Free Tibetan Peach Pie: A True Account of an Imaginative Life by Tom Robbins

populations came together to sing “Happy Birthday to Death.” A Halloween without fear is a Christmas without cheer, an Independence Day without freedom, a luau without aloha, a corrida without olé .
    By the twentieth century, the old terror, if not erased, had been significantly suppressed; and once-sanctioned communal anarchy reduced to a temporary tolerance of the kind of soft vandalism previously described. And in century 21, the Feast of the Dead is primarily represented by tutu-clad children on tooth-decay missions, by young adults dressed up as cultural icons in the hope they won’t be recognized when they make inappropriate sexual advances and/or get falling-down drunk.
    Now, as a property owner, not to mention “senior citizen” (talk about a scary epithet), I can’t say I’d prefer those Halloweens of yore, yet I can’t help but feel that something has been lost: something transformative, something central to our story, something secretly nourishing to the soul. And, to be perfectly honest, I wouldn’t mind awakening one November 1 to see my neighbor’s Toyota on top of his house.
     
    As a teenager in Warsaw (the Virginia village where I finally got over my homesickness for Blowing Rock), I was to be found every Halloween among the group of boys that gathered after supper in the center of town, intent on mischief, percolating with an unconscious longing to invoke and flirt with those fearsome forces that haunt the mortal shadows of being. On the other hand, it may just have been a bunch of bored kids looking for a break in small-town routine, looking to cut loose for a night, looking for a little excitement, for kicks. Despite their rowdy nature, these rallies were fundamentally devoid of malice, were reflective of an actual kind of innocence; yet, as I can report firsthand, they did not always produce a happy ending.
    As we boys, armed with bars of soap and rolls of bathroom tissue, milled about Warsaw’s main intersection, waiting for Clanton’s Drug Store to douse its lights and close for the night (the intersection’s other businesses had gone dark at six), we were inevitably joined -- or, rather, confronted -- by an adult male in a suit and tie. That would have been Mr. Willy Jones, the commonwealth attorney for Richmond County, a jowly, humorless middle-aged man whose fairly affluent residence was a scant two blocks away. Jones would puff himself up, survey us disdainfully, and address us in a painfully slow Southern accent so swimming in hog gravy that it elicited giggles from us boys, even though all spoke fluent Dixie save I, who, as aforementioned, sounded like an Oklahoma bug doctor trapped under a spud truck. “I am orderin’ y’all,” Willy Jones would announce, “to deesperse this assembly immediately or I will prosecute ever lass one of y’all to the fullest extent of the law.”
    Jones’s threat would be greeted with hoots and jeers. He would then repeat it, emphasizing the prosecute part; and gradually, in pairs or groups of three or four, boys would peel away from the main body, only to regroup (though we always lost several ’fraidy cats) around the corner and down the street in front of the B&B poolroom, the only establishment in town aside from the movie theater and the Negro-friendly Texaco station to remain open after eight. It was a yearly ritual: Willy Jones would strike a vocal blow for the rule of law and the forces of good, then we frankly laughable representatives of the Dark Side would scatter, later to slip and sneak around the residential streets banging on doors, tipping over garbage cans, wreaking very minor havoc. One October 31, however -- it was my senior year in high school -- the routine took an unfortunate left turn, paving the way for the end of Halloween Fright and the advent of Halloween Lite in Warsaw forever.
    Wishing perhaps to put some distance between ourselves and Willy Jones (Warsaw’s sole cop always seemed to conveniently vanish at