Marigolds! The Official Flower of Day of the Dead!

L came home from Cathy Day’s with ten pounds of Skittles.

Post-Halloween swag.

“Really?” I said. “But I hate Skittles.”

“So do I,” said L. “So does Cathy Day. That’s kind of the point.”

I hate to inflict ossified corn syrup and Red Dye II on Food Bank patrons, but really—what else do you do with ten pounds of Skittles?

###

Halloween used to be my favorite holiday. That was when I was young and feckless and played to an admiring audience that appreciated the work I put into crafting costumes like Freudian Slip (negligee, phony beard, Groucho Marx glasses) and Chip on My Shoulder (enormous papier-mâché potato chip glued to the shoulder of my least favorite dress.)

The audience dried up when I was in my mid-30s, coincident with my own Adventures in Human Reproduction.

So then, for many years, Halloween meant overseeing my own offspring’s costume choices and bickering with them over the size of the Mommy Tax on their subsequent haul. Robin was always big on werewolves. I can’t remember any of Max’s costumes. (Altogether now: Baaaaaaaad mother!)

###

These days, though, Halloween is just another date on the calendar.

Where I live, the houses are too far apart to encourage trick-or-treating. And even if they were closer together, the kids have all grown up and moved away.

I get that imperiled retail establishments must seize every opportunity to generate revenue but the deluge of plastic, breakable Halloween stuff occupying three middle aisles marked “Seasonal” in every local store with annual revenues over $500,000 a year, really appalls me.

Some people who decorate their homes for Halloween show great imagination:



But most people just seem to shove those Big Box props onto their front yards as pre-fab holiday clutter. The more the merrier! No personalized touches. Their imaginations have been utterly colonized by the retail cycle.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I’m a snob.

###

Today, of course, is the Day of the Dead, a festival that every year grows more significant.

None of my Dead are around to party with. Not even the most recently departed. He stuck around just long enough to signal his distaste when I read through his old emails—that stark black and white photo of an empty hospital bed inserted into that screensaver montage!—but hasn’t been heard from since.

He’s the one I miss the most. Not surprisingly.

But the one I’d most like to talk to again is Tom. He always had the clearest insights into the stuff that really interests me, and besides, he honestly cherished me. Always. He had a reputation as a difficult human being. But he was never that way with me.

The hard truth is that Ben always viewed me as a kind of mark. Did he love me? Maybe. But always within a manipulative context. He had my number. As the incredibly wise and perceptive smokingboot noted to me just this morning, Lost Girls are prey.

Anyway, when I dropped by the garden a couple of days ago, I was surprised to discover that it’s turned into one large marigold plantation:



Marigolds are the Official Flower of the Day of the Dead!

So, I’m thinking, after I go running this morning, I’ll take a trip to the Poughkeepsie Rural Cemetery, look for the graves of the enslaved—there are quite a few—and put marigolds on them: Nobody knew what you went through when you were alive. A few of us stragglers guess about it now.

But I’ll do that after I watch Law & Order: SVU, of course!