Wednesday, October 31, 2012

What In The Samhain...

Today the spirits of all my departed loved ones draw near.  According to Irish mythology, the spirits of the dead and fairies are able to communicate easily with the living tonight - the end of summer and the beginning of winter.  Samhain.

Though I would love to communicate with my parents, family, and friends who have preceded me in death, I do not like the spooky way ghosts have been harassing me most of my life so I take no chances.  I never ask anyone supposedly dead to slam a door or touch me the way television ghost hunters do!  If a door slammed for no reason, or I felt an invisible hand touch me, it would scare the begeezus out of me.  I would die of fright.

While I have lived in several places where strange things happened, events so blatant that a paranormal explanation was truly the easiest answer, I never felt as if those events were caused by one of my dead loved ones.  It would make me incredibly sad if anyone I loved was stuck on earth as a spirit without a body, unhappily roaming this world and unable to move on. 

Besides, in America there are no ghosts, and fairies are considered happy spirits, more like nature spirits.  In Ireland fairies are serious business and no one dares to provoke them.  I assume a serious Irish fairie could zip over here to America in an instant to kick any sissy American fairie's ass, so I am not going to take any chances with fairies, either.

In my life Halloween has always been a fun time of dressing up in an outrageous outfit and getting a ton of candy.  The best Halloween parties of course were the ones I attended as an adult.  The most righteous Halloween revelers of all are bikers - in the Harley Davidson sense of the word.  Halloween parties always brought out the creative best in those people.  When a fully grown male biker earning his own way in this world decides to dress up for Halloween, you never know what to expect.  At one memorable party, three friends came as ZZ Top, complete with suits, huge beards (in this case genuine beards) and cheap sun glasses.  They stayed together all night, drinking in unison and eyeballing women in a synchronized fashion.  But they took second place to the old school Mafioso, carrying a machine gun in a violin case, authentic to the last detail.  The clincher was a huge knife buried in his back.  Goodwill raked in a fortune from that biker crowd every year at Halloween.  I miss those crazy, happy people.  We are all old grandmas and grandpas now, too busy with grandchildren and too tired for a big costume party.  Many are already dead but I do not want to necessarily hear from them tonight, either.  I assume they took their wicked sense of humor with them, which means they would enjoy a great laugh at my expense and feel no ghostly remorse. 

If it is true that the veil between this reality and the next is thinnest tonight, on All Saint's Eve, then maybe, just this once, I will be willing to hear from a dead loved one.  But if a serious Irish fairie scares me to death instead...

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