Pondering the sinister on Halloween
The other day I spoke to my friend John on the phone and we talked about Halloween, which is one of our favorite holidays of the year. He lives on a busy street on the outskirts of the city, but it is an older neighborhood and therefore he seldom has many kids around for trick or treat. When I lived with my mom, we were on a dead end street, in a semi-rural area, but there were a fair number of kids going door to door on Halloween night. This was because one of her neighbors had six kids, and they had a big lawn party and invited all of the friends over. So a short street with maybe eighteen houses was full of the sounds of many happy children on October the 31st. But the neighboring children grew up, and for a while the large family down the street still hosted those parties for their grandkids and friends. But when that stopped, that was the end of it all. The last time my mom bought a bunch of candy, no one came. That was depressing, as I had helped her decorate the house.
My current home is just about as bereft on Halloween night, as I am at the end of a similar dead end street where maybe three or four kids live. Decorating isn’t worth it, as so few would see my hard work. Although I do some decorating for fall, just to pretty up my front porch. At least at my mom’s you could sort of see part of her yard from the main road. Decorating and handing out candy to kids on Halloween night was always something I enjoyed doing. Oh well, it just isn’t to be these days. John says he still gets a few kids, and so he has bought some candy in expectation.
As John and I finished reminiscing about past Halloweens, I changed the subject. I told him I was planning on walking across the Bay Bridge the Sunday after this one. He seemed to not know what to say, and his silence quite obvious. I then wondered if I might have triggered him, even though the Key Bridge and the Bay Bridge were/are two separate crossings. Neither of us has ever known anyone who jumped from the latter span. Then the conversation moved onto something else. For some reason, I get a weird look or reaction when I tell people what I plan on doing. Surely I’m not the only one who wants to do that walk, otherwise the organizers would not bother selling tickets, setting up and hosting the event. But clearly some are turned off, or even freaked out by the idea of walking across the spine of that steel serpent. My husband is far from afraid, rather, he simply lacks interest. He is one of those types of people for whom the world is nothing more than a basic black and white construct. In his world there are no subtle nuances of meaning and symbolism, and things, animals (and perhaps some people) are simply one dimensional. I told him about my scary dream about the evil from the Sunshine Skyway Bridge possessing our friend’s church and I told him I’d love to go down there and see it one day. He kind of looked at me funny and said that to him, it was nothing more than a chunk of concrete and steel. This is something I run into rather often in my life where some people are simply unable to see beyond the obvious and the literal. Is the Sunshine Skyway just a chunk of concrete and steel? Well, I’d have to agree, but I feel that it is that and a whole lot more. A person (or a dog, cat or other animal) is essentially a blob of meat, bone, blood and other organic matter. But of course there’s a lot more to most living things then only what substances they are made out of. While the Skyway isn’t a living thing in any sense of the word, like so many places and things it takes on the energy of what is (and has been) around it. It is imbued with those nuances that those people like my husband cannot (or will not) see. I have no idea if it is really haunted or not. All I know is that I had a strong negative reaction to it and I do believe there is something very abnormal about it. This abnormality may have a completely scientific explanation and have nothing to do with the history of the bridge, but I cannot as of yet determine that. And I may never be able to anyway.