were 9. Clain wrote back within a couple of days. He remembered me and my tenure at Commonwealth. I had been there from the second semester of kindergarten until the end of the first semester of fifth grade. I was excited to hear from Clain and pictured a long and interesting correspondence. I emailed him back immediately. This time his answer didn't come so quickly and when it did it wasn't even from Clain. It was from someone claiming to be his girlfriend, who wrote that he had died suddenly of a heart attack. (We were only 47 that year.) She asked if I cared to write a few words to put into a book that would be given to Clain's grieving parents. I told the cupcake story.

Clain and I were in the 3rd grade and I was upset when he took the last chocolate cupcake off a tray of classroom party goodies. Maybe it was Halloween. Anyway, my mother had baked those cupcakes and although she wouldn't let me sample one before school, I had faith that I would eventually get my hands on one. Clain sat (yeah, we had chairs by then) about three seats to my left. As the tray circled the room counterclockwisely, I counted down from an even dozen cupcakes until there was only one left. Clain's parents were known to be very strict. Surely he wouldn't have been allowed to scarf down a chocolate cupcake baked and frosted in some strange mother's kitchen. Boy, was I wrong, and his taking of that last cupcake lived on in my mottled brain. I was really shook up by Clain's death. It was years before I attempted to locate any other old friends online.

It's now after ten on Halloween night 2007. I'm sitting here at the computer listening to Regina Spektor and John Legend, waiting for my baby boy, who just recently turned 17, to get his butt home. He knows it's a school night! So, about Halloween. I'm grateful I no longer have kids to take trick or treating. For some weird reason I never felt comfortable doing that. One year we wound up at the San Francisco flat we had occupied for over 8 years. The stairway was nicely carpeted (unlike in our day). When I told the woman who answered the door that my 4 kids and I had all lived there, she invited us in to look around. I declined. I wanted to remember the place as it had been -- teal and lavender bedrooms with a bright red kitchen and pretty blue tile in the bathroom. They have the exact same tile in the ladies room of one of my favorite dives up north.