There’s a perennial costume store that crops up in the strip mall near my home every fall. When it’s not Halloween season, the space sits vacant, a big dark void between Sneaky Pete’s and Ellis Piano. The parking lot attached to this place just happens to be one of my favorite cut-throughs to Highway 31. Now, because I utilize this shortcut on a daily basis all year, I admit I have entitlement issues. Therefore, I have to work very hard at practicing patience with all the new pedestrian traffic messing with my flow. It’s not always easy, but I think I do a pretty decent job.
Whenever possible, or down right dangerous and/or illegal to do otherwise, I will yield to the occasional Gosselin-haired woman carrying a bag containing what I imagine to be some naughty Raggedy Ann ensemble for herself, or way worse, a French maid mini dress for her French bulldog. And yes, I willingly and momentarily remove my foot from the gas pedal just long enough to wait for the pudgy kid squeezing a chili-slaw dog with one hand and swinging a rubber severed zombie head by its frayed polyester dreadlocks with the other. And! Because I am bound by law to do so, I will on occasion give the right-of-way to the pubescent couple—one hand each buried in the other’s back pocket—headed inside to purchase matching girl/boy eighties punk rocker costumes. Because really old historic-y costumes
are hilarious.
However, sometimes when I least expect it, there is a bright spot in this daily route.
Death.
About once a week, I have the pleasure of crossing paths with a teenaged grim reaper hired to promote the store. His job is to dance on the side of the highway with a huge orange piece of poster board stapled to a six-foot high orange stick.
It’s sort of like God is looking down and saying, Wow, Wendy is a nightmarish ball of self-induced stress and unwarranted tenseness and anger today. She may need a quick reality check. I think I’ll have her take the cut-through, and get a little glimpse of Death.
And poof! There he is, a scrawny little slip of a boy draped in an oversized shiny black reaper frock that belts just below the waist with nylon rope and is complete with jagged cowl sleeves that hang past his black satin-gloved fingertips. His head is a massively disproportionate hooded plastic skull with huge bobbley eyes that jiggle freely, effortlessly, and totally independently of one another.
The first time I saw him, he had just left (or abandoned) his side-of-the-highway post and was headed back toward the store. I could see that he’d cleverly (or absent-mindedly) propped his orange stick-sign against the small magnolia tree near the road. He must have done this in an effort to free up the hand that was not dragging his long plastic sickle blade, so that he could comfortably tote his Strawberry Banana Vivano. I stopped the car to let him saunter across.
We locked eyes (or tried to) for a moment, I smiled, and then I couldn’t help but laugh out loud. He slowly nodded his enormously bulbous skull in my direction while raising his soy-protein supplemented smoothie up as a gesture of gratitude, and in honor of what must be a shared respect for all things universally funny—like an ancient symbol of despair and desolation delighting in a healthy fruity energy drink from Starbucks.
Death and I have seen each other several times since that faithful day. And he loyally takes a moment to pause his appallingly vulgar (yet somehow it works for him) pole-dancing routine performed passionately and disturbingly with his big orange stick-sign, to nod his three-foot-by-two-foot potato skull politely again in my direction. Just like a true Southern gentleman.
One of these days, as a small thank you for making my day on so many occasions, I may just work up the courage to a send him over a Pumpkin Spice Frappuccino. If not. Hey, there’s always next year.
