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Archive for October, 2007

This is a suitable lady for Halloween. She’s an angel who stands watch in the cemetery across the road. I like to walk this cemetery sometimes. Several people I have known in life are buried there and I feel completely at home. No sense of dread greets me there, just quiet. There are quite a few statues: some other angels, some saints — St. Francis of Assisi is popular — and more Virgin Mary’s than you can shake an incense burner at.

Death never has frightened me, although dead people and animals still creep me out to a certain extent. Sometimes, it seems that death would be a welcome relief, but fortunately those days are still quite rare. Most of the time I enjoy living a lot. Nevertheless, I walk the cemetery with my camera and contemplate the peaceful dead all around.

Have you ever caught yourself envying someone who has died — someone who has lived a good life, accomplished something, and then passed on into whatever waits beyond the veil? I have. I don’t dwell on it. I’m usually too busy for such thoughts, but they do come sometimes.

Halloween is the time when the restless dead are supposed to return to walk among the living. At Samhain, great fires were built and wild dances held, all for the purpose of scaring the dead into returning to the netherworld from whence they came. Each Halloween I wait. I wait for the dead or some kind of apparition that would make the night live up to its billing, but each Halloween is like the last. The only apparitions that appear are three feet tall on my front porch, holding their mother’s hand and demanding candy. Otherwise, the night is quiet and pretty much like any other.

It would be cool to see a spectral procession of the departed slowly flowing down my street, scaring the hell out of everybody, sending the dogs to hide under the bed. It would be fun. It would be something of a revelation. It’s something I don’t expect to see happen. I’m a “modern man” and I don’t see ghosts, elves and fairies. Maybe I should, but I don’t. The sterility of imagination is the price we pay for being as we are, but I’ve never cared much for seeing things unless they are really there. Still, I would love to walk out onto my back porch to find a unicorn grazing in the yard.

I guess, deep down, I’m a believer. There’s a part of me that still holds out hope that the magic is going to break through the hum-drum sameness of this world.