The Porch Light

For one night, the whole neighborhood agrees to play along.

Halloween in California begins with a lie.

It is fall.

Never mind that it is eighty-three degrees outside. Never mind that the children are sweating beneath polyester character costumes and the pumpkins on the porch have about forty-eight hours before they begin collapsing in on themselves.

It is October. There will be cider. Someone will insist on wearing a sweater.

We are all committed to this.

And somehow, by the time the sun goes down, it works.

The porch lights come on. Cobwebs stretch across hedges. Tombstones appear on lawns. Someone has gotten ambitious with a fog machine. The house at the end of the street has gone completely overboard and everyone agrees it is magnificent.

Children spill onto the sidewalks.

The neighborhood, which most nights exists largely behind garage doors, comes outside.

As a child, I thought Halloween belonged entirely to us.

The pumpkins were lit. The candy bowls were full. Someone’s dad was making alarming noises from behind a hedge. This was Halloween. As far as I knew, it happened every year entirely on its own.

We put on costumes and carried pillowcases because the little plastic pumpkin was never going to cut it. We knocked on doors we had never knocked on before and accepted candy from strangers despite being specifically instructed not to do exactly that the other 364 days of the year.

The whole thing felt wonderfully lawless.

Then, for a while, you grow out of it.

Or at least I thought you did.

And now here I am again.

Except this time I’m carrying the discarded sword and someone’s water bottle. I’m reminding everyone to say thank you. I’m standing twelve feet behind them while they knock on a stranger’s door, then listening with great interest when they run back to tell me exactly what I just watched happen.

And I’m noticing things I never noticed before.

The woman answering the door in a witch’s hat. The grandparents sitting in folding chairs at the end of their driveway. The man across the street who has clearly devoted an unreasonable amount of time to whatever is happening in that tree.

Someone bought three bags of candy and then another one because they ate some of the first three.

Someone has been repositioning a skeleton in the front yard for twenty minutes because apparently there is a right way for a plastic corpse to sit.

Everyone seems suspiciously delighted by the whole thing.

Including me.

It turns out Halloween didn’t disappear when I stopped being the one carrying the pillowcase.

I just moved to the other side of it.

And from here, I can see what I couldn’t then: everyone is playing.

Not just the children running down the sidewalk in capes. The grown-ups too. The ones hanging ghosts from trees and carving pumpkins and sitting outside after dark with bowls of candy for children they don’t know.

We say we’re doing it for the kids.

And of course we are.

But the fog machine is for you.

There aren’t many times in adult life when everyone agrees to play pretend together.

We have more respectable words for the things we do for fun. Hobbies. Projects. Entertaining. Traditions.

Play sounds like something you were supposed to have finished with around the same time you stopped carrying a pillowcase door to door.

And then October comes around and otherwise reasonable adults begin hanging ghosts from trees.

Nobody asks what the point is.

There is no productive outcome to a fog machine.

The skeleton contributes nothing to the household.

For one night, things are allowed to exist simply because they are fun.

A warm California evening becomes a crisp fall night if everyone would kindly stop mentioning the temperature. The perfectly ordinary house down the street is haunted. Strangers give children candy. A grown man hiding behind a hedge is behaving completely appropriately.

We all know none of it is real.

We all agree not to ruin it by saying so.

Maybe that’s what I’ve been hearing all these years when people talk about the Halloweens they remember.

The pillowcases. Staying out after dark. Homemade costumes. Roaming farther than we’d probably let our own children roam now. Candy bars that have apparently shrunk considerably since 1993.

Memory is generous with childhood.

But I don’t think I want to go back.

I’m rather delighted to discover I never really left.

Because Halloween needs other people.

Christmas can happen behind your own front door. Thanksgiving needs only a table. A birthday can belong entirely to one family.

Halloween needs the house three doors down.

It needs the neighbor whose name you only sort of know. The teenagers pretending they’re too old for this while still wearing costumes. The older couple buying candy even though their own children are long gone.

It needs someone to open the door.

And nobody organizes any of it.

There is no committee. No neighborhood meeting. No instructions tucked into the mailbox.

We just know.

As dusk settles in, the porch lights begin to come on.

One across the street.

Another three houses down.

Then the one on the corner.

Each one saying the same thing.

Come knock.

So we put the candy by the door. Light the pumpkins. Ignore the fact that it’s still seventy-eight degrees outside.

And turn ours on too.