I love this time of year. Halloween. It is such a great holiday. My love for this time of year goes beyond getting to dress up and openly indulge in being someone - or something you are not, no matter how outlandish. It goes beyond being able to gorge on all the mini candy bars you snuck out of your toddler's bag because he is too young to realize what the good candy is and is happy with the smarties.
I love this holiday because the flavor of it resonates so completely through everything. The air has just turned crisp and has a tang to it that says Halloween. The moon takes on an eerie quality. I find myself holding my breath at midnight waiting for ghosts and goblins to come out to play. Fear has such a delicious quality to it.
I have been reading other people's posts about fear tonight so I thought that I would write my own. What am I afraid of? What scares me?
I could list spiders. I swallowed a spider instead of a raisin once when I was very young and I remember my mother picking me up and holding me under a gushing faucet trying to wash my mouth out while she called poison control. I have been terrified of spiders ever since. I haven't eaten a raisin since then either. Horrid dreadful fruit.
Or there was the time I went into shock when I was the victim of a 'spider' prank in jr high school. It involved a bobby pin on a string, a backstage party from a school play I had just been in and a boy who liked me and was trying to get my attention in the 'if I pull her hair I like her' mentality. But that story is much too long and can be saved as a post for another day.
I could list snakes. I was bitten by a small harmless garden snake once and was told by my sister that I was, to quote her "probably going to die." I ran inside and sat in a corner crying until my parents came home and soothed my fears. They make my skin crawl.
But if I were going to be completely honest I would have to say that my biggest fear is myself. Or rather, my imagination. What goes on in my head when my imagination gets stirred up is worse than if you put all the snakes and spiders in a room together. (Ugh, well maybe not. I think I will have to reserve judgement on that fact to depend on whether or not I ever end up in a room filled with snakes and spiders. Fingers crossed that never happens.)
I have the type of imagination that needs very little encouragement to jump to the extreme of any situation. When I was newly married I used to work til late in the evening as a manager of a movie theatre. After closing and doing the bank drop I would often not get home until around 0300 in the morning. My husband would get up and go to work at 0430. (It sounds familiar to our lives now.) I remember a night when I was too wound up to fall instantly to sleep so I turned the television on. I watched the movie "The Deliberate Stranger" with the incredibly handsome Mark Harmon. (The girls at my work give me a hard time for liking men much too old for me. I have a picture of Robert Redford they cut out for me hanging in my locker amongst the family pictures. Not Robert Redford from The Sting, or the Great Gatsby era, but a picture from this last year's Sundance Film Festival. Still Dreamy. Sigh. But I digress.) For anyone not familiar with "The Deliberate Stranger" Mark played, masterfully I might add, the role of Ted Bundy. When my husband left for work I had myself so freaked out that I pushed couches in front of not only the front door, but also the bedroom door on the off chance that a serial killer might show up. And I couldn't sleep that night until I had committed to memeory just exactly how I would climb out the apt window and which neighbor I would run to for help. I moved the couches and planned my escape every night after that when I had to sleep alone for an entire month afterwards.
And yet I am drawn to it. I love/dread the feeling of fear. The gut churning adrenaline spike that makes every emotion more vivid and real. My imagination runs wild at the drop of a hat, or should I say the drop of an ice cube?
The ice maker in my house, when it drops it's ice cubes at night, makes me hear footsteps in the kitchen or someone fiddling with the patio door.
Some of my worst fears take giant leaps over the bounds of realism into things I know don't exist but still frighten me spitless.
As I drive home from work in the dark early morning hours and think of what I would do if I get a flat tire and had to walk, (I don't have a cell phone. Antiquated I know.) I picture the dark lightning-quick shape of a werewolf streaking through the orchards surrounding my town to drag me off the road.
I recognize that my fears tend toward the irrational and that I often let them spin rapidly out of control. But when I walk outside and look up at the crisp autumn sky and I see the Halloween decorations filling the stores and houses I get drawn in to the excitement of fear.
I thrill at the irrational nature of being scared and the fact that imagining the serial killer lurking in the shadows or the werewolf streaking through the mist means that I don't have to think about the fears that aren't softened by a couch pressed up against the door. Like the traffic accident that could leave me widowed, or the random violence of a school shooting.
So I will take my fears and relish in them, allowing this time of year to let me experience my fears while keeping me safe.