Tricks or Treats

Okay, I'm going to lapse into "old-geezer-speak" for this one.

In my day...trick or treating was about the kids.

There were not a lot of adult parties or dressing up in costume at work. It was about children dressing up in (mostly) homemade costumes and trolling door-to-door for candy. Every year the urban legends were dusted off and repeated...stories about people putting razor blades in apples and poison in popcorn balls.

Me and Medusa.

Here is how it rolled in our house.

A week or so before the big day, we decided what we were going to be for Halloween. The choices were limited. We had a box of stuff my mom kept, odd masks and old clothes. The basics were: witch (me for several years running), hobo, ghost, devil and pirate. We had a couple of scratchy plastic masks with slits for eyes, nose and mouth, that held onto the head with an elastic string. But my mom did not go out and buy a new costume every year. And we used old pillow cases to collect the loot. Or our book bags from school.

There were a few times when the costume restrictions were lifted. One year, my sister was Medusa in a school play, and she wore the costume my mom made to trick-or-treat. (The downside was, no one could guess who she was.) One year I wore an old suit of my dad's and was Groucho Marx. But that was in high school, and I didn't trick-or-treat, so I'm not sure that counts.

One of my favorite snapshots from our childhood is of my brother, Paul, sitting at the kitchen table surveying his loot, still dressed in his devil costume. 

The upshot is, Halloween was fun. Mom carved the pumpkin, stuck a candle in it and placed it in the front picture window. My folks turned on the yellow porch light and handed out candy while we did the hunting and gathering.

We walked through our neighborhood, and, when we were older and had more stamina, we trolled farther afield, onto the streets of the slightly more affluent, although the pickings weren't necessarily better. There were some houses you made certain to visit to because they had a reputation for good stuff, and others you avoided because the people were just mean about it. And you only went to the houses that had their porch lights on (which is still de rigueur). 

One of Mom's creations.

The night was fun, the candy plentiful, and we ate until Mom put the kabash on the feeding frenzy and made us brush our teeth and hit the sack.

When my son reached the age when trick-or-treating was appropriate, either I or his Dad took him out while the other handed out the goods. We called a halt to trick-or-treating when he hit the teenage years. There has always been controversy over this, some people feeling there should be an age limit, others not. But we've always held the belief that the night is for little goblins, not surly teenagers who wear tee-shirts and jeans and thrust a bag at you and growl menacingly.

These days, we can't have bags of candy around for health reasons, so we don't participate. I miss it, but I don't miss the day-after guilt of having ingested one-too-many Snickers. I do make up little goodie bags for the neighbor kids, just because.

I still like the idea of trick-or-treating. I suppose one day, Halloween celebrations will be reduced to parties at school or at the local rec center and that will be it. Because parents are afraid.

Oh well.

I'm going to end my ramblings with the last stanza from my favorite spooky poem, oft read aloud by my sister, Denise, which used to scare the crap out of me (especially when she got to the last line, which she acted out to great effect). It's by James Whitcomb Riley, and it was written in the late 1800's. It's called Little Orphant Annie:

An' little Orphant Annie says when the blaze is blue,
An' the lamp-wick sputters, an' the wind goes woo-oo!
An' you hear the crickets quit, an' the moon is gray,
An' the lightnin'-bugs in dew is all squenched away,--
You better mind yer parunts an' yer teachers fond an' dear,
An' churish them 'at loves you, an' dry the orphant's tear,
An' he'p the pore an' needy ones 'at clusters all about,
Er the Gobble-uns'll git you
  Ef you
     Don't
        Watch
           Out!

Word Nerd

I have this weird habit. I'll be talking to someone, and I'll see a sign or a box or something behind them, and I'll automatically take the words and read them backwards.

Why do I do this? I have no idea. It's something I've done for years, a habit. Most of the time I don't even know I'm doing it.

It's just part of my obsession with words.

Everywhere I go -- on the street or in restaurants or, sometimes, in the ladies' -- I read signs or menus or messages scrawled on stall doors. I critique the writing, the flow of words, the placement. Is the type too big? Too small? Is the spelling correct? Is the grammar spot on?

I know this is more than an occupational hazard. It's a little bit nuts.

At home I work on puzzles. I unscramble. I crossword. I jigsaw. Keep the puzzles coming. I say it's to keep my mind sharp, and I hope they do improve my brain power.

But honestly, I just get a kick out of words. Even malapropisms. Even the word "malapropism."

Or "bloviate," which is ironic, because I realize that's what I'm doing right now. Right here at 1:22 a.m. Because I can't sleep. Because the words are filling my head, spilling over in their attempt to come together in a meaningful way.

Yet, I suspect when I read this at a more reasonable time in the morning, I will wonder what possessed me. Was it the spirit of Noah Webster?

I wish it was Oscar Wilde.

Or Dorothy Parker.

Who aptly quipped, "A girl's best friend is her mutter."

You and Me and Leslie

"Who's Leslie?"

I wondered for years. Every time I heard the song, Groovin' by the Rascals. Then, out of the blue, I realized they were singing, "You and me endlessly groovin'." What a maroon!

There are plenty of examples of times when I've misheard lyrics, or simply could not understand them, so I hummed or added the wrong word. These days, through the miracle of the Google, I can look up a lyric I don't understand.

Sometimes, that is difficult to do when I can't even figure out the title of the song. Some bands are notorious for naming their tunes based on no particular lyric. One day, I had this conversation with my husband:
 Me: I heard Led Zeppelin on the radio.
Him: Which song?
Me: The one where they're singing something like "your distant eyes."
Him: Not helpful. What did it sound like?
Me: (Humming badly)
Him: I have no idea.

I know I'm not the only one who gets the lyrics wrong. According to legend (or the internet) the song In a Garden of Eden became In a Gadda da Vida, when the latter title was written on the demo tape by a drunken(?) guy in the studio. A record company executive thought it sounded all Eastern philosophical (very chichi at the time) and kept it.

And those of us who came of age in the 1970's remember the lyric in Blinded by the Light as "Wrapped up like a douche" instead of "deuce." (Well, okay, maybe that one was intentional.)

Speaking of intentional, there are many of those, too, created after listening to the same song over and over. My friend, Peggy, and I started doing this after playing Steely Dan's Royal Scam album about 500 times. "Luckless pedestrians" became...well, you get the idea.

Mr. Ginley is the master of lyric-changing -- who knew "Schrimpf" rhymed with "nymph"? -- as well as mixing and matching tunes. I will have the songs Mandy and Fernando inexplicably intertwined in my head for the rest of my days.

So much of the music we experience is heard but not listened to. It's everywhere...in stores, at work, at sporting events. And even when I've made a conscious decision to put in a CD or listen to iTunes, much of the time I'm only hearing on a subconscious level while I'm doing something else.

I guess music really is the background of our lives. I wonder what my theme song would be. I like to think it would be something along the lines of, Girls Just Wanna Have Fun or Born to Run.

But I suspect it's more like, Still Crazy After All These Years.

Confessions of a Crystal Junkie

I'm not sure when my love of crystals began. I think there was a hint of it when, as a kid, I would stare deeply into marbles, searching for the secrets of the universe.

Flash forward several years to when I started working for a jewelry company. Then move ahead a bit more to when I took a course and became a guild gemologist. All along I had a fascination with crystals and gems, but the interest didn't really get going until about a year ago.

I found a little store in Lakewood. That's where my real obsession began. They have an assortment of crystals and a list of the properties associated with each. My first acquisition was a quartz, which they made into a necklace for me. I wear it every day now, it's my personal talisman, a reflection of me.

Hematite soon followed (for protection), then the floodgates opened. Now I have a nice assortment of crystals whose mission is to soothe and protect and bring enlightenment. A lot of people will roll their eyes and think I've gone all woo woo. Well, maybe I have.

In the last few months, I've visited the gem and mineral collections at both the Smithsonian and the Cleveland Natural History Museum. They call to me in dulcet tones, their colors, their textures, their vast history.

And carrying the crystals, holding them in my hand, brings me comfort. If you can find comfort in anything in this tricky world (and it doesn't harm you or others), I say, go for it.

We have an errand to run in Lakewood today. Hmmmm. I think I hear another crystal calling my name...

Peek-a-Boo

Funny thing about the internet, it feels so cozy, it can lull you into a false sense that it's just you and your computer. You forget that, unlike writing a little something in the privacy of your home, you might just as well be sitting in front of a camera in your underwear.

It's good to remind yourself that web crawlers and spammers and cookie droppers and other odious types are out there, trying to capture your soul. Then spit it back at you in the form of phrases such as, "you may also like..."

Twenty hits from France and twenty-one from Romania. Really? Are they interested in my having tea with my husband? Or working at the cat shelter? What do they want, and why are they tracking me?

Maybe I shouldn't care. After all, I'm not selling state secrets or planning a coup. I talk about my little life in a little corner of the world. Harmless stuff.

And yet I wonder what the connection could be.

I've never been to France. I don't speak French. And I don't like Jerry Lewis.

As for Romania -- could there be a Schrimpf or two (or 21) living there? I'm told that "Schrimpf" is as common a name in Germanic countries as "Smith" is here.

There's really no point in dwelling. So I'll just continue to post and try not to think about the lurkers.

I'm just going to make sure I'm fully dressed when I sit down in front of my computer!

Tea for Two

It's funny how you hear a song all of your life, but you don't think about the words. Tea for Two was written in 1924 for the musical No No Nanette.

The idea is a couple (presumably married, although it's not called out in the song), imagining their life together without the distraction of friends and relations.

"We won't have it known, dear
that we own a telephone, dear."

Yes, even back in the day, folks wanted to fall off the grid, at least for a little while.

Which, back to the title of this rambling piece, was what Mr. Ginley and I did this past week.

We got dressed up and went out for tea.

There's a little place called the Emerald Necklace that overlooks the MetroPark. It's decked out in Victorian style, with lots of little gewgaws. Mr. was a tad uncomfortable at first, but, as he said, "A promise is a promise." So he bravely soldiered on.

He had said many months ago that he would take me there for tea for my birthday. We've passed the place a million times, and I hadn't been to tea since my trip to London in the early 1980's.

So there we were, Thursday afternoon, and the place was empty except for us. But it wasn't weird, just cozy. We decided to go for it, and did the High Tea, which is the works.

To the strains of Nat King Cole, we were served a little glass of chilled hibiscus tea with a lemon wedge, pink sugar lining the rim.

The deal is, you get two pots of tea. We chose to split two varieties. The first was a vanilla chai, the second a caramel rooibos, which we learned is pronounced "roy bus" and is actually red bush tea, popular in South Africa. (Precious Ramotswe is fond of the brew, for all of you who are fans of the #1 Ladies Detective Agency series.)

Back to our story...

The first course was a salad, presented in a tall glass, sprinkled with almonds and tossed with strawberries and other yummy extras, and ready to be topped with a fruity dressing, possibly a raspberry vinaigrette. We both enjoyed the salad.

The next to arrive was a wedge of quiche and a two-tiered plate with an assortment of breads, scones and sandwiches. Yes, there was the traditional cucumber sandwich. Plus chicken salad and egg salad. Bill wouldn't go near the cucumber sandwiches, but he gamefully finished the quiche, which is not his thing.

Last to arrive was the dessert plate. Little petit fours and macaroons and such. Bill passed on the coconut but sampled everything else, even the cheesecake.

The ceremony of the tea itself was a big part of the experience. Mostly, I played "mother" and poured the tea over the strainer. It's amazing how much better a real pot of tea tastes. And I drank it with steamed milk, which I don't normally. And with sugar cubes, although when I asked Bill if he wanted one lump or two, I couldn't get Bugs Bunny out of my head.

Altogether, we were there for nearly two hours. And we couldn't believe it was that long.

Time was suspended, as we sipped and nibbled and yacked our way through the food, which seemed like a lot at the time, but collectively wasn't really that much. The tea is what fills you up, I think. That, and the conversation.

Who knew that a couple of old married chuckleheads could share tea and talk and avoid  the distraction of phone calls and texts and other intrusions from the outside world? Just tea for two and two for tea.

Can't you see how happy we could be?

Right of Way

Year after year, the Canadian geese keep coming back. This in spite of the guy with the dog and the motorized mini boat whom they hired to chase the geese from our ponded shores.

In an act of defiance, the large fowl strut in numbers through out parking lot, emitting loud, throaty honks and leaving behind a trail of green goo. They have been known to hiss menacingly at passersby. While I believe that yes, they are a nuisance, there is an underdog part of me that believes they have just as much right to be annoying as we do. Presumably, they and their kind were there first. As were the field mice, ground hogs, chipmunks and other critters that turn up from time to time.

There has been a lot of grousing in the news about the deer population. The latest solution is to hit them with paint balls. While this would certainly lend a certain color to the neighborhood, I'm not sure it would be much of a deterrent. "Oh look, Henry, there's that green deer we shot yesterday."

I suppose that's the way people are. Not just with animals, but with each other. First, we find a patch of land we really like, then we chase the inhabitants off said land, until there is nowhere left for them to go. When they fight back, we exterminate them. That's how we roll!

I don't know, maybe coexisting just isn't in our DNA, even in today's "civilized" society. If you need evidence, all you have to do is head to a busy shopping center and hang out in the parking lot.

Let he who has not felt a shiver of triumph at beating someone else to the best parking spot cast the first stone!