Hallowe'en on a Budget

For years, I have resisted buying decorations for Hallowe'en. I have tried hard to stick to a one jack-o-lantern rule.

I blame my ancestors. Half came from the shtetls of Ukraine and Poland. The other half were just Scottish. (Four generations ago, yes, but it still counts at our kids' school multicultural night.)

Forget a dollar, my forefathers knew the value of a penny. Of a rag. Of spent matches, even.

But there is no excuse for such frugality these days. With a Dollarama on every corner, anyone can adorn their porch with a fake devil or two.

So every year, recession or not, Hallowe'en decorations festoon front yards all over the city.

Except ours.

This year, our next-door neighbors got an inflatable spider for their front yard. Our kids looked on enviously as the good parents plugged in the spider and its googly eyes lit up.

Even I had to admit it was awesome. Definitely would have been a hit in the shtetl.

Our 9-year-old stared at it sullenly for a while, like she just knew that would never be her reality. Then she turned to the neighbor's kids.

“Can you help us decorate?” she said. “Because our yard is kind of lame.”

I tried to tell our daughter that our creaking door and lack of renovations made our house genuinely creepy.

But, no, she wanted fake creepy.

That was it. I had to ignore my instinct to keep my money in my wallet, and I headed out to buy fake spider webs, Monster Mix sprinkles, fake tombstones and a second, totally ostentatious jack-o-lantern.

I came home $40 poorer, and I swear I heard my ancestors rolling in their graves.

The Place Beyond the Lilacs

We used to have the coolest backyard.

We share a property line with the neighbors to the north of us. There is no alley or road dividing the two yards. So, six years ago, when me moved in, the effect was that we shared one giant lawn with our back neighbors.

There was no fence, but there was a natural partition—a row of lilac trees that yielded a fragrant, white froth of blooms each spring.

The occupants of the other house were one very elderly lady and her cat. We didn't know her well; she hardly ever went outside except to sit on a wooden bench she had under the lilacs.

Our kids sometimes wandered around on her property to talk to her or play with her cat. She didn't mind.

This communal paradise yard went on for a while.

Then one winter, three years ago, the lady died.

Her house was sold, and stayed empty for a while.

Then suddenly, one Monday morning as I was getting the kids ready for school, there was a work crew in that yard. Backhoes and chainsaws and diggers and mini-bulldozers. Whatever small excavating machinery they could fit in there.

Out went the grass, the bench and the bluebells.

Our children watched from our back yard in tears as a worker took a chainsaw to the lilacs and felled them in a few short minutes. It was a Watership Down moment.

It was clear our new neighbors were building a fence. I saw a family there, and went over to introduce myself. There wasn't much we could do about it. The fence was on their property line. The lilacs were technically in their yard.

They built the highest fence allowed under the building code.

And the kids, though they occasionally peeked through the fence at each other, never met.

Until recently.

It was a blustery but warm and sunny fall afternoon, my kids were just home from school and went to play in the back yard.

The neighbors' kids were out in their yard with their nanny watching over them.

“Hi,” my 5-year-old son called out.

No response.

“Hi!” he bellowed. "Hi! Hi! Hello-o!"

He's third born, and is used to being ignored.

Finally one of the neighbor's children answered him back.

“Hi!” said the little boy. He had glasses and looked a bit shy.

 “I want to come play with you,” hollered my son. “But your fence is too high to climb!”

At that point, he and his two sisters ran out back together.

They tried to scramble up the fence, but couldn't get a foothold. It was a fortress wall.

My daughters tried to boost up my son and help him climb the fence, but instead they made a type of tottering pyramid. The other kids' nanny, probably sensing this meant trouble in some way, ushered her charges inside and slammed shut the sliding glass door.

We haven't seen them since.

It is a good fence. Well-constructed, anyway. But I'm not sure it has made us good neighbors.

Getting to know your neighbors

One quiet Sunday morning this past August, it hit me: our daughter was about to turn seven and still didn't know how to ride a bike. I took her out to teach her.

Out on the sidewalk, E. got on her pink, surfer-girl themed ride, pushed the pedals, and wobbled down the street.

She was oblivious to the fact that her seat and handlebars needed adjusting (she got the bike when she was four). This made her hunch over and her knees stick out, like a circus clown on a tiny tricycle. 

She didn't care. She quickly figured out how to balance and then raced down the sidewalk at full speed. She stopped and looked back at me, eyes gleaming with excitement.

I went to congratulate her, but as I approached, I saw that someone else was already doing so.

An elderly man, a neighbor, was sitting in his easy chair on his covered porch, clapping enthusiastically, sharing in my daughter's triumph.

I didn't know this neighbor. I mean, I knew of him, but I had always steered clear, a little afraid. He was very old, and had highly arched eyebrows that gave him a cold, judgmental look. He often sat in his chair and contemplated the neighborhood, aloof and silent.

But today he was smiling. He got out of his chair. He came down the stairs of his porch gingerly, gripping the handrail, walking on badly swollen ankles that were clearly painful.

“I remember,” he was saying to my daughter, “When I was about your age, my father taught me to ride. He took me to a grassy hill, so it wouldn't hurt if I fell. He let go of my seat and I just, pshhh---” 

He made a motion with his hand like he was taking off. His eyes were alive with the memory.

“That was a long time ago,” he said.

My daughter got back on her bike and started riding again, the world of adults and reminiscence must have paled in comparison to the feeling of the wind in her hair.

“It's something you never forget, isn't it?” I said. “The first time you ride a bike.” I was trying to make small talk.

He began to talk about his childhood, and I detected an accent.

“Where did you grow up?” I asked. It's a question we often ask each other here in Toronto, where everyone is from somewhere else.

“Germany,” he said, his face darkening. Now he knew I would register: very old guy, German...World War II! 

He launched into an explanation. “I was in the army. Not in Hitler Youth or the SS or anything. I was stationed in Russia.”

Right, nothing bad happened there, I thought cynically. Half my family is Jewish and came from Russia, Poland and Ukraine. My grandmother lost 26 relatives in the Holocaust.

Now the joy of the previous moment was gone, awkwardly replaced by the atrocities of the Eastern Front.

"When did you come to Canada?" I asked.

“1950. The first thing they asked me in immigration was, 'How many Jews did you kill?' Then they found me work in a Jewish deli. I could speak Yiddish. We all got along. The owner never asked me about my past. But you should have seen how my children were teased in school,” he continued. “They were called Nazis.”

It struck me that he had quite possibly spent a large part of his life explaining himself to people. As a German soldier in World War II, he was in his own way a victim of war. Then again, maybe he was a war criminal.

My daughter stopped her bike in front of his yard.

“How old are you?” she asked.

“Ninety-four,” he said, as if the fact were unbelievable, even to him.

It was getting toward lunch, time to go home. We said our goodbyes.

“He's nice,” my daughter said, as we walked her bike home together. “He's really old. Is he going to die soon?”

“I hope not,” I said.

“He's almost a hundred!” said my daughter.

A few weeks later, an ambulance was parked at his house. He was being taken out on a stretcher and put into the back. For days after that, I didn't see him. His car wasn't in the driveway. The fall weather was warm and balmy; he should have been out on his porch. Every day when I walked by on my way to pick up the kids from their bus stop, I anxiously scanned his chair, but it was empty.

Finally, a few days ago, I saw him. I found I was relieved, overjoyed even.

“The old guy lives!” I texted my husband. My heart was pounding, happy he was still in the world. He was taking out the garbage, remembering the past, just like the rest of us.