Since our neighborhood doesn’t have many kids – and has that seedy factor - we trick-or-treated on base with some friends. The mom of this family is from Bogota, and they had us over for a Columbian soup called ajiaco. I made pan de muerta, my nod to the holy days, with the last bits of Moroccan saffron we had brought back from Spain a few years ago.
The base housing community was one big block party: kids ran from house to house without fear of cars, but several families really got into the fright factor. One had an inflatable haunted house and a party in the driveway with scary adult clowns and zombies. Another family had converted the garage into a gory laboratory. Lawns were dotted with skeletons and tombstones and glow in the dark cobwebs. It seems as if the south likes to celebrate Halloween big. Or maybe it’s getting this big everywhere. When a sexy pirate wench walked up to school Friday to pick up her kids, I had to figure maybe the mardi gras mindset down here has seeped into the fall festivities.
The fall festival fundraiser for the kids’ school last weekend also had a Southern feel. Each class ran a couple carnival game booths, and the booth that had the best décor won a prize. Some booths decked out their tents with the traditional skeletons and spiders, but others glammed up with tulle and glitter everywhere. Kids dressed up for the costume contest, and my 10 year old won a $30 gift card to Walmart for his mime costume. The jr high CYO manned the haunted house in one half of the parish hall, while in the other half, parents shopped at the silent auction and kids’ art sale and decorated pumpkin sale. There was a cash raffle, a live auction, a dunk tank, a raffle to get out of bingo duty, a bake sale – all the popular school fundraisers rolled into one glorious sugarhigh event.
Meanwhile, the Methodist Church across the street had their fall festival on the same day – an alternative to Halloween? Maybe they didn’t realize that our school was celebrating the same day, or maybe they hoped to lure in some of our overflow. But theirs was a much smaller event – only a few game booths and food.
And a tractor pulled hay ride.
Monday morning we found out that a twelve year old boy jumped off the hay wagon and fell under the tractor. He was killed almost immediately. He was the son of the pastor. One version of the story has the pastor as the driver of the tractor. Apparently, the emergency vehicles all arrived while the festivities continued uninterrupted at our carnival.
My imagination keeps returning to this event. I can’t quite work out how the boy fell and where he was and what his body looked like when they pulled him out from under the wheels. Saturday afternoon I saw a kitten hit by a car scuttle to the side of the street, and I keep trying to make up an alternative ending to the story of this boy, who was the same age as my second son. Maybe he could have rolled away or laid still between the wheels.
Today the school kids, some of whom knew this boy from their neighborhood, remembered this young man. We prayed the prayer for the dead in Latin class:
Réquiem ætérnam dona eis, Dómine; et lux perpétua lúceat eis. Fidelium animae per misericordiam Dei requiescant in pace. Amen.
Another saying I came across while doing my research for Latin class: Vivere disce, cogita mori
4 comments:
Oh how terribly sad! I wouldn't be able to get that out of my mind! Reminds me of the story about Steven Curtis Chapman whose teenage son ran over his daughter and she died. He wrote a beautiful CD where he released some of his pain. I just can't imagine!
Emily, so very sad. I'll pray for them.
The juxtaposition of the ongoing carnival and the tragedy across the street calls to mind Auden's "Musee des Beaux Arts".
Lord, have mercy. It is a heart-wrenching story.
Isn't it a tragedy that there are so many of these accidental deaths of children at the hands of a parent or sibling? I have a friend whose twin brother, a teen at the time, was killed in a farming accident involving his dad. Happily, their family was able to draw closer together. It's easy to forget how precarious life is - that poem is a good reminder of how life goes on, though. Thanks for the prompt, Melanie.
We had another brush with death this past weekend - we passed a fatal accident on the way home from the corn maze. We were routed onto the shoulder of a country road because all the emergency vehicles were taking up the pavement. As we passed, we could see EMTs and police looking into the woods, and I was afraid a criminal was on the loose, but I read in the paper the next day that a man was thrown from his car and perished. Fortunately, no one else was killed.
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