Halloween, rusty lions and tiny teddies
Cars pass like whips and the rain is steady and heavy as cattle. Green surrounds us and the trains pass shaking and rattling. We’ve had so much rain lately you begin to think you live in the subtropics.
Just had some young neighbours rifling through the lolly basket for Halloween by the front door and their laughter and happiness on a cold wet last day of October was lovely. The older kids were more impressive in their shrieks but the youngest were delightful.
The trams curve past and it seems to me Halloween is one of the last public trust things we do for each other. Our several parties left with all sorts of goodies and left some cobwebs behind, though they may have been there all along.
People complain about the Americanisation of Halloween and yet all they did was commercialise it. Halloween is very old. And so is the Americanisation of the world, just think music. Anyway, it’s fun. The main thing it’s got going for it is saying hello to the neighbours.
Twenty years ago, caught without a costume for my youngest, we got a roll of toilet paper and made him a mummy costume. Well, of course the paper tore away, and the tomato sauce seemed to be the only thing holding the outfit together. These days people are a bit more sophisticated.
Johnny at 19 months was a plump koala, Hazie was a fairy, Rosie was also a fairy and Alfie was a sabre tooth tiger which turned out to be totally exhausting.
There were lots of little boys yelling on the porch. The best came with parents who insisted on manners. And the very best was with a polite golden retriever in a yellow raincoat.
My dog scrambling and moaning, climbing on the window seat baffled about all this noise and possibility of visitors. And so many sweet things to eat.
Police sirens wail and remind us of danger and the rain keeps failing.
Other things I saw today: A woman whose white head barely reached over the steering wheel of her tiny white car. Could she be a small skeleton? An anxious young woman waiting for her medicine to be dispensed, so sure the chemist would lose it, she wanted to label it with her name until it was dispensed. Seeing anxiety makes you anxious.
The bearded irises pounded by the rain, the blue of them slipping away. Like streams. I saw a woman take a bedhead from hard rubbish and a wire basket and a Dyson fan. She seemed pleased with the haul. Recycling.
I bought a new phone and of course I can’t get it to marry up with any other appliance. The man in the phone shop offered up tiny teddies but they were his only solutions.
The roar of the recycling bin in the mornings is like a rusty lion, like the Sydney Lion dad who took his family for a wander around the zoo the family, just poking around. Soon the our lion bin is here and the bin is empty.
People stuck at the faulty parking machine. Offering help and talking. Wandering around the shops in the rain. Bought two white towels, when will I ever learn? White is not sensible.
When the kids were young we would raid the sheet shop and buy a new set for a cheer-up. Somehow I got them to like sheets. So we wandered around the other day with the rain pounding but couldn’t find it in us to spend much. Still the artificial flowers are always lovely. Even without fragrance. And now today there are so may sheets online. All beautiful, we still have a little look.
Which makes me think of the people whose houses have been flooded and the destruction all around us. Now there is something to fear.
Deborah Forster is the Melbourne journalist and author behind the Sunday Age column ‘This Life’. This is a revisiting of that column.