Some people could care less for the holiday, but I fell in love with Halloween as a child. My dad loved the old-school monster movies and any opportunity to dress up and scare someone. It’s a love he passed onto me. When we lived in San Bruno we would convert the garage into a walk-through haunted house. His sister had a lot of Halloween masks for some reason and we would use them to spook up the gage. His sister also dated Joe DiMaggio apparently, but who knows with that lady. I remember seeing Frankenstein, Jason and Yoda masks. They took my R2D2 toy chest, put it next to Yoda, and filled the area with fog. It looked legit, at least to my little girl eyes. My dad would stuff costumes with hay and build bodies for the masks. I was little and useless, but I loved hanging out in the garage listening to spooky music and learning the hard way about why you shouldn’t touch dry ice. I think my dad purely enjoyed the company. It was his chance to show me all his cool things in the garage. The very same stuff my mom is now digging through and trying to clear out. These moments gave birth to my love of hanging out in garages (garage bands), and Halloween. One day I want a garage with a TV and my workout stuff . A place to hang out with friends early morning and late night, wether we are working out or drinking beer and watching music videos on TV.
Back to Halloween. My Dad had a coffin and a guillotine. They were prominent features of the haunted house. I cant recall who built them for my him, but he was so proud of them. He would lay in the coffin and pop up during the haunted house, scaring all the neighborhood kids (aka my friends). Years later he would donate those items to Ann and JP, and their prop house.
Once we moved up to Sonoma County we tried the haunted house a couple of times, but it wasn’t sustainable. So, my dad settled on dressing like a gorilla and sitting on the front bench like a mannequin. He would scare anyone who came to the front door. Halloween was a big celebration, and everyone would congregate at the Aguilar house. There was music, laughter and fun. We would order pizzas and then walk around the neighborhood, whether we were kids or in our 20s. As we got older Halloween came to include cocktails, and chaperoning the little ones.
My Halloween spirit went beyond those garage-based haunted houses. I also worked at a few Halloween stores during my college years, dressing as a new character every day and playing with Halloween makeup. Throughout the years I was everything from an elephant, Jiminy cricket, Pinocchio, Frankenstein, ghoul, pirate, Dracula, Michael Jackson, Tom Cruise Top Gun, Elvis, Reno 911, a flying monkey from the Wizard of Oz, and the scarecrow many times over. I love that holiday, but it was tainted when my heart was hurt on that day in 2006, and I’ve been crawling my way back to Halloween joy every day since. You awoke that joy in me again, and that broken heart became a blip on the map of my history. Now when I think of Halloween it’s no longer about sadness, but joy with my Dad, and Melissa. I love that you love Halloween.