Dear Me Letter: Silverlake Halloween

It’s as if someone is trying to tell you something when the electric power goes off until midnight on a windy Halloween full with albino pumpkin moon. I don’t know how the goblins felt as they made their rounds - maybe like a trick was being played on them.

But I don’t bend out of shape in October. It’s the month when I start thinking cozy. Cozy hot chocolate with oven-buttered toast, favorite sweaters and socks, baking and fattening up with creative thoughts.

 I was amused by the blackout and so did the ritual of lighting candles and calling the “Electric Trouble Hotline.” This happens about three times a year in Silverlake. Probably some weak transformers or overloaded transvestites in the area. Anyway, it fit the mood of my first favorite holiday of the year. (My year starts on Halloween which could explain the life I’ve been leading.)

I had the big-toothed pumpkin I called Big Jack shouting his big mouth with ferocious light in the big window facing the lake and the street below - my silent way of shouting back at the traffic noise I’ve trained myself to ignore for the past nine years. The other pumpkin I called was on duty at the top of the outside stairs. Living one-third of the way up a 30-degree hill with the stairs facing the lake and the boulevard below,

I felt he would have more impact there. (An ex-friend told me later there would’ve been more impact if I’d put a candle behind my face instead. I warned him I can throw lightening bolts and I haven’t seen him since.)

 Aside from silly insults: On this night each year I think of Halloween on Woodlawn in Little Rock when I was eight. My mother had just recently had her teeth removed, which complimented her decision to dress up like a witch. With a big bowl as her cauldron, full of candy and popcorn balls, she sat cackling for the goblins who came to our front door. One little goblin got scared and started crying when she saw “the witch” and Mom had to put on her Mom’s hat to sooth her back into the spirit. I love her zest for playing the holidays.

I was reliving this while sitting on the third step down of the thirteen front steps, a great spot to stretch into the space of the lake and sky. The Jack-o’-lantern, who I called Little Jack, glowed warm on my back while my dog Daisy sniffed relative truths of the night with her microscopic nose. I

t’s nice when it’s quiet and only an occasional car drones by. I appreciate it when someone’s pulsating car alarm isn’t pulling my relative peace out from under me. In the woods or ocean there’s peace. In smog-silted L.A. there’s relative peace to catch any way you can. Tonight I caught a piece of it, I thought.

The lake was special this night with the power off in the surrounding houses and streetlights; only the moon lit its misty face.

What I saw next must have been waiting for a blackout of this magnitude to show its scary face. I wasn’t startled by it, just very curious. Of course my skin finding its way back on my body after a perfectly normal jump was not pertinent.

Near the northwest corner of the lake, which is two miles around, a very large tubular shape surged slowly through the silver ripples then receded, cautiously rising again but much higher and receding less. The mist over the lake erased its edges so I could only see a dancing motion. Since the lake was fenced from public, I knew no human was involved. Then I heard a sound new to me, this area, and probably this planet. A loud breathy gurgle punched through the water with irregular rhythms of equally loud rude burps and belches.

I felt like all the horror movies I’d seen had come to life. Something should be done, but what? I ran in the house to get binoculars and returned to see small bobbing white lights floating above the water, slowly moving toward the shape then stopping. The shape surged higher, the burps and belches became obnoxiously louder. The lights moved back and anchored. The binoculars only magnified the thick mist, revealing nothing more, but for another very long while I persisted.

Thinking the morning would unwrap the mystery, I went to bed, leaving Jack on guard to absorb the rest and tell me its end.

The next morning the Silverlake Independent headlined; “Pop Goes the Reservoir! A gas line beneath the northwest corner of the Silverlake Reservoir burst last night, jetting water to a height of about 60 feet. Using diving equipment, a gas company crew worked through the night to contain it...

” Little Jack told me a different ending. He said the shape burst up from the water, and followed by the little lights gurgled, belched and burped all over the Silverlake sky, dumping water pellets over the neighborhood that fizzled out Jack’s candle.

Now, should I believe the reality of the press or the possible illusions of Jack?

But I did find water puddled in the top of Little Jack’s fat candle.