First, a distant relation in Kansas sent me this link with a Flash on How to carve a pumpkin like a pro. I knew there would be a punch line but I didn’t know what. H.o.p. came running up behind me, “What game is that?!” I told him, “How to carve a pumpkin like a pro.” He pointed out what virtual face he wanted me to carve. I picked up the virtual knife to carve it. The punch line hit. H.o.p. stood beside me, silent for a couple of seconds, me wondering what he was going to do and say as he may love ghouls and monsters but his tolerance threshold for scary things is quite low. After a couple seconds of silence, he said, authoritative (a trace of dejection in his voice),”I know a better game than that.”
He thinks the pumpkin should instead grow legs and become a huge giant pumpkin.
We have yet to get a pumpkin, usually waiting until Halloween. Truth be known, I like the idea but hate carving pumpkins, scraping the flesh away until the shell is thin enough for the candle to glow through is tedious and though I do it I’m not a Martha Stewart. Or I used to do it. The past few years we’ve not had carved pumpkins as H.o.p. wanted the faces drawn on rather than carved out. You don’t carve up friends and the pumpkins were friends. I ask him if he wants it drawn on or carved this year and he says, “Carve the face!”
Usually we go trick-or-treating at the old neighborhood. There is no trick-or-treating in this neighborhood. Or we haven’t tried it. We’re a mix of upper middle scale (like the new condos on the corner that go for several hundred thousand a pop), middle scale and down scale. Day’s dawning brings always the question of, “Was the van broken into again last night?” Which it was on Sunday. And even I thought that was a bit much. Someone tries to break into the apartment last week and a couple of days later the inside of the van was torn apart with people looking for I don’t know what because there’s nothing in it to steal. Nothing. You leave nothing in your vehicle and despite our leaving nothing in the van ever it’s been broken into now too many times to count. So, I thought that was a bit much, two break-ins in one week.
We’ve not gone trick-or-treating around here as I think the pickings would be pretty slim. When we drive out the neighborhood on Halloween, heading over to the old, we never see any trick-or-treaters around here and almost no decorations. Transvestite hookers, yes. Well, not really; they don’t come out until later at night. The fresh crop of faces who were particularly obnoxiouss recently are around here no longer as they turned out to live in our building–one guy had rented and then had made it a nest–and they were causing problems and not paying rent and were evicted.
Hey, but I hear there is another child H.o.p.’s age now living in the building! H.o.p.’s not met him yet and probably won’t. But that means the demographic for the area has taken a decided turn.
Marty has met a couple of times and said hello but they were busy shuffling the child from building to car and that was that.
The old neighborhood had very few trick-or-treaters when we were there. When we moved in, our little corner was not yet a little artist/musician’s colony, though the two apartments in the house we moved into had been handed off from R&B musician to R&B musician for a number of years. There was a crack house kitty-corner behind and someone who sold heroin lived behind us and two strippers lived across the street. Helicopters with search lights scouring the neighborhood were then a common occurence and once Marty stepped outside in time to have someone run by in the direction of the crack house, followed up by a policeman who paused just long enough to call out, “Which way did he go?” The neighhborhood was on the upswing when some visitors were accosted with Uzis on the corner, which was notable because by then it was bad form. We had became a musician/artist colony which we didn’t know about until one of us, at a coffee shop, said where he lived and the woman behind the counter said she’d heard all about the artist colony and wanted to know to whom one applied to live there. Which caused us to laugh. The landlord at that time was living in Florida and the apartments (in houses) were simply handed off from one artist or musician to another. Then the demographic changed. The landlord moved back and in keeping with the upswing in demographic evicted us building by building and sold off most of his properties. The towering stick-figure metal sculptures disappeared. The community garden went away. People with genuine incomes purchased surrounding homes and fixed them up and formed a neighborhood association that decided renters were riff-raff. H.o.p. and Marty and I went to the birthday party of a neighboring child, a nice couple, and we were talking to one woman who was very pleasant to us, I told her what a beautiful flower garden they had (what I could see of it, behind six-foot stone walls and locked gates that lent an air of romance) and she asked us which was our house and when we told her we rented she turned her back and that was that. Turned out she was the head of the neighborhood association. H.o.p. was not invited to her child’s birthday party. I couldn’t have cared less except that I felt badly for H.o.p. I wondered if I was imagining the abrupt cut in conversation and turning of back, but Marty later mentioned it himself. Our old van was now the exceptional vehicle rather than the rule. And we were not there the following year as we had moved.
A couple of years prior the newspapers had run a few articles on the changing demographic of that area and the inner city suburbs, the insanely rapid escalation of housing prices in those areas with the influx of yuppies from outside the perimeter and how there was increasingly nowhere in the city for those with lower incomes to live, pushed out of their homes by the huge jumps in land taxes and shoved from apartments by the great hikes in rents. The house the strippers had lived in was, six years ago, already $350,000 and they moved out at a tidy profit. Our landlord’s properties were now worth several million. One street over, someone I knew had purchased a house right before the Olympics for $30,000 and sold it afterwards for around $200,000.
Some musicians we know have made their way back into the neighborhood, renting one of the houses our landlord sold. They know who he is. “That creepy, short man who stands around and never does anything,” is how they describe him. Which fits. He used to work for NASA, went around inspecting military jet wings for stress fractures. When he was done working for NASA he returned to the area and made a career of standing in the parking area behind the buildings and staring at first the community garden (with such obvious loathing that we put up a fence so he wouldn’t mow it down) and then staring with disdain at the back porch of our apartment which was decorated with loads of plants and our cement buddha.
That landlord had a thing against plants and trees. Tore out two of the area’s old redwoods. Right in our (his) front lawn. Right on either side of the walkway leading up to the stairs. Tore them out for no reason whatsoever, those tall old trees which were perfectly healthy. It was a ghastly, gut-wrenching show. Left big holes. We couldn’t let toddler H.o.p. run around in the front lawn for fear he’d fall in and break a limb.
Anyway, every Halloween in that old nighborhood we’d get candy, hopeful for some trick-or-treaters, and ours would be the lone place with a pumpkin sitting outside, and about four trick-or-treaters, all in one group, was all we’d get on a good year. The year we moved out was the year of the big shift. That year, a couple had moved in who did up a right good show of a giant tarantula on their roof and a big Frankenstein. When we went back the next year, because of that house, we found the whole neighborhood lit up with pumpkins, witches on the doorsteps. “A witch!” “Well, some people’s Halloween idea of a witch,” I’d say, and remind him that witches are regular people who look nothing like that. Last year there were groups of kids everywhere and as people opened their doors to spill out goodies into bags one glimpsed the interiors renovated to match the outside renovations, and well-appointed with just right full-blown wood furniture, nothing laminate. We informed the two guys with the giant tarantula and the Frankenstein that we had returned to the neighborhood two years now because of their house, thinking they might appreciate our devotion. They seemed pleased.
On one porch was a pumpkin with a big “W” carved in it.
Boo, chills.
This year we will go out to a suburban neighborhood in which family lives to do the trick-or-treating and H.o.p. will enjoy making the rounds with cousins. H.o.p. hopes we will be able to hit also the house with the tarantula and Frankenstein, though it’s in a completely different direction. I say maybe so, we can try, though I doubt it will happen as the distance between the two places is about an hour, if not more. I don’t say it’s impossible but he makes some inner calculations and then offers, “We can go by the next day. Maybe it will still be there.”
We may have cool temps for trick-or-treating this year. It’s in the 60s all this week with lows at night in the mid to high 30s and low 40s, which has been nice but means it’s a bit chilly inside as our heat won’t be cut on by the landlord until the first freeze (need to pull out a space heater). I get up today with a fierce headache. In the spring it’s pollen allergies. In the summer it’s pollution. In the fall and winter it’s allergies to mildew and mold what not. I’m one of those people who on a scale of 1 to 10 rates an allergic reaction of 9 or 10 to just about every tree or grass in the area and to mildew, and dust. So there’s something every season to kick my butt. But today, on my way to the kitchen for coffee, I find on the table two big pots of cactus waiting for me, a present from Marty. One is filled with gorgeous specimens. The other has some nice and a few that are a bit suspect but may grow up nicely. We’ll see. It was grand walking in to find them sitting there in their big green ceramic pots filled with sandy soil. I made coffee, took aspirin and the new Sudafed, wiped my allergy-watery eyes, sat to wait for something to take effect, contemplated the cactus and decided what they need is a blue wall behind them but a mural in here would look pretty ridiculous. Maybe a big blue painting. What they really need is sunlight, which is the challenge . I should put them up in the front little book nook closet that gets the sun but then I wouldn’t be able to enjoy them. And the pots are too big to shift back and forth from one room to another. Need to relocate to a corner where we can put a sun lamp.
I’m pulling out the plastic light-up pumpkin tonight. It’s what we’ve used during those years when H.o.p. was loathe to carving a pumpkin.
Cactus! I’ve got cactus. Loads of cactus. In pretty green ceramic pots with sandy soil. I’m going to drop in some desert rocks as decoration. I don’t know what it is about cactus that I love, but it makes me happy.
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