All Hallow's Eve

If we had chosen to go as zombies, our work would have been easy (two months with Zoogle=no makeup necessary.) But it's one thing for two haggard, sleep starved parents to pose as undead, quite another for a cherub cheeked infant in the bloom of perfect health. Who would believe that blood and worms could produce fat rolls like that? (N.B.: if you do hope to catch sight of the elusive Buddha zombie, Pittsburgh, as the home of the cult classic "Night of the Living Dead", is a very reasonable place to start looking. That film, incidentally, featured a cameo by the father of Annie Dillard, whose "An American Childhood" is a beautiful portrait both of this city and of a sensitive soul in the flush of self-discovery.)

So we scrapped Plan Z and decided to go existential instead. Behold: one Cosmico Z. Toews, as The Reader, a Sartre-like figure with beady spectacles and a perpetual pipe; one Piccola C. Ocampo, as The Armchair, an ambulatory seat for The Reader's repose; and one Gargantua C. Toews, as The Lamp and Table, a shaky repository for The Reader's texts and pens. We sat on the porch and passed out candy until the kid stream ebbed to a trickle, then blew out the pumpkin, crawled into bed, and passed into weird collective dreams of childhood, nausea, radical freedom and death in the soul.

The prize for best costume goes to my brother, who apparently tore around NYC all day dressed as a sunflower, delivering neatly packed boxes to burly men named Mugs and Bruno, who threatened to grind him into wormpaste if he and his kind ever came around that way again. God that kid rocks.