Skip to content

Mielke: Recalling Halloween from another era a long time ago

The night is bright and eerie, with starlight and streetlights giving it a glow kind of like a weirdly carved pumpkin.
9126502_web1_Mielke

The night is bright and eerie, with starlight and streetlights giving it a glow kind of like a weirdly carved pumpkin.

Halloween. It must be Halloween.

It is the night when little ghosts and goblins and witches and princesses and many Harry Potters and Spiderman join forces and take over the streets shouting trick or treat.

The night itself has been marred by its pagan origin and by sick individuals, who seem to find a perverse pleasure in harming innocent victims with ‘tricks’ instead of ‘treats.’

It is sad, but true, the icy cold splash of reality does not, sometimes, co-exist favourably with the innocence of children collecting candy.

I flip through the cobwebby dark corridors of my mind where Halloweens of the past lurk like so many white-sheeted ghosts, and I still feel a shiver of excitement as I remember.

Years ago pillowcases were the container of choice for gathering candy. In those days, when I had yet to venture across the threshold of adulthood, but was only yet a child, knee high to a grasshopper, I remember soggy masks and cold nights and a kind of magic in the air.

In those days, my brother and I were comrades in arms, not only at Halloween, but pretty much at any time of year. True, we had a kind of love/hate relationship that happens with most siblings, but, for the most part, we stuck together like glue. Together we were fierceless and unafraid, separately not so much.

My brother was tall and lanky with a shock of unruly dark hair. Although he had yet to wander far from the borders of the little town of which he was born, he already knew stuff that I had yet to become privy to.

He already read newspapers, for goodness sake. He mostly read the sports section, of course, but I swear he knew every hockey player in the NHL, not personally, but he knew pretty much everything about them.

And he knew about music and the musicians of the day, mostly, perhaps because he could actually reach the knobs on the radio that stood high on a shelf in our kitchen. He always tuned into CKRD, which was our radio station of choice, actually our only radio station, at that time.

But, on Halloween night, to me, at least, the most important thing my brother knew was where the people lived who gave out the best candy. Therefore, I tagged along behind him on our trick or treat journey, quite willingly.

So up Main Street we went, our pillow sacks slowly becoming heavier as we dragged them through the gravel and the dirt. I’m pretty sure our dog came along, too, wagging his tail and looking not the least bit frightening, even on this night.

It was so long ago, when I trailed after my brother to collect Halloween candy, but in my mind, I see it still.

The darkened street. The ghostly quiet of the night. The lights filtering out from the windows of randomly scattered houses, a sprinkling of stars overhead, and, us, a couple of kids, still fiercely holding onto our childhood, our innocence and our pillowsacks.

And for a brief moment in time life was simple and good and so, for that matter, was Halloween.

I’m glad I was a kid back then.

It’s always good to remember the way we were.

Treena Mielke is the editor of the Rimbey Review.