An October Midnight Better Spent Sleeping

October mornings start out a little chilled, then turn to warm afternoons for letting sun and salt dry out the skin. The boy took over the role of Slide Supervisor at the Department of the Beach. Every slide was carefully inspected. Check, check, and check, all was well. The boy had big dreams of spending several hours examining every slide for the following three miles or so, but management shut that idea down. How many slides does a beach need?

A sad little song bird was found half flattened in the surf. The poor thing was an imperfection in a place where even trash, once worked over by the waves, has a sort of perfect belonging to it. A melancholy mood fell over the crew. “The ocean will take it,” management said. The tide was coming in, taking everything, including the beer bottles that we were collecting in-between slide inspections. We moved on.

We were driving then and it was an October evening. I watched a man in an ominous clown mask walk slowly down the main thoroughfare, his bright red hair extra freakish in the fading golden sun. A rocket and a mermaid were traveling to a carnival—one that I don’t think that clown was invited to. He was probably going to Pizza Hut, where I had observed a sign that said “No Halloween masks allowed inside store.”

This is me trying to take an adorable picture of a mama holding hands with a tot. This is the tot trying to get me to let go so that she can run circles around me singing "Ring Around the Rosie."

Later on that October evening we sat in a room full of children giggling at a magician, and suddenly I remembered how it is possible to spend a great deal of time with children, and it feel like very little. In the absence of looking into their eyes and talking, or spending a half an hour in play one-on-one, the quality time doesn’t feel like it counted. I’m not sure if it counts to the children, but it doesn’t count to me. And quality further nose dives with too much time being grouchy. The rubber ducky the tot got for a carnival prize was dropped outside the vehicle, and being rubber, it bounce, bounce, bounced right underneath a large SUV. There I was again, grouchy, crawling around on the pavement trying to get a damn duck.

We left the carnival and went back home on an October night. The boy, the tot, and I sat on the living room floor, markers in hand, designing our pumpkins. I helped the tot draw awkward circles for eyes, as the boy took care of business on his own. While I carved out the pumpkin’s circle nose and the “scary” mouth on the tot’s behalf, she sat on the floor smearing pumpkin seeds and fibrous strands in every way short of actually lying in them to make pumpkin angels.

I finished the simple jack-o-lantern face, then entrusted the tot with the task of putting the pumpkins seeds into a colander. She accepting the colander with joy, and proceeded to ignore me and make “pumpkin soup” with her brother, flinging more slimy seeds back onto the floor. At some point this grew uninteresting. The boy returned to his work, carving his pumpkin on his own for the first time. The tot took the initiative, and colored hers thoroughly with marker, post carving—for good measure. An imperfect, beautiful mess.

It was for such good measure that she proceeded to color it after it was lit with a candle and set out on the porch. “Don’t forget pumpkin!” She shouted when we all moved to go back inside. “It has to stay outside and scare away the spooks that come to our door on Halloween night,” I said. She took a look around at the darkness surrounding her, and jetted back inside.

Cutest imperfection I've ever seen.

It is almost an October midnight. And now I don’t have a writer inside me, just a tired woman that is dried out from the sun and salt. Maybe the writer jumped out of me while I was straining to reach that rubber duck.

I’ve been writing fiction for ten years, tinkering around on my own, in limited spells of free time. It used to fill a void for me. In fiction, anything you want to happen can happen, and it allows the writer to unburden herself. For the same reason as fiction used to do it for me, it doesn’t anymore. Because you can make anything happen in fiction, where is the challenge? In non-fiction, can you make a day in the life, otherwise just a day, still readable? Can you make it interesting? Sometimes you can, sometimes you can’t, but that is the real storytelling challenge that I pursue every other night here.

Tonight, I can’t. Life is imperfect. That’s it folks. It’s just an October midnight better spent sleeping.