Happy Halloween!

Originally, a “happy” Halloween was simply one you survived without getting sucked over through the thinning membrane that’s all that stands between the world of the living and the world of the departed. Or attacked, in some manner, here on our own side of the veil by somebody — or something — that has for whatever reason has it in for you.

The question is, of course, what is the ghosts’ problem with the living? The strange contradictions built into practically all everything about Halloween have always puzzled me, and as somebody once described (pretty accurately) by my boss as “one of those annoying detail guys,” at this time of year I’m always ready to delve into the depths once again.

So let’s start with those ghosts. Now, humanity has been around for tens of thousands of years, and every single ancestor of ours has eventually died. The stories about ghosts aren’t consistent at all, but one theme you see repeatedly — not all the time, but fairly often — is that not everybody who dies becomes a ghost. There’s often some other factor involved. Even given that, though, by now, with tens of thousands of years behind us as a species, there would have to be a lot of ghosts. I mean, even the physical remains start to pile up and get in the way; that’s why in European cemeteries they exhume the bones after a few years, just to move them and free up the space. Ghosts can evidently occupy the same space as something else (more about that in a bit), but even that would eventually get to be a bit of a nuisance. At least you’d think so.

But let’s give the benefit of the doubt to the sheer number of haunts and assume there’s some solution to it. Expiration dates or something like that. But by the way, is it just humans who can wind up as ghosts? Not dogs or cats or horrible geese? How about Neanderthals, or the other hominids in our deep past? Was there some point at which we evolved to be, um, ghost worthy? This question bears on the over-ghost-population issue, as I’m sure you can appreciate. But anyway, let’s say there’s some natural (or, well, supernatural) process at work to make it all work out.

One thing that seems to be common to practically all the ghosts I’ve heard or read about is that they’re not much concerned with physical barriers. Walls, closed doors, a visiting elephant, whatever, they can mosey right through. And yet while they’re passing through walls, they aren’t usually described as passing through floors unless they intend to. But does that imply something unique about the composition of their feet (if any)? If you can pass right through a wall, you must be made of something similar to neutrinos. Those, you’ll recall, are the subatomic particles that swoop right through the entire Earth without noticing it’s there. But if a ghost is a neutrino-based form of existence, then what’s the deal with them hanging around on Earth at all? If a ghost is made of something like neutrinos (and even a ghost has to be made of something,surely), then haunting any given place on Earth is going to be unlikely. If we assume a newly-minted ghost has no motion relative to…well, anything…then they’re probably going to be left behind as the Earth proceeds on its orbit of the Sun.

And it’s not like they’ll be there when we swing around next year either, because the Sun is also moving in a orbit; it’s circling the Milky Way. It takes a quite considerable time, to be sure, but that’s because galaxies are seriously gigantic. So if we’re going to entertain the idea of neutrino-based ghosts, I’m afraid the Earth is just leaving them behind like a wake as it travels through space. Since a ghost can’t, for the most part, affect much of anything in the physical world, maybe floating in deep space is an appropriate venue, because (again for the most part), there isn’t anything there. It could get a bit dull being that sort of ghost.

But there’s another aspect of many ghostly traditions, and that involves where they, um, “live.” That didn’t come out quite right… let’s say where they reside. According to quite a few myths, ghosts and their companions have their own world. It usually doesn’t quite measure up to ours, particularly in terms of a full palette of colors and little incidentals like residences and the like, but it’s still a world. We can’t typically see it or visit it, of course, except for a few special cases (somebody had to describe it to us). But the ghosts have much better access to our neighborhood. Nevertheless, they’re often working on getting us over to their side of the tracks. Why? Well…if you exist in a nonmaterial manner in an evidently nonmaterial “place,” who’s so say what might motivate you?

For that matter, why would anything motivate you? If you have motivations, you have desires and goals, and since you have eternity to work on them, you’ll probably accomplish them. It’s like the old Steven Wright joke: “every place is walking distance if you have the time.” If you have all the time there is, you can afford to think big. But by all reports the ghosts don’t; they’re intent on basically trivial little issues like bothering us living folks and causing mild troubles here and there.

That’s the other thing about ghosts; as far as most (maybe all) the stories go, they’re generally up to mischief, never helpful things. This also makes very little sense to me. A central point about a great many stories where somebody end up with all the time in the world is that twist where they realize they might as well try to engage in something genuinely good or worthwhile. Come on, just rewatch Groundhog Day; even Bill Murray’s character manages to evolve from  jerk to reasonably good guy given enough time. (Side question, by the way, how long would you say he spent reliving that one day? He was able to learn piano, master ice sculpture, and puzzle out all sorts of other little issues in Punxatawney, so I think it had to be at least ten years; probably more.)

I could keep going, but I think I’d just be reliving the same arguments over and over. Halloween just doesn’t make a lot of sense, at least not any more. It’s probably time to stop being all 21st-Century analytical about it, just go sit in the nearest pumpkin patch, and hope the Great Pumpkin chooses that one as the most sincere of all pumpkin patches. That’s what the holiday is really all about, right?

Tales from the Forest

Hard-Boiled Carrots

It seemed like an ordinary day in the forest. The breeze stirred the leaves around. The river flowed. The plants grew. But then Hare heard a knock on his door.

It was an ordinary knock; just a quick rat-a-tat. But something about it gave Hare a bad feeling. On his way to open it he grabbed a carrot, just in case. A carrot usually helped.

Hare opened the door. There was a small animal there. He looked a little like Otter, but he was wearing an old-fashioned hat and a raincoat. “Probably not an otter,” thought Hare.

“Is your name Hare?” asked the animal.

“It’s what I go by around here,” said Hare.

“Good enough for me,” said the animal. “I’m Ferret. I’m a PI, a tec, a private eye some call me. Ask you a few questions?”

“Sure,” said Hare, taking a bite of his carrot. “Ask away, champ, I got nothin’ to hide.”

“Didn’t say you did,” said Ferret. “Can I come in, or shall we conduct our business out here in public?”

“Yeah, you can come in,” said Hare, holding the door open. Ferret went in. Hare peered around outside. Nobody around. He closed the door. “Have a seat,” he said to Ferret, chewing his carrot.

“You got another one a’ those?” asked Ferret, nodding at the carrot. “I was tryin’ to quit until last week when this case came along. The stress got to me.”

Hare silently handed Ferret a carrot. “Thanks,” said Ferret, taking a nibble. “You know why I’m here, right Rabbit?”

“Hare,” said Hare. “I got no clue why you’re here. Maybe you’re lost.”

“I don’t get lost,” said Ferret. “So you wanna play dumb, fine with me. Okay, long ears, this is the skinny. You was seen last week. At a party. You know the one. The party. In. The. Barn.”

“So what if I was?” said Hare, leaning against the wall.

“I’ll tell ya what,” said Ferret. He was nibbling his carrot quickly.

“You wanna take it easy there,” said Hare, indicating the carrot. “That’s from my own stock. You don’t want to overdo it, if ya know what I mean.”

Ferret looked at his carrot, then turned to Hare and took a huge bite, on purpose. Like he was flaunting it. “I been around,” he said, “I can take whatever you wanna dish out, hopper. Now, spill. What were you doin’ at that party?”

Hare was taken aback by the stunt with the carrot. He’d figured Ferret, who was pretty small, wouldn’t be able to keep up with him in the carrot department. He glared at Ferret and quickly gnawed his carrot down a couple more inches.

“It was a party,” said Hare, trying to sound nonchalant. “I was just having fun.”

Ferret took another enormous bite of his carrot. “There’s fun, and then there’s fun,” he said with his mouth full.

Is he really that rude? thought Hare, or is it just a tough-ferret act? Before he could say anything, Ferret continued.

“Nervous, long ears?” he said, grinning nastily. There were bits of carrot stuck in his teeth. “Couldn’t help but notice, you were sounding kind of chalant there.”

Curses, foiled again, thought Hare. I was doing my best to do that nonchalant thing, and some of that chalant stuff leaked though. Whatever it is. “Nah,” he said, trying to lean against the wall more like the way an innocent hare being questioned by mistake would lean. “I ain’t nervous. You got nothin’ on me, shorty.”

Ferret very deliberately finished his carrot. He licked his paw carefully. “Didn’t say I did,” he said. “Sounds like somebody has a guilty conscience, rabbit.”

“Hare”, said Hare. “And my conscience is as clean as a whistle.”

“Oh really,” said Ferret. “This the whistle you’re talkin’ about, hopper?” He pulled a whistle out of the pocket of his coat. It was a very dirty whistle.

“Hey, just a minute,” said Hare, who suddenly was nervous. Who was this Ferret, walking around the forest with a dirty whistle? “You the cops or somethin’?”

“I ain’t the cops,” said Ferret. “Just trying to find out what went on at that party. Because it’s a funny thing, long ears, but nobody seems to know. That guy Beaver was talking to them cows, and the story is that there was some kind of game going on.” He flipped through a tiny notebook. “Tag,” he read. “Supposedly. But that’s all anybody knows, rabbit. So somebody hired me to find out.”

“W-who hired you?” asked Hare.

“Sorry, no can do, hopper,” said Ferret. “That’s for me to know and you to not find out. But that’ll do for now.” Ferret smoothly rose from his chair. “I think I got what I needed,” he said. “For now,” he said, pointing a claw at Hare, “you sit tight, but I’ll be back. Gotta get to the bottom of this one way or another. Don’t worry, I’ll let myself out.”

Ferret opened the door and walked out. Just before he left he turned and said “And one more thing. Don’t leave town, rabbit.”

“Hare,” said Hare, as Ferret stalked away down the path. Hare got himself another carrot and sagged into his favorite chair. “Oh dear,” he said to himself. “I didn’t expect anything like this.”

Then he shook his head to clear it. “Hey wait a minute,” he said to himself. “It was just a party. There wasn’t anything going on that shouldn’t have.” He took a bite of carrot. Remembered how Ferret had sauntered in like he owned the place. Ferret had been pretty confident. “Gee,” whispered Hare under his breath. “I wonder…”

Make no Bones About It

Make no bones about it; the expression “make no bones about it” comes from soup. Sort of.

Saying “make no bones” about something, nowadays, generally means to talk about something clearly and openly. It’s most recently derived from its opposite: “to make bones”, which is an obsolete expression meaning “to have objections to or difficulty in”. That expression probably originated in the early 1500s, and in those days “to make bones” really meant “to FIND bones”. It was sometimes used in connection with food and drink, as in this quote from the 1516 poem “The Tunnyng of Elynour Rummyng”:

“Supped it up at once; 
She found therein no bones.”

The expression “make no bones” started to appear later that same century, although at first the phrase was “make no bones AT” rather than “about”, as it’s used now. The “about” form appeared in the 1800s:

“I didn’t quite like to draw out my money so long as Pilkington held on; but I shall make no bones about it with this fellow.” (from “Adrian Vidal” by William Edward Norris in 1885)

As to where the phrase came from in the first place, it goes back to the 1400s, and had to do with “the occurrence of bones in soup...as an obstacle to its being easily swallowed.”

By the way, the word “bone” itself is so old nobody is really sure where it originated. It’s Germanic, at least, and the earliest known reference is from the seventh century, in a tome called the “Erfurt Glossary”, which referred (for some reason) to “elephant’s bone”.

There are at least a couple of other bony expressions in English, including “a bone to pick” and “a bone of contention” — both of these are derived from how dogs behave with bones, and both date from the 1500s. Not to mention an almost-obsolete phrase meaning “to live to a ripe old age”: “to make old bones”. It was popular in the 1800s, and appeared, for example, in a serialization of the novel “Verner’s Pride” in the magazine “Once a Week” in 1863:

“Barring getting shot, or run over by a railway train, you’ll make old bones, you will.” Gee, what a pleasant thought…

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