'I Hold It Towards You'

Only once as an adult have I worn a costume on Halloween. Even as a kid I relied on the minimalist (cheap) approach: Army guy (Ike jacket, holstered .45) or Emmet Kelly-style hobo (burnt cork, bindle on a stick). In the nineties I was dating a woman who worked as a registered nurse at the V.A. hospital. One of her friends invited us to a Halloween party/costume contest. Not wanting to spend any money on a costume, I had my girlfriend borrow a white lab coat, stethoscope and latex gloves from the hospital. I carried a can of Crisco, went as a proctologist, won first prize and didn’t have to spend a dime.

Just following family tradition. More than thirty years earlier, my parents went to a Halloween costume party. My mother rented a full-body rabbit costume, complete with reinforced ears and bushy tail, and my father wouldn’t stop complaining about the rental cost. He wore his old Ike jacket (the one I would wear in another year), holstered .45 (a real one) and a fake beard made of cotton gauze and shoe polish. He took the topical approach and went as Fidel Castro.

There’s more to Halloween than Halloween. Let’s remember John Keats, doctor and poet, born October 31, 1795, and dead at age twenty-five. In December 1819, Keats scrawled some of his final lines on the manuscript of another poem. They wouldn’t be published for eighty years:

“This living hand, now warm and capable

Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold

And in the icy silence of the tomb,

So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights

That thou would wish thine own heart dry of blood

So in my veins red life might stream again,

And thou be conscience-calmed—see here it is—

I hold it towards you.”

 

One thinks of that line from “The Fall of Hyperion”: “When this warm scribe my hand is in the grave.”