This morning, while it was quiet, I went up the street with
my trusty spade and I slid it under him, lifted him, and carried him to the
copse at the bottom of the green. There, among the grass clippings and the secateured
twigs, I laid him to rest.
This wasn’t good neighbourliness or even civic duty. The
Halloween Frog had been playing on my mind, sufficient to be the subject of
this week’s blog entry. So it was in my own interests to see him moved on to
somewhere less public.
I can close the book on him now… right after I’ve told you a
bit about him.
The Halloween Frog showed up a few days before Halloween. At
first, I thought he was still alive. He was sat on the pavement, right on the
corner where one street in the Estate becomes another. It was nice to see him,
a perfect little frog right there on our street. It wasn’t a normal sight. It
was kind of cool. Except. Well, except he was dead, of course. That became
clear pretty quickly, on closer examination. I wondered what had killed him. He
was in a perfectly natural Froggie pose and there wasn’t a mark on him. Not
then at least. I gave a mental shrug and moved on. Nothing to see here.
He was still there on my way home from work and he was a
slightly less welcome sight, now that it was clear that he had not moved since
I saw him last nor would he ever move again. Not of his own accord anyway. If
he was ever going to move again, somebody was going to have to move him.
And nobody did.
He was quite the little stroll from my house so I didn’t see
it as my thing to be going up there and moving him. Maybe I should have.
Eventually I did. But not soon enough. Not quite soon enough.
On the second day, the day before Halloween, the frog had
developed an extrusion of white foam from its mouth area. It seemed a little
flatter on the ground. Not quite the firm, rounded, figure of the day before.
On Halloween itself, the foam was slightly more pronounced and the roundedness was
slightly less so. Something was happening, that was for sure, and it wasn’t pretty
and it wasn’t fun.
And, because of the day and night that was in it, this
thought started to rattle around in my head. Death is not fun. The rapid
deterioration of the mortal frame is not cool or attractive by any stretch of
any imagination. Yet here we were in that day and evening when little corpses
come out and circumnavigate the neighbourhood in search of sugary treats. Their
homes are decorated with long haired skulls that scream silently at passing
folk, their front gardens boast half open caskets with skeletal hands groping
their way out.
And, all the while, a very real creature was slowly turning
to corruption, right out there on the front street.
Don’t get me wrong. I love Halloween. Always have. As a kid
I was fascinated by walking skeletons and spooks and Hollywood monsters. Just
like all the other kids. Hell, I still am. It’s just, this year, the little
frog and its insalubrious public deterioration made me wonder a bit. I wondered
about what logic drives us to encourage this fascination in death and ‘the
skull beneath the skin’ in our little kids. Are we preparing them for something
in the nicest, most fun, way possible? Or are we cocking a snook at the fate that inevitably awaits us all a little way down the road?
You can see why I needed to get my spade, this sunny Sunday
morning, and commit the frog-corpse back the wood from whence it hopefully
came. By this morning it was a flat jelly-like simulacrum of a reptile, covered
in billows of grey viscous foam.
Halloween is a very good thing, to my mind. But it is also
good that it keeps itself a considerable distance from the truth of the things
it proports to celebrate. It also helps that it dodges two of the most unavoidable
realities of death.
One, that we won’t really continue to look all that cool
after we go.
And two, that we are not ever coming back.
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