Halloweenie

It’s probably appropriate that my earliest true memory of Halloween is one colored by fright. It was a Halloween fair in San Antonio when I was in first grade. We had just moved back to Texas from Louisiana and I was pretty excited to be attending with my new Texas friends like Terry Olivarri. The Halloween fair was at James Madison Elementary and there was a haunted maze of course . I was six, unsuspecting, not really knowing what made a maze haunted.

Nobody told me stark raving fear lurked nearby.

My daddy was taking me through the maze and the first order of business was for the kids to crawl through a barrel entrance. The adults had their own method of entry that didn’t require getting down on all fours. My daddy tucked me into the barrel and then departed to enter on his own.

He got into the first hallway of the haunted maze and I was gone. He had somehow lost me in less than three feet and probably wondered how he would explain this to my mother. I was nowhere to be found in the maze because I never actually entered.

As I crawled through the barrel my eyes fixed down the first hallway of the maze and came to rest on the backlit face of the Devil. He was red and fiery looking like something out of my worst dream. I took one horrified look and somehow managed to turn completely around inside the barrel and come back out the entry point where I fled.

My daddy caught up with me someplace in the crowd. I was easy to spot as I was the one making the hurried move over ground to parts unknown. My dad laughed at me and tried to coax me to go back and face my fear but I was having none of it. I would probably be a better man today if I had gone back to build character, but anyone who says that didn’t see that Devil’s face.

Since I’m Methodist, most of the sermons I’ve had preached at me have emphasized Christian guilt more than Fire and Brimstone. But, what little Fire and Brimstone has leaked into my consciousness over the years has always spewed from the mouth of that Devil’s face from the school Halloween fair. The picture above this article is the closest I found on the web to what I saw that night that has stuck with me over the years.

The message is pretty clear. Be good in this life or come face to face with that grinning sonuvaflameeater. There will be no way to escape as I’ve gotten too big and inflexible to turn

completely around in a barrel.

A man’s got to know his limitations.