Carvin' Pumpkins

This year Sid got his very own carving knife to carve his very own pumpkins. His excitement so lit up the night that if you passed our house, then you would surely have felt an inexplicable sense of glee not felt since childhood.

What is it about carving pumpkins that makes us smile so?

Ah yes! It's that theraputic sensation of stabbing. Now I remember!

As Halloween nears, I am reminded of the celebration of All Hallow's Eve, the celebration of spirits returning to roam the earth and to revisit hopefully with loved ones. Since I've learned about El Dia De Los Muertos and the similar tradition in asian countries like Korea and Japan that occur about this time of year, Halloween now fills me with a certain spirit that I'd never had before.

Two years ago, when I gave up smoking and drinking to better my life for the sake of myself and my family, I couldn't sleep for nearly a week and began to hallucinate. During this period, I saw things that I know a sane person would attribute to hallucinations but that a spiritual person may have connected to the spirit realm. This episode which included insomnia, depression, paranoia, and anxiety occurred in the last week of October and culminated on Halloween. Coincidental parallelisms surfaced between what was going on in my life and what was showing up on the external -- on billboards, in books, on the TV, magazines, in the noises outside my house, for instance. Most unnerving however was what I thought to be the witnessing of dead people and the experiencing of telepathy, clairvoyance, and premonition.

Bizzare indeed.

I guess I'll never know for sure, but in my heart I do believe I experienced something out of the ordinary that changed my life forever. At the very least, the experience cleansed my soul and body and left me receptive to conception. Sidney's birth allowed me to experience the miracle of motherhood, but Lucian's birth helped me to redeem my sins against myself and allowed me to forgive myself.

Of the years of depression, I've had one in LA and two in Sacramento. They started when I was 27 -- the year I graduated from Cal and my naïveté about the world died -- and ended (hopefully) when I was 36 -- the mid-point of one's life and from what I've heard, the hardest year in one's life according to chinese astrology. I had one of the worst episodes while working at Tower Books on Broadway.

As Fall/Autumn is the phase in nature where life begins to die, to go underground, so fitting it seems that Tower (Pooks and I met at Tower Books) is going out of business.

Let's hope it's just a transition to the next stage of the cycle -- for both Tower and the Flying Slesickis.