I haven’t really talked about my dad much since he died and I did his eulogy. He had an All Saints birthday (November 1st) and he used to hate that I would point that out every year. “I’m not a saint, bubba.”

“Even still, dad, happy All Saints birthday!”

I suppose I should have pointed out all soul’s day was the day afterwards. Or perhaps I should just have stuck to my guns when I told him, over and over, that ἀγιος is applied universally to the company of the confessing church — that whether he was or wasn’t one now, he would be in the fullness of time. And now he’s gone, I feel that I won the argument and all it cost me was the presence of my father on this mortal plane.

The man adored Halloween — all hallow’s eve. I never understood why until this year and it’s so obvious: it was his birthday eve. He probably did costume parties his whole life because of his birthday. How did I never put that together?

My aunt used to own a chain of halloween stores and I did a ton of theater (even went to class for more complex foam and latex prosthetics and makeup [though my sister’s better at costume makeup] around the same time I was trained in broadsword choreography by the lady who did it for Lord of the Rings — to this day, the 1-hour stretching session she demanded before every class was the sweatiest and most pained I’ve ever been from any workout in any category including 4-hour MMA sessions; also broadswords are heavy and so I resonated with Samwell Tarly when he finally found a mirror and realized, low and behold, he was no longer flabby, but fit and gorgeous after swinging a broadsword around for a few years).

Anyways.

I used to do this stuff more before life got expensive and busy. And then I just sort of stopped. Part of it was family members who were pretty halloween averse (i.e. toxic shame about my past that I’ve gotten over), part of it was a lack of preparation on my part, the list goes on.

But something shortly after last year’s Halloween stuck with me.

Emily Munro (co-leader of the Starlings writing group here in NYC and coeditor for Of Gods and Globes III) watched Slumberland with me and said, “You guys could go as Flip and Nemo easily.” It was right after Halloween. And I just decided we would.

I realize, now, I was thinking of dad. That it was his birthday season. That I needed to honor him.

So I planned all year long and thought through the pieces and finally figured out how to make it happen with what I had on hand — Jason Momoa, if you’re reading this, I couldn’t catch the flies with my chopsticks.

And there was something that came back to me.

See my grandma died recently too (most of the “Beth” stories in Bell Hammers come from her). I haven’t really talked about it to give the other side of the family space to grieve (they didn’t ask for this, but I’m mostly processing it alone, haven’t really responded to anyone but my siblings’s condolences — I generally don’t like grieving in public outside of writing fiction and poetry). But grandma sewed.

She sewed quilts. She sewed dresses. She sewed many, many of my halloween costumes over the years.

She did a felted set of armor for me so that I could be Lancelot one year.

She made me a full-up nightcrawler costume — giant size X-men #1 version, obviously — before anyone had any idea of who that was, back when you used to get literally beat up for reading Marvel comics at school, back before everyone had a surface-level in interest in the universe with no idea how Morbius connects to the Blade series that literally no one has seen these days.

Grandma sewed these for me. I’m asking my mother and sister if they have photos.

One year, I literally made up a superhero on paper with my buddy Chase (whose new halloween coloring book just came out) and had grandma and dad help me make the whole outfit. I remember the face, but I remember nothing about his powers or anything. Maybe I’ll revisit that character someday to show him.

Grandma sewed me a Robin Hood costume one year when dad and mom went like this:

You gotta realize how much time my dad spent on these cans. They’re made out of these cardboard barrels he always had around. He’d use them for trash on the job site, sometimes as burn barrels, but he’d keep steel beer cans in there and blueprints and other things.

He had them out in the garage and did things in stages. He cut the arm and head holes for him and mom first. I remember trying them on and they dug into my shoulders — I remember wondering how he’d ever get those things on and wear them all night. It only now occurs to me that my tiny six-year-old shoulders couldn’t bear the weight of it well.

He then painted the top with chrome and the white walls. Took forever to dry. Then he did what he did with his business signs: he transferred the image of the Diet Coke logo to transparency and then used his overhead projector to project that onto the cans. It was set up in our garage for ages, it seemed to me. He then hand-painted the Diet Coke symbols on there.

Who does that these days? Heck I even used a vector for my own Jack Skellington pumpkin carving ideas and the Harry Potter pumpkin carving.

But dad did.

Know what else he did?

This.

Same can, but this time he hooked up the PBR so that people could literally nurse their beers.

Also, I’m unsure, but that looks like a softball trophy? I know nothing about that.

I’m asking my mom if she has any old pics of my halloween costumes.

Friend of the site, editor of the Joplin Toad, and co-conspirator Mark Neuenschwander reminded me of my pied piper leprechaun year:

He’s so good at photos. And when I’m playing a villain, he really lights me up creepily.

But this year, I chose Slumberland.

Here was our model:

And here’s how we did:

Perfect?

No.

But for being out of the game for almost a decade other than some piddly little things, I’m actually really proud of how it turned out. Particularly the details of Tara’s late grandma’s pins, her uncle’s Greenville Ohio pins (he was mayor there), and the Cloud Appreciation Society pin Mark’s wife Autumn gave me.

Dad would have loved it.

I’ll talk about it more elsewhere, have indeed started a prequel to Bell Hammers about Beth and just finished a novel involving Bren (more or less my dad), but with the death of “Beth” from Bell Hammers who made my costumes, the death of “Daddy John” who taught me my first magic tricks, the death of both Grandpas who formed “Remmy” and made a thousands swords from wood slats for the local theater, there’s only me and my brother left on that side of the family of men. My sister holds her own too, we’ll throw her into the mix.

Every man who was there when I started the novel — who told stories that made it into the novel — is now dead. None of them, dad included, lived to see me perform it live, post-pandemic, on my hometown’s stage. Let alone in Joplin. Let alone in NYC.

They didn’t live to see it randomly spike in popularity on Goodreads, three years after the pandemic release, right now, right at Dad’s birthday:

The corresponding sales that have come with that spike.

And so it feels like, though I have — through that novel — rescued “the precious life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life” — they are all bodily no longer here.

And that’s what an All Saints birthday is about, what all hallow’s eve is about, what all soul’s day is about.

Nostalgia.

Sehnsucht.

Longing for the home we’ve never known.

Lacrimae rerum.

物の哀れ

Sunt hic etiam sua praemia laudi;
sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt.
Solve metus; feret haec aliquam tibi fama salutem.

Virgil, Aeneid, 1.461 ff