Trick or treat

I was prepared for 'complicated, demanding, suspicious and reserved' but what I encountered was a person straightforward, accommodating, trusting and open, someone I've been happy to know.

Where had that pre-assessment come from? It had led me to look out for a certain expression, perhaps like one on a grimacing kabuki mask, indicating a person I'd have to teach defensively. I'd briefly rehearsed a few scenarios, assembled a set of materials, and, as it were, waited balancing on the balls of my feet. But the mask didn't match the man. He was congenial, curious, ready to learn.

What to do, then, about the mask? Somebody before me had constructed it, based on their encounter, and sent it ahead--a helpful presentation of what to expect, and how to prepare. But the mask didn't match the man. As we worked together, I found myself thinking sometimes about it: how could it be so completely opposite of my experience? Was I missing something? Did he suspect? Would he care?

Such a fierce mask as I had been shown would not have been untoward among the the goblins, the crimson-winged devils with red wings, the big cats at my door this Halloween evening, all looking (or playing at looking) fearsome--to win their treats. they clomped up the front steps in threes and fours, and banged hard on our door--our bell doesn't work. When we opened it, there were the made-up faces and masks, the costumes homemade and store-bought.

Are you here for tricks?, I asked, when what the baffled kids held out their bags and plastic pumpkins for sweet swag. Apart from a girl with green leaf flaps sewn all over her, Mother Earth, whose hand I shook, they were all pretending to be something more scary, more dangerous than they were, even the befuddled babe in arms with black marks smeared on her face to make her a monster.

The chewy fruit and raisins went quickly. There there was lot of laughing a picture-taking. Many  calls of 'Thank  you' calls from the parents and older sibling out on the street. We recognized some of the kids on the street. I canvassed last weekend  for votes, I thought; they tonight for candy.

But masks seem to have a life of their own, apart from whether they are inadvertent or intention, imputed to others or assumed by ourselves, serious or playful, accurate or disjunct. Monarchs used to woo by sending paintings, and today it's done on internet mating sites with artfully unposed pictures, each image an assertion concerning the person represented. Get to know me better. The masks on the children were references to what people are capable of being. Beware.

Now the 'kabuki' mask hangs in my museum of memories like an anthropological artifact. It certainly matches somebody. Sometimes it even fits me.