Happy Halloween From Leon Ray Livingston

Halloween was different when I was a kid.  I remember being a Hobo  three years in a row because it was a cheap costume comprised of items we had around the house.  A pint-sized Leon Ray Livingston if you will.  Wait!  What?  You don’t know who Leon Ray Livingston is?  He is the most famous of Hobos.  If you had been a Hobo for most of your trick-or-treating career, you would know this.  He became a Hobo at eleven years of age and Hoboed the rest of his life, stowing away on ships and hopping trains.  He wrote journals and became somewhat famous.  I digress.

            Nurse Meme would drag out the Maybelline black eyebrow pencil and draw big thick eyebrows on us, then she would smear it across our jaws and cheeks making little five-year-old Gladys look like she hadn’t shaved in a day or two.  Then she would dress me in Buck’s old flannel shirt and a pair of jeans that were twenty times too big, cinch them up with a swath of rope and hand me a bandana tied to a stick for a bindle.   That was it.  That was the costume.  It was in this fashion I would tag behind my big brother, Quirky Cousins, and Matilda going door to door begging for candy. 

Buck of course was Superman, Matilda was a movie star, the Quirky Cousins always had some kind of imaginative and quirky costume and then there was Gladys the Hobo.  Oh, don’t get me wrong, I didn’t care that I was a Hobo, it was just that I watched other kids in their store bought costumes with their plastic jack-o-lanterns full of Dum-Dum’s and Tootsie Rolls.  I envied their polyester Casper Costumes with the plastic mask with eye holes but no way to breath.

  I would long for the Cinderella costume that tied with three ties in the back and had scratchy netting for a skirt and again a plastic mask with huge eye holes but no nostril holes. This costume always flummoxed me, if you didn’t wear something underneath it you have a draft in the back, but if you did wear something underneath well then it just wasn’t Cinderella like.   We would pass each other on the street, little Johnny in his Casper costume complaining to his mom “I can’t breathe!” as his plastic Jack-O-lantern full of candy swayed this way and that spilling out little pieces of Bit-O’Honey and Laffy Taffy.   I would pause, stoop, and pick up the stray pieces only to find that Casper had melded into ten other Caspers none of which knew they were leaking Nik-L-Nips and Candy Cigarettes. 

            House by house we trudged up and down our neighborhood, ringing door bells and yelling the same old spiel “Trick or treat, smell my feet, give me something good to eat.”   Every house on the block would have the porch light on and some kind of goody.   The elderly lady on the corner always had candied apples and popcorn balls wrapped in cellophane.  The old man that lived at the end of the road had rolls of pennies.  My favorite house was the big house half way up the block who always gave out little packages of suckers on a string, candy corn and Double-Bubble gum with the cartoon wrapper. 

            We had to wait until dusk to make our rounds and before we went we had to eat our dinner.  ALL of our dinner.  Nurse Meme was no fool. She knew that if she wanted us to eat liver at least once a year, then Halloween was the night to cook it.  We would never miss trick-or-treating over liver.  We would try not to gag and choke down our strip of organ meat smothered in onions and gravy, slog down our helping of spinach and head out the door.  Buck pushing back his red satin cape, Matilda fluffing her hair and checking the mole she had painted on her face and little Leon Ray Livingston in her too big everything. 

            I guess I’ve come the long way around to tell you Happy Halloween.  Today’s Halloween are much more sophisticated with costumes that look like they belong in the movies and decorations that equal those of Knots Scary Farm.  I don’t ever remember adults dressing in costumes but today everyone was decked out in some type of get-up from Freddie Kruger to a life-sized singing Elsa.  Everyone was in the spirit from the guy at the DMV dressed as a sloth to the cashier in Wal-Mart dressed as a giant Snicker’s bar.  I don’t know if Halloween is better today or if nostalgia skews my view.  But I kind of miss seeing a bunch of kids using their imaginations to come up with original costumes.  Or even some who ended up being Leon Ray Livingston three years in a row.