The Treachery of Memory: Halloween Trick or Treat (November 2014)
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Sometimes things aren’t quite what they seem. In 2014 we had rain on October 31st. I mentioned to my students the next day, “When I was a kid — wait — I need to say this in my Old Man Voice. Let me start again. [Scrunching up my voice] When I was a young’un… that kind of rain on Halloween was normal. It used to rain all the time on Halloween night. I remember walking around at night in my costume on many Halloweens, slowly getting soaked. That was what it was like here all the time — rain in the final week of October with the Santa Anas blowing through earlier in the month. [Returning to my normal voice] But it hasn’t been like that for decades. The weather patterns have changed. The climate has shifted.”
My students, trusting the memory of an old-timer, nodded. “The climate has shifted…” It seemed true for them as well, they all agreed. Never in their seventeen years of living memory did they recall a rainy Halloween — and it was raining now. Had there been a shift in long-term rainfall patterns? Or was this just a happenstance of weather?
Or was my memory faulty? Or perhaps I was confusing climate and weather in my zeal to point to an example of how our local climate had altered in my lifetime? Was anecdotal evidence overwriting rational analysis? Had Facts become casualties of Opinions? Was it right for me to say such things to my students if I did not know and verify they were true? Was I artfully arranging the facts on the table before me, like a charlatan magician, to dazzle my audience with a sleight of hand? Or was I exposing the nature of the world?
Besides my costume getting drenched, another reason I remembered rain those Halloween nights was that, in the morning, up and down in the street, I’d behold, with dismay, rain-drizzled, splotches of stringy pumpkin pulp. Older kids would wander the streets after the trick-or-treaters had gone to bed and wreak havoc. Every vandalized jack-o-lantern was reduced to a shapeless mess, transmogrified into a pile of slimy garbage. All the individuality of artistically transformed pumpkins: tall or squat, yellowed or red, warted or scarred, big or small — pulverized into the disgusting consistency of shit.
As a family, we had chosen each pumpkin with care from the pumpkin farms by the river. For the first few Halloweens that I could recall, Dad had worked our impenetrably hard clay soil with sacks upon sacks of fertilizer so we could grow our own pumpkins, but these always came out pathetically small and fragile; the silt of the riverside farms produced far more bountifully than our hillside clay.
We materialized at the pumpkin patch as a happy family of friendly Doctor Frankensteins, delighting in each oddity of our subjects’ squasheous forms. We discussed our plans to bring them to life for a night with flickering candles inside. Then came our dedicated work to fashion an innovative design, carving them on the kitchen table. The seeds were carefully saved, washed, and baked (with a bit of paprika and salt). From the age of twelve, I scraped the insides for home-made pumpkin pie which I would work on for the next couple days: straining steam-baked orange meat through a colander until it was a fine puree, then adding in the sweetened condensed milk, eggs and spices, and finally baking it in a home-made crust (mom taught me how to make them firm and roll them well). Halloween would begin as a festival of care and creativity, laughter and praise (Oh! How marvelously hideous! My! What a wonderful pattern of light it casts!), celebrating a communal time with the family working in harmonious unity.
Of course, after the treat would come the inevitable trick — our creative efforts wasted by some disaffected kids in the night smashing pumpkins, heedlessly defiling the world around them for their own perverted pleasure. The treat of Halloween was not the candies we received by going door to door, but the time we spent working together and loving each other. The trick was what humanity delivered in the morning, casting that sweetness into a polluted gutter. I made no mention of this destruction to my students.
But did I remember it factually? Was this simply a child’s emotional memory? I looked up weather data for Ventura for the past 50 years. I found I was both right and wrong about what I had told my students. Their sense that rain was an unusual occurrence on Halloween was justifiable for their lifetimes. In their entire seventeen or eighteen years, prior to 2014, it had only rained one other time on October 31st, in 2003 (when these students were a mere six years old, and unlikely to remember that rain well). In fact, prior to 2003, there had not been any rain on the holiday in Ventura for two full decades. The last time it had rained around Halloween in my town in the 20th century had been in 1982! Here in Ventura there are on average only about 36 measurably rainy days a year, most of which fall between December and March. That my students should have had two rainy Halloweens (2014 and 2003) in their nearly two decades of life was, by that particular metric, remarkably frequent!
What was not average was my childhood. Each of the years 1976, 1978, 1979, 1980, and 1982 (when I was in 6th, 8th, 9th, 10th and 12th grades respectively) recorded rainfall on October 31st or November 1st. So it had rained often on the holiday in my hometown during the age when I was just old enough to go trick-or-treating. My memory was vindicated, but did that mean I was right about the bigger picture? Had the climate really changed since I was a kid?
When I dug further in the records, I could not find a single example of rain on either October 31st or November 1st in the decade immediately after my birth. From 1965 to 1975 it had been dry on Halloween and All Saints’ Day, just as it generally was now. For me to claim that “That was what it was like here all the time…” was factually false. My perception was the result of an arbitrarily experienced, but personally salient date. A portion of my childhood happened to have coincided with an unusual spate of rainy Halloweens. Had I been born a decade earlier or a decade later, I would have had no such memory. Such coincidence does not constitute a shift in weather patterns. This is not climate change. Just a happenstance, a trick of memory.
Right?
