even*cleveland: imaginary outfit: nocturnal creatures

imaginary outfit: nocturnal creatures

It started with a story about Fred, the orphaned baby raccoon we raised when I was a little girl (my dad was a naturalist, so injured and abandoned owls, squirrels, snakes and other creatures sometimes cycled through our lives until they were ready to return to the wild). Or maybe it was the little moon-obsessed raccoon in the Margaret Wise Brown book. Whatever the reason, Hugh is fascinated with raccoons. Besides Fred, an imaginary raccoon named Hehe has appeared, with a fondness for messes, hiding, eating fried chicken, and making raccoon sounds (a sort of unsettling hiss, as it happens). So, with Halloween in mind, I found a pattern for a raccoon coat (Simplicity 1477), and my talented mother turned corduroy into magic, and Hugh now dresses like a raccoon whenever he likes.

He likes to tell us about how nocturnal creatures come out at night, so I imagined us as a family of night-loving animals out trick-or-treating—raccoon, owl, and fox—because we'll likely stay home after all. It's cold after a month of weirdly warm days and there's a chance of snow, and while I have happy childhood memories of bunchy long-johns under my Halloween costume and chilly toes even after running from house to house, Hugh's (slightly) less candy-obsessed.

For me, Halloween is a holiday of porch lights and friendly faces, preluded by the hum of my mother's sewing machine, fed with glue sticks and glitter, and finished with a handful of crumpled Tootsie Roll wrappers. I hold on to that, zombie baby decorations notwithstanding. I may channel my inner second-grader and make a haunted house diorama.

Happy Halloween.

What sort of diary should I like mine to be? Something loose-knit and yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace anything, solemn, slight or beautiful, that comes into my mind. I should like it to resemble some deep old desk or capacious hold-all, in which one flings a mass of odds and ends without looking them through. I should like to come back, after a year or two, and find that the collection had sorted itself and refined itself and coalesced, as such deposits so mysteriously do, into a mould, transparent enough to reflect the light of our life, and yet steady, tranquil compounds with the aloofness of a work of art. The main requisite, I think, on reading my old volumes, is not to play the part of a censor, but to write as the mood comes or of anything whatever; since I was curious to find how I went for things put in haphazard, and found the significance to lie where I never saw it at the time.

V. Woolf

Don't be amazed if you see my eyes always wandering. In fact, this is my way of reading, and it is only in this way that reading proves fruitful for me. If a book truly interests me, I cannot follow it for more than a few lines before my mind, having seized on a thought that the text suggests to it, or a feeling, or a question, or an image, goes off on a tangent and springs from thought to thought, from image to image, in an itinerary of reasonings and fantasies that I feel the need to pursue to the end, moving away from the book until I have lost sight of it. The stimulus of reading is indispensable to me, and of meaty reading, even if, of every book, I manage to read no more than a few pages. But those few pages already enclose for me whole universes, which I can never exhaust.

Italo Calvino

Why didn't she try collecting something? It didn't matter what. She would find it gave an interest to life, and there was no end to the little curiosities one could easily pick up.

Henry James

imaginary outfit: nocturnal creatures

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