A Joke at the Door, a Silence at the Table

By River Stormcaller

Two nights from now it is Samhain, the old Celtic new year that most people now call Halloween, and I am on Canyon Road at dusk with a staple gun and forty paper lanterns, hanging light for a festival that does not open for another week. The lanterns are the color of apricots. Willow supervises from the sidewalk with the expression of a dog who has seen me do worse. A man walking a bicycle stops to tell me the veil is thin this time of year, which is the polite Santa Fe way of saying hello. I have been thinking about the two oldest things people do on this night, and about how badly built I am for one of them. The first is guising. The second is the dumb supper. One of them is my entire personality. The other I have been avoiding for eleven years, and this year the moon is in my own sign and it is not letting me get away with it. ## The Original Trick Was a Performance Before costumes

came in plastic bags, there was guising. In Ireland and Scotland, people went from door to door on Samhain in disguise, and they did not get a treat for showing up. They got it for performing. A song, a rhyme, a joke, a bit of business with a hat. You knocked, you did your turn, and the household decided whether the door opened wide or a hand came out with something small in it. The performance came first. The sugar was after. Which means the jester is the oldest job on this holiday. Not the ghost. Not the witch. The one who has to be funny at a threshold with cold hands, for people who did not ask them to come. I have been doing a version of that my whole adult life. The doors are gallery openings now, and magazine editors, and the treat is a commission. The cold hands are the same. The Santa Fe Improv and Street Art Festival handed me a free hand as creative director, and the first

thing I want to build is a guising lane. Twelve doors, plywood, painted by local artists. You cannot buy your way down it. You knock and you do something. Max has already volunteered to juggle at the gate and heckle anyone who phones it in. In the grant notes I am calling this community building. Really it is a permission slip for strangers to be a little ridiculous in public, which is the only product I know how to sell. ## The Plate I Set for the Girl in Asheville The other custom is quieter. Some families kept a dumb supper on Samhain, a meal eaten without a word, with one extra place laid for the dead and sometimes a candle in the window to guide anyone wandering home. Dumb here means silent, not stupid, though I once made that joke at a table and watched it land like a wet coat. The first time I tried it I lasted four minutes. I filled the dead air with a bit about Willow's opinions

on decaf. Then I stacked the plates and told myself the ritual was not for me, that I am a woman of noise, that my work is with the laughing people. Which was a very tidy way of saying that silence scares me and I would rather be funny than be honest. This year the extra place is for the girl in Asheville who carried a film camera around a town that had no job for her yet, at fourteen, shooting the backs of people's heads because she was too shy to ask for their faces. She is not dead. She is just not here anymore. I do not think Samhain is only for the departed. It is for anything that has finished its season and deserves to be named before it goes. ## A Waning Moon in My Own Sign The moon tonight is a waning gibbous, which is the phase just past full, when the lit part shrinks a little each night. It is the half of the lunar cycle for putting things down rather than starting them. It

happens to be in Gemini. So is my sun. So is my rising. I noticed that at six in the morning and then could not stop noticing it. Gemini is the talker's sign, the twins, quick hands and a quicker mouth and three opinions before breakfast. And tomorrow Mercury makes a square to Mars, an aspect astrologers read as friction between the part of you that speaks and the part of you that acts, the kind of day where the thing you meant lands sideways. I read that forecast standing in my kitchen in socks and felt personally called out by a planet. Because there is a sentence I have not said to my friend Jamie. She moved here from our college town in the spring, and we have been circling a plan to lead the Sedona photo retreat together since summer. I have written the itinerary. I have priced the lodge. I have not asked her. I keep waiting for a moment soft enough to make it easy, and the waning

moon is laughing at me, because there is no soft moment. There is only the knock. ## The Knock I Am Rehearsing So here is what I am actually doing this Samhain, in addition to hanging apricot lanterns and keeping Willow out of the paint. I am setting one place at my own table, and I am lighting one candle in the front window, and I am trying the dumb supper again. Ten minutes. Timer on the counter. No jokes until it rings. The reason for the timer is that the ten minutes are the point. It is not a mystical endurance test. It is the only way I know to sit in a room with the girl with the film camera and let her look at what I built, without narrating it to her, without making it funny so it goes down easier. Then, when the timer rings and I have survived being a person in a quiet room, I am going to call Jamie and ask her in plain words. Not after the moon turns. Not after the festival.

That night. And I am building the guising lane. Twelve doors painted by twelve people who live here, a rule about knocking, Max at the gate with three beanbags and an opinion. Same rule for me, as it turns out. Do the turn. Ask the question. If she says no, I will hear it, and I will not turn it into a story about how the desert gets dry in October. ## Closing Reflection Two nights before Samhain, with the light thinning in Gemini and one square between the talker and the doer, there will be a plate set on a table in Santa Fe for a fourteen year old with a film camera and no career. The old year is closing out. The lanterns are up. Almost nothing in this plan is comfortable, which I am choosing to read as evidence that it is the right one. Laughter is a legitimate spiritual technology. I have believed that for years and I am not retracting it. But a technology is a tool, not a hiding

place. So this year I am going to knock on the door and be funny for the people who came for funny, and then I am going to sit down at my own table and be quiet for the one who needs quiet, and then I am going to ask Jamie out loud before the moon gets any thinner. If you are setting a place this weekend, put it where you can see it from where you sit. You already know who it is for.