Halloween is one of those days I don't know quite what to do with. As a child creating a costume was always a chore. In the basement my Mom kept a box, down behind the furnace in a location more scary than anything else about Halloween. It would be one of those occasions where I would have to recruit my brother Dan and hope he would have the interest and nerve to go down there, crawl through the storage around that oil burningbeast and pull out the Holloween decoration box. And if we succeeded in that, we would open the box to find halloween costume parts. Instead of whole costumes we would find a few masks, some with their little elastic strings attached, others without; half a skeleton outfit; half a this, a part of that. That was one of the problems of coming along number 8 after 20 years of having kids-- there were a lot of scraps that the parents didn't really feel inclined to replace or upgrade.
When the "hobo" look came into vogue I felt a sense of relief. At least I could pull that off with little more that a sick with a bundle tied to the end and a handful of coffee grounds. Before that being a ghost was an option if there happened to be a sheet that was fully ready for retirement and had no further usefulness other than having a couple of eye holes cut in.
This year Ev declared he wanted to be a cowboy, a miner, and, for the Saturday trip to the local train museum Halloween function, an engineer. I did the best I could to match the theme. It's kind of refreshing that an engineer still calls up a train hat and red bandanna rather than glasses, iPad and a pocket protector. My friend Carol tells me she has a picture of me wearing a hat like this with a friend in grade school. She can rest assured some things never change.
Stay young and Happy Halloween.
The Engineer hat!
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