Every year leading up to the big event, the buzz at S. Ellen Jones Elementary School was intense. “I heard that some kid got stuck upside down in the Rocko-plane. Oh yeah? I heard that Frankenstein walks around an’ catches kids an’ takes ’em back to the haunted house an’ he eats ’em! Nuh-uhhh!”

I was introduced to a lot of my favorite things for the first time at the Harvest Homecoming. Parades with big firetrucks and Shriners in little cars, candy buckeyes, peanut butter fudge, buffalo burgers, corndogs drowned in mustard, a clown walking an invisible dog, five pop-gun shots for a quarter, the duck pond where you were guaranteed a spider ring or a rubber skeleton, billowing clouds of grilled chicken smoke, shop windows painted with ghosts and bats, my very first wad of cotton candy, and rides. Rides!

I called my favorite ride simply The Cars. You’ve seen them. Little corvettes going round and round in a circle under a big umbrella. Back then there was a button on the steering wheel or the dash that sounded a buzzer. “Maaak aaak aak aaak aaak!”

Five of my top 10 memories are of my brother Brian and his wife Kathy picking me up after school to go ride The Cars and the Tilt-a-Whirl, and Scrambler, and a sort of parachute-tower affair where I got a certificate because I jumped so many times.

In a couple of weeks a parade of firetrucks, marching bands, floats, politicians, thunderous old dunebuggies, older but no less thunderous Shriners, and all the rest will wind through the streets of New Albany again, just like they’ve done every year since forever ago, proving that you really can come home again.

The zombie horde’s numbers continue to swell. I overhead this exchange between our scarecrow named The Grumble and one zombie..Grumble: “Ahh…Fred the zombie. How’s the family?”
Fred: “Belligerent and numerous.”It took me a while to figure out where I had heard that before. Zombies have a sense of humor too, sort of.

Among the rest of the assorted detritus are a pair of jackolanterns called the Moth Brothers. These two make a troublesome pair. I don’t know what’s in the water around these parts but it breeds insane mutant pumpkins.

Correction…cool insane mutant pumpkins.

The first was that they were contemptible; a terrible abuse of the spirit of Halloween. Why would you wear an Ultraman costume that is covered with pictures of Ultraman? It should be all silver with a picture of that blue flashy thingy on the chest, not emblazoned with Ultraman Protector of the world! I mean really! When I put on the costume, I am Ultraman, not a billboard advertising Ultraman!

As was evidenced by the cosistently large numbers of these things sold year after year, the second and possibly more dominant opinion was simply, “Hey, Ultraman. Cool!”

I fell somewhere in between.

It could be argued that one’s Halloween costume is the essence of Halloween itself. Certainly a poor choice in costume or just plain rotten luck, Charlie Brown’s muddled ghost for example, could seriously dampen spirits on halloween night, but when it really came down to it, you could put up with a lot and still have a great time. How else was it possible for companies to pawn these atrocious and yet wonderful little nightmares on kids across the US?

It boils down to one thing. They knew how crazy we were.

They could slap “flame retardant” on the cover and satisfy our parents. Everything else just sort of blended together for the most part. We were much more picky, and woe to the kid whose mom picked out his costume for him.

– Here’s your costume, Billy.
– But momm, I wanna be Ace Frehley!
– You’ll be no such thing! Don’t you know that KISS stands for Knights in Satan’s Service?
– But…but…is this Pluto? From Mickey Mouse?
– Oh, it’s cute! You’ll be just adorable!

I was sooooo lucky not to be that kid. You remember him. The quiet boy dressed as Raggedy Andy. He went through all the motions, still managed a muffled “trig-er-tree” at every house, even collected as much candy as the rest of us, but you could just tell. He was dead inside.

My costume varied over the years. I remember being Spiderman and a ghost and a crocodile ghost among other things. The store-bought costumes weren’t without their charms, but I much preferred to make my own out of this and that. Of course, that didn’t mean I wouldn’t linger at the Halloween display and gaze upon row after row of fantastic faces glaring, grinning, snearing, leering back at me. In fact, that hasn’t changed much in 30 years.

Like sex and to a lesser degree pizza, Halloween under a scratchy sweaty mask is still Halloween.