All Hallow's Eve

Back on the couch again. This time I'm watching the credits begin to pop up for "Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers." I can feel myself tense as I begin to anticipate the measured and deliberate dismemberment of another slew of teenagers in a small Illinois town. I am thinking about what a well timed showing this turns out to be, and how lucky I am to have access to the wide variety of broadcasting offered by cable television. I am looking at a movie that I watched with this same fevered anticipation back in 1988. Then I started to remember the formula by which these teenagers would be killed, with the wicked intent of generating yet another sequel. I was twenty-six when I first saw "Halloween 4." I was sixteen when I saw the first one.
I remember sitting in the band room of our high school with my friend Clark and I sat slack-jawed as Lance Hardesty, who was a year ahead of us, gave a shot-by-shot re-enactment of John Carpenter's magnum opus. We were transfixed, and when we finally went to see the film ourselves a few nights later, it was a terrifying experience that had not been dulled by Lance's bravura performance.
Now I'm creeping toward fifty, and outside the tear gas has dissipated from Oakland's most recent riot. The homicide rate for the year in this city is climbing toward one hundred. The news magazines and Internet are still awash with the matter-of-fact photos of the bloody corpse of Muammar Qaddafi. When I was ten, Halloween was about costumes and Trick-or-Treating. When I was twenty it was about drunken debauchery and pushing back the veil of night. When I was in my thirties I watched my son begin his own pilgrimage up to the porch to beg for candy dressed as a truck. In my forties I have started to wonder what Halloween really is.
I switched the channel to watch the World Series.