Paper lion

All right, all right, I admit it. I'm not a huge fan of Halloween. It's got nothing to do with the devil, either. Nope, leave him out of it.

My mother on the other hand, well, let's just say she took the fun out of it for me. Back when I was nine-that's right, nine, when other kids were just getting into the spirit of ghouls and goblins and ghosts and witches-I was, quite literally, hiding behind a paper bag.

Sure, it was a fancied up paper bag.

Mom got out the crayons and the markers and the glue and the scissors and got that creative look in her eye. A look I would learn to dread.

"We'll make you a costume!" my mother proclaimed. "How about a lion?"

It was too late to go out and buy something made in China. Mom had forgotten Halloween. She was at an Eastern Star meeting, and when she got back I told her I needed a costume for school the next day. There was no way she was running to the store, particularly since she didn't have any money.

Mom was poor. She drove a Maverick with no floorboards and no heat-well, there was some heat, because she once left a head of cabbage in the back seat and it got warm enough to turn black and rot.

Us kids, my sister and I, huddled under a blanket as Mom coaxed the car home from the babysitter. The rotten cabbage rolled back and forth below our feet.

By the time she paid the sitter, we had enough money for milk and cereal and, if the Maverick didn't break down that week, rent.

But we were happy. Until the Halloween of 1975, that is. Gerald Ford was President. Mom had her hair in braids. The country was 200. And I was going to learn to hate Halloween like I never had before.

Mom got to work on my lion costume. She drew a face on the bag and made whiskers with a black marker and cut the obligatory eye holes. She then took another bag and cut strips out of it and then took the strips and ran the scissors against them so they would curl. She then pasted them all over the paper bag.

Then a vest was crafted out of a piece of shag carpet, and a tail was made out of a coat hanger and a wig and, Voila! I was a lion.

"C'mon Chris, try it on! Try it on!"

Mom was excited. At first, I actually took the bait. I bought the whole lion bit.

"Growl," she said.

I growled.

"You really think kids will think I'm a lion?" I asked.

"Sure," she lied.

Off to school I went. We did some obligatory school work, and then Mrs. Benedict told us to get into our costumes, we were going on a big costume parade where we showed ourselves off to all the other kids in school.

I put on my paper bag and my shag carpet vest and my coat hanger tail and was ready to go.

"What are you supposed to be, Peterson?" Scott Cullen asked. "Did your mother make that?"

Cullen was a sniveling friend of mine at the time. He drew dinosaurs with stick legs, like a chicken. I drew dinosaurs with real legs. Legs with flesh and bone.

He sucked and he knew it, but he had on an astronaut costume with a tag that stood proud and tall: MADE IN CHINA, it said.

I wanted to grab him by the throat.

I sulked, put on my bag, and got in line.

Things went OK until we got to the fifth graders.

"Oh," they said when I walked by. "Look at the kitty cat. Here kitty, kitty, kitty."

I'm a lion! I'm a lion! I'm a lion! I screamed silently to myself. But what was I to do? At least I was behind this bag.

Class after class after that, kids either snickered or meowed or called me the kitty. The costume parade became my own personal Bataan Death March.

Somehow, I survived. But I swore off Halloween after that. Not for me. No sirreeeeeee. And if you're a clerk out there in grocery land, and you ask, paper or plastic, sir? Don't be alarmed. No, don't be alarmed if I bite your head off when I snarl plastic.

I'm still working on some demons there. Demons from long ago.