LETTERS FROM HOME: HALLOWEEN AND `THE THIRD BOYD'

Oct. 14, 1993

Dear DC,

The trees have gone psychedelic again and Central beat Jackson in football, so almost everything must be right with the world. I know you never were a football fan, but you'd be cheering for deciduousness if you were here.

We're slowly beginning to win the wrestling match with the new pagination system at work, but reporters and dress codes -- especially one of our own -- always will see eye-to-knuckle. Tie-dye ties for Christmas, please.

Casey decided to be a 6-year-old Blushing Bride for Halloween. The satiny dress, the lacy sleeves and veil, the silk roses and baby's breath bouquet. She's the niece who insists on eating her watermelon by candlelight, so I think it may be a hopeless case.

I have been invited to a masquerade party myself. The last time I went to one I was God. White hair, beard and toga, pillow stuffing attached to feet for that cloud-surfing effect, and a "Thinks he's God" sign on my back. Was it funny to watch God dancing, or could people just see through the toga?

A former girlfriend and I went to another party as The Giant Czechs. This was before the Communists lost control, of course. We wore black-and-white checked clothes, painted more checks on our exposed skin, and attached empty paint cans to our feet (seems to be a recurring theme). I suddenly knew why guys who are 6-10 might have a problem with arrogance. From up there, the world looks yours for the taking.

Just as I was thinking that, I took a mighty fall off my paint cans.

And what should I be for Halloween without you? The halfback of Notre Dame? Maybe a radioactive substance, half-life and all. Half-hearted? How about half-baked?

I wish we could go together, like the Tigris and Euphrates. When they join they form the Shatt-al-Arab, a river nobody ever heard of.

It's like in Robert Bly's poem "The Third Body." A man and woman, content to be where and who they are, sit near each other and through their breaths together feed someone others do not know, a third body the two obey and share in common and promise to love.

Though others know of it, only the man and woman see that body, and only their breaths feed it. Your breath and mine.

I'm sorry you're missing the latest visit by the Mississippi Queen, but so did everyone else. The river was still too high for her to dock, which makes me wonder how the farmers and merchants who depended on riverboat transportation got by during long floods in the days before interstate highways.

People are tired of the flood in every way you can think of. It's time to put on a mask and be someone else for a brief while. That someone is just a part of your personality that may be hidden. In Casey's case, not. In mine, well, I do believe in miracles.

Love, Sam