When Sprawl-o-ween eats October

Only four more shopping days to Halloween. That means our Halloween tree has been up for three weeks.

As Halloween trees go, ours is modest. It’s about 4-feet tall, is decorated with tiny rubber bats, some Jack-O-Lantern tinsel and has funereal black boughs to match my mood as we enter the Halloween home stretch.

Growing up, I never knew Halloween was anything but a single day, B-list holiday. It didn’t mean as much to me as Christmas, Easter or any of the other candy-plus-vacation holidays.

I’d dress up like a cowboy or an astronaut and go out and haul candy home in an old pillow case.

I dressed up purely for the candy. I didn’t harbor any childish ambitions to actually become a cowboy or astronaut. Back then, my only ambition was to become a boy who didn’t have to go to school.

Times change. Today, Halloween has become a month-long Caligulian candy fest. It has me wondering if the American Dental Association isn’t behind the whole spread.

Of course, the kids love it. Sprawl-o-ween means all of October is studded with adults handing out cheap candy at banks, drive-thrus and at parties in grocery stores and even church basements where you’d think a pagan holiday that tips its hat to Satan would be tsk-tsked by the holy folk.

No sign of that. Halloween is harmless to all but the dour fundamentalists who view it as another unholy assault on all that’s decent in America.

So I’m all for that.

But I just don’t get how this of all holidays became so super-sized. How in this age of childhood obesity, wanton candy distribution has yet to be demonized is a mystery.

I suspect many adults revel in the holiday for escapist opportunities. There’s nothing wrong with that. Life can be such a slog.

Me, I need less escape and more normal. With the glaring exception of near-zero income, man, I’ve got it made. I enjoy ample bar time, have a wonderful and understanding wife, and the kids are still at a tender age where a single glare will cease their sass.

That’s hardly all. The Pittsburgh Steelers are 5-1, author Keith Richards and I are now colleagues, and no matter what happens on election day, not a single vote for Bush/Cheney will be tallied.

Given the way my life is turning out, I’m surprised I don’t see kids shuffling up my sidewalk dressed as me. You’d think being me would be more aspirational to many aimless youth than, say, dressing up as a fireman.

My seasonal grouchiness is in direct contrast to that of my ‘weenie lovin’ wife -- and that’s as dangerous a line as you’ll find in a family-friendly blog.

She loves Halloween. The tree was her idea.

I guess much of my pique has to do with bats.

Not the rodent kind, mind you.

The Louisville Slugger kind.

For the past few years the monster that has become Halloween has devoured my precious post-season.

There are just too many Halloween-related events when baseball is at its most sublime. And with each passing game, I’m one day closer to the baseball Siberia that coincides with the cruelest months of the year.

Take last Halloween. Val was invited one of those over-the-top theatrical Halloweens where every room is decorated and all the guests look like extras from a movie where everyone gets slain.

It sure killed me because it was held during Game 4 of the World Series between the Phillies and Yankees.

Val -- and I told you she was understanding -- knew my aversion to dressing up as anything but an underemployed blogger and went easy on me.

She got out some old cat whiskers, tail, ears and the like.

While she was a come-hither kitty, and I wound up being a real sour puss.

I tried to be nice, but was furrious, er, furious to learn people who are into Halloween are cruelly judgmental of people who are not.

They looked at us like we didn’t belong. They made us feel inferior. They wondered who’d let us in.

For the first time in my life, me, a white man with cat whiskers, knew what it was like to be oppressed.

The sting of discrimination stuck in my paw, er, craw.

Sort of like the Halloween that ate October.

The man Maz made a Communist

I’m friends with a man who became a Communist because of Bill Mazeroski.

It’s true. My buddy Paul and I were sitting in a Pittsburgh bar after a Pirate game about 15 years ago when we struck up a friendly conversation with another baseball fan.

And with the exception of some addle-brained Cub fans, friendly is about the only kind of conversation you can have with a fellow baseball fan.

Unlike professional football, a game played exclusively by and for mental meatheads, baseball has a charming civility about it. The lax rhythms of the game lend themselves to sunny chats.

His name is Tom Zanot. He was about 60 years old, but maintained an animated demeanor about baseball like a junior high spaz on a six Pepsi sugar high.

He talked about all the great games he’d seen, the players he’d cheered and the recollections of more than 50 years of great Pirate baseball.

That was until we asked the one question every Pirate fan asks every other Pirate fan who was conscious during the magical 1960 season.

“Where were you when Maz homered?”

ESPN voted it the most sensational home run in World Series history. His walk off dinger led the scrappy underdog Pirates to Game 7 victory over Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris and the rest of the swaggering New York Yankees. 

Tom winced and said, “I don’t like to talk about that.”

But talk he did.

“You have to understand, I came of age in the 1950s,” he said. “I was raised to be respectful of the country. I was in ROTC at Penn State during the World Series. A friend of mine had tickets to Game 7. Great seats.”

His friend wanted Tom to skip marching drills and attend the game.

“‘Just blow it off,’ he said. ‘C’mon, it’s Game 7!’ But I felt it was my duty. So there I was on that beautiful Thursday afternoon.”

Right, left, right, left, right . . .

He told how he marched the whole afternoon while the rest of the baseball world fixated on what would become one of the greatest games ever played.

“Then right at 3:36 -- I remember looking at my watch -- I heard these cheers erupting from all over.”

As every Pirate fan knows, that’s the precise moment Maz homered. Pittsburgh fans everywhere went crazy.

Tom went right, left, right, left, right . . .

“To have missed it left me profoundly depressed. My life changed. I’d missed out on one of the greatest moments of my generation. Really, it broke my heart.”

Not thinking clearly, Tom decided to he needed to shake things up.

“I volunteered to serve in Vietnam. It was the biggest mistake of my life. I came to hate the war and my government for conducting it. That’s when I became a Communist.”

So, we asked, you became a Communist because of Bill Mazeroski?

“I never thought about it like that, but I guess so.”

The three of us ended up becoming great friends and he remains the only Communist who’s ever bought me beer, something that factors into my visceral disdain for Bolsheviks.

He moved to Florida and we haven’t seen him in years. I thought of our old comrade yesterday as I was attending what may be the world’s greatest pseudo sporting event.

It was begun by one man, Saul Finkelstein, on Oct. 13, 1985. All alone, he went to sit at the base of the lone remaining wall of old Forbes Field. It’s a 50-foot stretch of ivy covered brick in a small, shady park on the University of Pittsburgh campus. 

With a cassette recording of the original NBC broadcast he listened to the game, commercials and all, in real time so when broadcaster Chuck Thompson calls Maz’s home run ball leaving the old park it’s precisely 3:36 p.m.

What started with one man has grown to thousands, including Maz and every surviving Pirate from the 1960 championship team.

It’s Pittsburgh’s most magical gathering. Fans picnic, drink beer and sing off-key renditions of “Take Me Out To The Ball Game” during the seventh inning stretch. They bring mitts as if they expect haunted foul balls to start dropping out of the sky.

It’s difficult to convey the eeriness of listening to a broadcast of a game from 50 years ago and still feeling tense about the outcome.

I took it all in standing in what used to be centerfield.

Had it been 1960, I could have whispered pep talks to Pirate centerfielder Bill Virdon, Heck, I could have pantsed Mantle.

And at 3:36 when Maz’s homer leaves the park, the crowd erupts as if it was happening right before our very eyes. It’s as if the lousy, stinking Pirates of the last 18 years never happened.

That one city, one people can from one man preserve and nurture a memory like that makes me proud to be a Pittsburgher.

Mazeroski, a rugged son of a West Virginia coal miner, made a moment immortal, something to be forever savored.

That one good man lost his soul to a corrupt belief system in the bargain seems a small sacrifice.