Making masks

It probably started the Halloween my parents made my brother his Ace Frehley costume. I can't pinpoint the year precisely, but it had to be the late 70's, when his then-favorite band KISS rose to prominence, penetrating even our remote Midwest with their makeup and blood-spitting and smoking guitars. The band was more or less a troupe of trick-or-treaters from the beginning, so it's not surprising that kids would eventually show up at their neighbors' doors ready to Shout It Out Loud. I suppose it's also not surprising why my brother chose the band member he did. Paul Stanley, with his aggressively hairy chest, would have been a bold choice in those days, and, as far as I can tell, nobody really wanted to be Gene Simmons, battle-axe bass notwithstanding. Frehley (like cat-faced drummer Peter Criss) hardly ever spoke, but he had a spaceman ("Space Ace") theme to his getup, which made him a prime target of boy-emulation.

My brother's Ace Frehley was, not to oversell it or anything, simply awesome. My parents glittered huge swoops of paper to make a triangle for his shoulders and huge cuffs for his wrists, and they converted his off-brand moonboots into platform shoes truly worthy of moons. Most importantly, they painted his face white with silver star-things exploding around each eye.* I'm sure he had some sort of guitar, too, probably cardboard but with actual strings, and no doubt a wig. I don't remember the actual trick-or-treating or party going or whatever it was he did while he was Ace; I only remember the making and what he looked like.

My lovely wife and I love making costumes, too. There was the first Halloween with both Q and The Boy, when they went as a Dalmatian and firefighter respectively. My wife sewed black spots to an old white onesie and black flaps for ears to an old hat. (Q supplied the smile.) For The Boy, she turned a plastic bottle, clothespin, and some red paint into a remarkably realistic fire extinguisher. Then there was the robot year, with the suit made out of boxes and brass brads and lights that really flashed. Even lately, when the kids have favored off-the-rack options like skeleton, witch, Egyptian princess, and ninja, we embellish. Though you can't really tell from the picture above, my wife made shockingly realistic shuriken out of some silver paper and ten minutes on the internet.

I'm not exactly sure why we do this, why we bother for a day of dress up, perhaps because there are too many reasons: a rare creative opportunity, dissatisfaction with store costumes, or just to make ourselves into makers of things.

It's hard to think about why we make masks without thinking a little about why we wear them. That's a bigger question, of course, one draped in a host of tropes. Myself, I've never really been that convinced by the common claim that most wear masks to hide themselves. Kids, after all, love to dress up, and they are only beginning to have something of the required sort to hide. Instead, I think it's the chance to become something else altogether — some nights, dressing as a 70's rock star is enough to be a 70's rock star.

There's an old story about the particular why of Halloween, of course. Like many of our traditions, this one seems to have been handed down (or up) by pagans** by way of Catholics, though it's all pretty nebulous. Anyway, it's believed that ghosts and ghouls arrived on the last day of the year to revisit their former homes, and steps had to be taken to scare or fool them back under. Funny, then, that we dress up our children and shove them out into the night to deal with the dead. Then again, maybe we make masks for children (and ourselves) because through them we might mix again with the dead, catching a bit of those who we can now see only in ourselves.

We have lost so many, and we don't know where they've gone.

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*Like so.
**Druids!

The Big Four-Oh

I think I remember someone telling me that someone once said something like, "I only write when the pain of not writing outweighs the pain of writing."* I've been a collector of writing — particularly writing about writing — longer than I've been something like a writer, and this is one of my favorite bits of pith. I used to think it was true, but now I'm pretty sure it's false.

I took the summer and part of the fall largely off writing wise, not because of one kind of pain and another. If anything, we were too occupied, too much happened, and I simply enjoyed our making memories without my hanging them up.

But back to the pleasure of writing outweighing the not writing. Here's a somewhat big thing that happened during my summer vacation: I turned 40 (back in July). At first I wasn't going to say much of anything about it, then I was but couldn't think of anything useful or interesting to say.

Largely because I find the size of the thing a little puzzling. Nearly everyone who ended up hearing about this new number of mine asked what I was going to do to mark it. Nothing much, I answered — an unusual plan, apparently. Nearly everyone had stories of big celebrations they'd heard or been part of, from a triathlon on the edge of Long Island to weeks spent lolling in Tuscany.**

A bit much.  Still, I am somewhat sympathetic to what's driving the big-ticket parties — namely, the feeling that 40 marks a new phase, officially around the time of Starting To Get Old. It's not really old, of course. I've got a mix of longevity and early demise in my family (both from nature and from active engagement with it), so it's hard to sit down and do the math.  Nevertheless, I'd like to think that I'm not even half done.

In any event, it's not the worry of oblivion and schemes of overcoming it that move me; it's more like what the leading edge of oblivion means.  I tell my kids, as I was told, that they could do and be anything if they set themselves to it.  I still believe it of them, as I believed it of myself a while ago.  But coming to be things takes time, and each year a little less of that remains for remaking myself. Or so it seems sometimes.

It turns out I did do something remarkable for The Big Four-Oh — or rather my lovely wife did something remarkable for me.  Just a day or two before my birthday, my wife told me that just she and I would be enjoying dinner and jazz at Dizzy's Club that night.  The club is affiliated with Jazz at Lincoln Center, and the music was, as expected, fantastic — almost as fantastic as the seats she got for us: 

We were close enough to map the constellations of sweat on the drummer's head.  And before the musicians came out, someone taped down a thick square of wood on our side of the stage. That square eventually became the tap floor for two young dancers who did things with their feet that had us all accompanying them with our rhythms of amazement.  (To get on stage, they had to bend around our table.)  Such a wonderful night.

As we sat there, the club's window framing the lush canopy of Central Park, my beautiful wife's bare shoulder its own kind of song in the soft dark, I thought:  If this is what getting old is like, I'll take it and more besides.

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*To this day I've been unable to locate the source of this expression. It does sound like something that someone might say, so if you happen to know who, certainly let me know.

**Of course, I'm completely prepared to admit that this could say more about the people I happen to hang out with than about turning 40 in general.

Coming back up

Soon.

Incantations

September days in New York recapitulate a year of seasons: mornings cool and dark giving way to afternoons bright and hot. Today will be as clear and blue and usual as that day—or maybe more so, it's hard to trust the memory now that so many have handled it.

Burn the buildings, burn the books. Read out the names again.

Today we celebrate our bodies without really meaning to, Q at gymnastics and The Boy at soccer. My lovely wife and Q make their way uptown to the gym on scooters; The Boy and I kick around our nerves out in the park until game time. Then swimming in the afternoon around the time of the protests, new this year.  The mind always trailing the body, getting in its way. Ground Zero lies just a block off, and I see the new building finally rising. Rumor has it they found an old ship at the site—what you find when you dig.

This morning my daughter asks me how we're made.*  It's not the awkward and inevitable question of conception. No, she's taken by the larger mystery of how we as things that see, that hear, that think have come to be at all. This is my kind of question, and we begin the long story that goes back before all tellers, the one that has the shape of magic.

But however great the incantations, we can't seem to stop the stories of our unmaking.

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*Seriously. Not kidding.


9/11 Archive:

• Not quite done with 9/11, I suppose (2009)
• On collision (2008)
• I want to tell them (2007)
• By accident (2006)

Steel

Today is our 11th wedding anniversary (or the steel anniversary, for those who like made-up things).  It's cliche to say, of course, but we seem as young and new as we once were.

More important, I think our marriage thus far has been transcendental in the old, Kantian, sense, which is to say necessary for the actual to be possible.  To be a little less fancy:  To be just the way we are now in this place, with Q & The Boy made as they are, would not be possible without that Friday night eleven years ago.

Congratulations to us, then, for what we have made and what has made us.

And just listen—they're playing our song:



Nina Simone, "My Baby Just Cares for Me"