Last Friday night Susan and her friends dressed up as Waldos and Wendas from the "Where's Waldo" books. There were 3 Waldos and 4 Wendas (Waldo's female friend) and 1 Odlaw (the barely known evil Waldo). They painted striped shirts, sewed red and white hats, and bought cheap glasses. I never saw them, but I heard about it from Susan. It was Halloween. Dressing up is a tradition for Susan and her friends. One year they went as five bowling pins! I, in contrast, dressed up as Wendy. It’s what I do every year on Halloween—a tradition, you might say.
Susan says it’s fun to dress up, and even more fun to have a photo session with your friends before you leave for the party. That’s the jolly time, the optimistic time, the hour when you feel connected yet certain of your uniqueness. If there are going to be other Waldos at the party, you don’t yet know it.
Those to whom I am connected, in contrast, tend not to photograph me on Halloween. Admittedly there’s not much to photograph, seeing as how I look like the same Wendy you’d photograph any other day, except for wedding days when there tend to be a lot of photos of me dressed up, and Christmas mornings when the focus is on the gift I am holding not the outfit I am wearing. When I was a kid I used to dress up as a witch. I wore an old black cape and a pointy hat my mother made of cardboard and crepe paper. The hat had an elastic that hurt my chin. One year I wore the hat without the elastic. It was windy that year. Windy years and calm, I believe I was always a witch. I don’t believe there are any photos to prove it. I liked being a witch. What else can I say?
There is, however, one photograph of me on Halloween. I am an adult in the photograph. My mother was not around to make me a pointy hat, and hat-making has never been a talent of mine, so David made me a hat. It was a memorable evening. I went as a sunflower. I don’t recall the party, but I do remember putting on the costume and feeling like—like—like a sunflower, bright and perky, an unusual situation for a sunflower on Halloween in Edmonton, just about as unusual as Wendy in a costume.
Susan is my niece. She probably wouldn’t have written to me had I not begged her to do so. She used to write to me when she was travelling and I have found that life gets a little bit boring without her letters. The subject of her letter (because it was an email it had a subject) was: An Update On Susan’s Life In Edmonton. She would not likely have mentioned the Waldo costumes, were it not for the fact that she was finding it a struggle to think of interesting things to tell me about her everyday life—going to work, evening classes etc. The costumes were something a little different, a little more interesting. It got me to wondering how much Susan knows about my daily life. Probably very little. If she were to ask what I’d been up to lately, I’d probably say Not much. Then I’d think up the only extraordinary thing that’s happened to me in the past month and tell her about it. The rest of the details I would leave for her to take for granted.
I am told that archaeologists develop a passion for knowing the ordinary details of lives lived in the past. They dig and scrape and survey and catalog in a frenzied attempt to figure out what people ate for breakfast, how they cooked it, and why their neighbours a hundred miles away ate something different. Most of the details are fashioned through informed speculation which may, or may not be well-informed. I wonder how many of these same archaeologists go home after a hard day’s work, never stopping to notice the details of their own daily lives, never quite taking the time to catalog them for the educational benefit of future archaeologists. The relative interestingness of current detail is subject to many variables, distance and familiarity being two.
Come to think of it, Halloween is not the only event which is under represented in our photo albums. I wonder if there is a single picture of me cooking supper, or doing the dishes, or shopping for groceries, or getting on the bus at Corona Station. Future photo lookers will undoubtedly conclude that I opened a lot of presents and took a lot of vacations. Will they think I had a full-time cook? And if they deduce that routine events were seldom photographed, how will they explain the presence of only one sunflower photo? Will they surmise that I probably dressed up as a sunflower on a regular basis, thereby rendering the event unworthy of further recognition?
After so many hours of listening while sad people tell me what they believe to be the interesting parts of their life stories, I think I am developing an appreciation for both the exceptional and the normal. We need the normal to keep us grounded, to give us security. We need the exceptional to shake us up occasionally, to change our position in life. Exceptional things throw us off balance and increase our core strength. It is the core strength that gives us the ability to re-establish our balance. Too bad we fall into the trap of thinking that the normal is boring.
I myself am pretty attached to normal, though I admit to an occasional rash decision based on the need to break the pattern. Had I received Susan’s letter last week, I likely would have vowed to dress up on some future Halloween, not because I like dressing up, not even because that sunflower costume was comfortable. Heaven knows I can still remember sweating like a sprinkler under the brown polyester centre while trying to relieve the future scalp blisters by fiddling with the poky petal-wires. But when I read Susan’s letter I immediately felt the connectedness, that moment of fun when you and your friends get to laughing and taking pictures.
How grateful am I that another letter, one that arrived on Halloween, threw me off balance, thereby saving me from the tyranny of the costume Susan’s letter would undoubtedly have inspired! The letter came from Linda. It was a thank-you letter. In farewell it said: Happy Halloween Wendy, the good witch of North Riverdale! I only met Linda recently. She doesn’t know I used to be a witch. She doesn’t even know about my brief stint as a sunflower! She probably thinks I never dress up on Halloween. But when I read that letter I felt really connected. And just for a minute I felt like a kid again, pointy hat and all, counting up the candy.
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