Halloween, the Story of a Cowardly Lion

November 1, 2020, Freeport

This morning the sun comes up late, hours after I’ve awakened. This is the beginning of the dark times, the earth’s plunge into the underworld. Like Persephone’s mother, Demeter, I feel left alone above ground to grieve as the plants wither and die, as green bleeds into browns and blacks, days shorten into little gasps of sunlight and cold comes for my toes, my cheeks.

Today is All Saints Day, the day that follows Halloween. As a child, I was raised in a town with a large Irish and Italian population. Everyone was either (in my tiny mind) Catholic and going to heaven or Protestant and doomed. All Saints Day was a Holy Day of Obligation, which meant you had to go to Mass. It was all very confusing why this feast, which celebrated the faithful’s attainment of heaven and the good company of angels, followed a night when witches and scarecrows and ghouls silently floated down the concrete sidewalks and up onto stranger’s lit porches. Certain as my nine years old self was that I was destined for heaven, for the blissful light of eternity, I wasn’t very scared of witches or death. Not even the dark scared me then.

It was not until I gave up that sweet, pure faith of childhood, got older and moved to Maine, that I became acquainted with the dark, with real dark, with how suddenly it comes on, shuts you off, leaves you feeling, like Demeter, alone. It was then that I began to understand why my Celtic ancestors celebrated Samhain, the pagan precursor of Halloween. These are the liminal days, when the boundary between the underworld of fairies and wraiths and the ordinary world of the living is thin.

For hundreds, likely thousands, of years mankind has in one way or another at this time of year, defied the dark, defied death, embraced fear, embodied the ghost, the dead soul. It is the day when we summon nerve to prove oneself courageous against the dark forces — forces which are so much darker and scarier this year than ever before in my lifetime.

The “modern plague” is sly and oh so self-interested and oh so thrilled winter is coming. Covid is coming for us inside our warm rooms. Covid loves the word airtight. Covid loves the word party, hug, Thanksgiving, Christmas. Bar the door. Today, the death toll in the USA is over 1,000. Cases in Maine are rising. “We are nearing a phase of exponential growth, if we haven’t entered it already,” Dr. Nirav Shah, director of the Maine CDC, said on Twitter Saturday. “It’s easy to think you’re flying until you hit the ground.”

We are in the dark time in the country, this moment when democracy is teetering on a thin edge and the threat of violence around the election is being seriously examined, by really smart people. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t qualify for a diagnosis of anxiety, except the real pessimists who have been preparing for this moment all their lives.

I walked with my friend M. a few days ago and she told me the dream she’d just had. In it she was packing for a journey and as she was doing it, she glanced at her phone which showed an urgent text message. “Space is destroyed.” In the dream, she stopped packing.

“What’s the use,” she said to herself, in the dream. We agree that in the dream that is life now, this is a question that haunts us.

Oh! Courage.

“I am a cowardly lion. I haven’t any courage at all,” said the lion to Dorothy, tears running down his cheeks, when he met her in the woods with the Tin Man and the Scarecrow. Sometimes, I feel like that sheepish big cat: I just want to go back to bed until this is all over. When the Cowardly Lion meets the Wizard, the Wizard tells him, “You are a victim of disorganized thinking.” Straightaway, he pins a medal on the Cowardly Lion which transforms him into a hero. People who do brave things are ordinary people who think differently about themselves, explained the Wizard, taking a page from the cognitive behavioral therapy manual, long before it existed.

Hmm..a lion. A Courageous Lion. A Medal.

I was alone last night for Bob has gone back up to Washington County to canvass, his own form of courage. Only Finn and Addie ventured down our long dirt road to the dark house for trick or treating. When they knocked, I had the feeling I was participating in an ancient ritual: if you knock when you are scared, someone will be there on the other side to answer. And, indeed, there on the other side of the door was a lion. A not cowardly lion. A lion with a medal. A lion who believes she can face danger.

While Addie, cheerfully dressed as Pipi Longstocking, went off with her parents to trick or treat, Finn — who worries about his grandfather and I dying of covid whenever we cough — in the guise of the Grim Reaper, and I, the courageous lion with the medal, and Colin, the Swamp Thing went out into the dark together to defy the dark forces, float down the street, roar in the night. Though of course, there was no knocking. Instead, there were treats laid out on tables elaborately decorated with carved pumpkins, flashing lights and spiderwebs.

All you need is a medal. I can make one for you. And a mask. For that I thank Colin who sewed mine for me yesterday when I asked him to help me become courageous. Let me know if you need one too!!