As fate will have it, this first post on the Magnus Incognito blog occurs on All Hallows Eve. I will now ramble after a long day….
One of my earliest memories of Halloween is falling down the stairs in my Batman costume. I was about three or four years old. We lived on the third floor of a three decker tenement in an old Massachusetts mill town. Of my sisters and various cousins I went out trick-or-treating with that night, I was the youngest. We went out in our neighborhood which was composed of similar three story houses. I can remember laboring up a long flight of dark stairs, toward a lit doorway with a bunch of other kids jostling me along. It was tough going because of my ill-fitting mask and my fantastic cape which kept tripping me up. Everything seemed to be going fine and the new experience didn’t seem to be all that bad.
Then disaster struck.
The knot of kids had reached the door and I was unfortunately at the back of the group. This meant I was standing at the top of the stairs backward! What follows happened very quickly. A woman who lived in the apartment suddenly appeared at the door. The kids crowded up to the screen door and shouted a lusty “trick or treat!” The woman began to slowly push the door open so she could distribute some treats. The knot of kids jostled back a few steps so the screen door could swing open. The knot shuffled one half-step back too many because the last jostle pushed Batman right down the stairs, backward! In the dark!
Poor young Batman took a pounding that night tumbling backward down the blackened stairs, not knowing what was happening until he got to the bottom, and realizing only then that not only had he suffered a punishing indignity, but he didn’t even get any candy. Young Batman called it a night right after that.
Thankfully, Halloween and trick or treating couldn’t help but get better after that.
The family relations remain the same!
Copyright 2012 Magnus Incognito