Phone Home

I am excited each Halloween, as more and more young adults come by with their nephews and nieces and tell me how I scared the hell out of them when they were kids. We've been a pretty active Halloween family for all my thirteen years here:

This is my usual spiderweb. I dispatched the spider yesterday. Today I'll get the toe-pincher coffin out with the pneumatic vampire. I wanted my crucified nun on an inverted cross receiving a hot-lead-douche for Halloween 2010, but the wife didn't approve. She muttered something about not wanting to look so evil to others. What a downer.

However -- what I remember most about Halloween as a kid wasn't my own experience, but rather, the Halloween scene in the 1982 movie ET. If you're my age, you were a kid the same age as the kid actors, and you got your first glimpse of a sanitized, wholesome California-style suburban "community." I wondered for many years why my own suburban neighborhood didn't look like that.

Fast forward fifteen years, I buy my Elk Grovian unit, and my own "community" looks much like that scene. Clean houses, kempt (sic) landscaping, good exterior paint, two new cars in every driveway. Halloween '97 comes, and it looks a lot like what I remember in that movie...only one thing is drastically different. There are no people.
We load up on the decorations, we offer a massive bowl of candy, yet people only trickle by. I take my own son out trick-or-treating and am amazed at how every other house is dark, every third house has a light on but no answer -- it has absolutely no resemblance to my own childhood experiences in Carmichael which was highly active, or to ET, where Hollywood inserts a community into that sterilized suburban housal unit pod.

Elk Grovian Halloweens suck. I blame it on a few factors:

• A much higher Asian American population than my Carmichael of the '70s and '80s. My observations are that they don't engage in this tradition;


• Within every third housal unit lurks a registered sex offender. We obviously didn't have that back then. Times have changed. It's much more dangerous out there these days;


• The neighborhood is bifurcated into multiple dead zones created by Frye Creek Boulevard Freeway. No parent in their right mind would allow their children to roam at night around all that brutally fast traffic...although they have no fucking concern when they themselves are behind the wheel;


• Neighbors don't depend on each other for anything anymore. Better to drive to the supermarket on November 1st, stock up on discounted candy, and have no fear that the neighbors spiked Billy's peanut butter cups with razor blades or dropped used syringes into Betti's bucket;


• The distances between housal units has grown to the point that little children have be dragged down the last street.

With a fair degree of sarcasm I still make my point because within each one of these bullets lies a kernel of truth.

The 4th of July, Halloween, Memorial Day parades -- these are things that define us as a culture, yet I am seeing that they are increasingly being trumped by private celebrations, by private ceremonies. Fewer and fewer of us engage in the few public events we have. Halloween in Elk Grove in 1976 was probably fantastic. Halloween in Elk Grove in 2009 is just a casualty of the dead, lifeless autoclaves we call subdivisonal living.

ET had to phone home. He boarded his spaceship presumably to return to a culture that probably respects the dignity of place, the value of community and shared experiences.