Halloween, Devil Dogs and My Mom: Before and After Jesus

       Before my family became entrenched with the Evangelical Church, and was still obliviously, even cheerfully, freefalling toward hell, Halloween was a big affair. My older brother Geoff and I dressed as ghosts and cute devils, wizards and fairies. My mother came to my kindergarten class in a full white witch costume, complete with a glittery eye mask, wand and iridescent robe flowing down around her large, pear-shaped frame. For the big night, we would drag out the creepy Vincent Price 33s and put the stereo speakers out onto the porch roof. We darkened the house and lit the windows with rows of candles. When Geoff and I went door-to-door in costume, Mom would chide us if we didn’t say “trick or treat.” It was rude, she lectured, to ring the bell and just stand there with your jack-o-lantern bucket thrust forward. It didn’t matter if it was obvious why we were there, or if Mrs. Wertzman clutched her chest and gushed over how horribly cute we were. There is Halloween etiquette; you must always say “trick or treat,” and preferably say it with some enthusiasm and graciousness. It was within the rules for someone to offer a trick instead of a Charleston Chew, she warned. And if that ever happened, you’d better act appreciative and say thank you. Thank the Halloween gods, that never happened. It was bad enough that Mom made us freeze 95% of our Halloween loot, to be doled out in small increments over the next several months.

      It was the 1970s, and my mom was with millions of others exploring all the new, promising lifestyle trends--spiritual and dietetic, New Age and “All New You in 30 Days on Grapefruit”--with great zeal and optimism. She was out to find the Answer to Health and Happiness. She read all the current books, on biorhythms and probiotics; she peddled my brother and I to our elementary school on her adult-sized tricycle with the huge basket on the back. She was no purist, however. Mom loved sweets and we regularly stopped for soft serve ice cream, “creamies” we called them, in downtown Winthrop, Massachusetts, where we lived. So if I wanted a Devil Dog or Snickers bar after school, I either had to go to a friend's house or sneak down to the corner store with silver dollars snitched from my dad's top dresser drawer; our house was free of sugary temptations. And Mom was continually trying to find the right “life diet” for us all. She was bright and adventurous, eternally optimistic. As a young woman, before marriage, she earned her private pilot's license—just for the fun of it, and because she knew she could do it. My father was the skeptic, the quietly stewing, secretly smoking, drinking, barroom intellectual. Dad didn't exactly put all his chips in with Mom on every trend, large or small. But you would never know it, if there were protests or misgivings, they were drowned out or swept away by the sheer force of Mom's irrepressible spirit. How, then, could this exuberant, life-loving woman end up dying at the age of 46?

      Mom's contagious enthusiasm and optimism made her easy prey for pyramid schemes like selling HerbalLife, Amway and Evangelical Christianity. As for her flings with the health food movement of the 1970s, I remember a parade of various small appliances cluttering our kitchen counter—a yogurt maker, a juicer, a food preserver—all promising renewed energy and health with incredible convenience. I remember bits and parts of each machine: the neat row of cups inside the yogurt maker, the thrill of plunging carrots through the juicer, and the neato vacuum feature of the preserver that sealed up food into airless plastic bags. Those machines each had their 15 minutes of fame on our counter. But some of my mother’s healthy prescriptions for our family remained more or less constant. Every morning, Mom doled out four small bowls of raw wheat bran mixed with applesauce. I usually managed to choke mine down. Unless of course, our happy, hungry black Lab named Sunshine came wagging through the kitchen when Mom’s back was turned. That dog probably had the cleanest colon—human or beast—in the entire neighborhood. Another daily must was a handful of vitamins. These were all neatly sorted into day-of-the-week vials and stored inside little yellow plastic chests. The chests had flip-top covers and fit only six vials; I guess even avid vitamin eaters get the Sabbath off. Every morning, I staged a mini-drama of torture, choking down the chalky pills. Only the small, aerodynamically-shaped vitamin-E provided any relief in the ordeal. Meanwhile, my stocky older brother, just to piss me off and gloat at having an unusually large trachea, would pour the entire vial of pills into his throat at once. And despite the bran and vitamins, we still occasionally succumbed to the common cold. That called for my mom’s concoction of apple cider vinegar, honey and water, to be drunk in large quantities for as long as symptoms persisted. She was also a strong believer in the powers of honey. One summer, when I was around 7 years old, I picked up a burning candle and spilled quite a bit of hot wax onto the bare skin of my chest. Mom grabbed a bottle of honey and poured it down my front. Legend has it that this saved me from getting any scars from the burn.

       At the same time of my mother’s foray into health foods and remedies, I remember vague references and episodes regarding her interest in more otherworldly, even occult-ish matters. She was fairly certain that she and her best friend Ray could communicate via ESP. She held a séance once in our dining room, and over time garnered a small collection of books on the occult. I imagine she got a thrill from pushing the limits of her conservative religious upbringing, as she spent her formative years at an all-girl Catholic academy. That period of flirting with the darker side of things didn’t last very long, however. By the late '70s, the Charismatic Catholics had a hold of her, and soon she found the Evangelicals. It was time to rid the shelves of the ouiji boards and any literature bearing pentagrams.

      As the story goes, my mother was doing just that one afternoon, piling the sacrilegious books into a box, when my father appeared in the doorway of the den. He stood, stock still, looked her right in the eye, and said—in a deep voice unlike his own: “Don’t touch my books.” I came to understand years later, with the help of the church, that it was Satan himself that spoke those words to my mother, and not my reserved, normally unexacting father. But after that afternoon, our lives were never quite the same.

      We were all saved by Jesus at the Parkway Assembly of God in Revere. We were baptized in a miniature, sunken pool hidden beneath the staging behind the pulpit. We were at church three times a week for Sunday service, Wednesday night bible study and Friday night youth group. I was no longer a Girl Scout, but now a Pioneer Girl. Mom made signs saying “What Would Jesus Do?” and taped them up around the house. The next Halloween, my mother fashioned a homemade costume for Geoff. He was a Christian Soldier. With tinfoil-covered cardboard, she made for him the Armor of God, straight from Ephesians: the shield of faith, belt of truth, sword of the spirit, breastplate of righteousness, and a helmet of salvation. I got to dress up as a cat, but it had to be a white one.

       After inheriting some money, my parents moved us from Winthrop to Groveland, Mass., when I was twelve. They bought a sprawling modern A-frame house complete with intercoms and a two-car garage on 20 acres. Mom pictured having small church services in the huge upstairs room, with its vaulted ceiling and two-story windows pointing heaven-ward. My brother and I started private Christian school. We started a garden and picked raspberries from the dozens of bushes on the property. Bible studies and church potlucks were the social events at that house. My parents kept their jobs in Boston, and commuted every day, an hour each way, listening in the car to “Christian self-help tapes”: James Dobson's “Focus on the Family,” or Tim LaHaye or Jim Baker. Living in that house, my mother and I read the book of Revelation together when I was thirteen. I would have two more years with her, and only one more in the “big house.” She quit her job at Logan International and planned to get her real estate license. But she kept losing energy, and couldn't breathe. All the vitamins, all the bran and applesauce in the world couldn't make her lungs stronger. It wasn't cancer, but some indistinct respiratory disease. We sold the big house and moved across the river to Haverhill, to an ugly green and white ranch. One year later, when I was fifteen, she went to be with her Jesus. He may have wiped my soul clean, but I still haven't forgiven Him.

      I no longer go to church.  I do not believe in sin or heaven and hell.  But I do believe in feeding the soul and spirit in other ways.  I give my children vitamins and sprinkle probiotics in their applesauce.  There are no Devil Dogs in my house either.  But if one of my little girls wanted to dress as a cute devil for Halloween, I'd make her the costume myself.