Five Stories for Halloween

It’s that time of year again. Autumn is “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness” according to Keats, but to me, it is the season of things lurking in the shadows under the eaves of forests, under tables and beds, and certainly in the back of our minds. To celebrate, I’m sharing five more short stories at this, my favorite part of the year: Scary Season. Each Thursday in October, I will be posting a brand new short story on my blog, Shadows Lengthen.

This year's collection is listed below. Read them and enjoy ... IF YOU DARE (insert maniacal laughter).

Punch Buggy

Two sisters embark on a tense road trip to visit their ailing grandmother, navigating sibling rivalry and the stresses of the journey. But as they near their destination, a mysterious vehicle with a single headlight looms behind them, turning their drive into a chilling fight for survival.

Improv Cats

When jazz prodigy Wen-Dawg unleashes haunting, otherworldly music from his mysterious silver saxophone, his amateur bandmates find themselves drawn into a mesmerizing world. As the power of the music grows within them, they must confront the cost of brilliance and the truth lurking behind the notes.

The Downfall of Roddy Merton*

Roddy Merton, once a feared school bully shaped by his own violent upbringing, finds himself haunted by the memories and victims of his past in a chilling reckoning that forces him to face both his former deeds and the darkness in his own soul.

*Sensitive themes include emotional and physical abuse, homophobic language, neglect, violence, and deep psychological wounds—reader discretion is strongly advised.

“On a Country Road”

A man walks a lonely country road. Another man stops to change a tire and finds that his fascination with the walking man is a deadly thing.

“Gancho’s Haul”

Gancho, an ancient imp, moves in the shadows of life, stealing what we lose and feeding forces beyond our understanding with our sadness and disappointment. Mischievous and older than time, he keeps the balance between order and chaos delicately poised—beware what vanishes, for it may mean more than you realize.

As always, if spooky short stories aren't your cup of Irish breakfast tea, please feel free to scoop back through the previous DRO essays you may have skipped or missed. Back to my regular fare, come November.

Happy October! 

The Prince and I

Author’s Note: Hamlet, written by William Shakespeare between 1599 and 1601, is his longest and one of the most influential tragedies. Its story is based on an ancient Scandinavian legend about Prince Amleth, first recorded in the 12th century by the Saxon historian Saxo Grammaticus. The legend tells of a prince who feigns madness to avenge his murdered father, a tale Shakespeare adapted and enriched with Renaissance humanism and Elizabethan political themes.

The play was likely first performed around 1600, during the late years of Queen Elizabeth I's reign—a period marked by political strife and uncertainty because Elizabeth had no clear heir, paralleling the play's themes of succession and legitimacy. Early performances include one at the Globe Theatre and, unusually, a documented staging aboard the East India Company's ship The Dragon in 1607. Hamlet remains Shakespeare's most performed and studied drama, deeply rooted in the cultural and political anxieties of its time and drawing on earlier Elizabethan revenge tragedies such as Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy.

While we were in London, during our England trip in 2017, we did see a play in the New Globe theater, but it was Twelfth Night and not Hamlet, more’s the pity. It was no less enjoyable, but I hope to get back there one day to see the Prince where he once was played. 

Also, the 2022 action drama film, The Northman, is the tale as it may have happened based on Saxo Grammaticus’ telling. Worth seeing. Those familiar with Hamlet will see the connections.

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Shakespeare, to most people, evokes a sense of someone who may have existed and written some plays and poems in another era. We typically have to read some of his works in school, but the language of the time feels full of thees and thous and references to things that make no sense to us in the modern era. He and his works don't feel relevant, may seem impenetrable, and are difficult, if not impossible, to read.

During my time in high school, we read Romeo and Juliet. I think it was chosen mainly because the “star-crossed lovers” are themselves but teens, and the “hectic in the blood” is raging with hormones and drama for us, too, so they seem relatable. Even so, despite the play's ability to make sense to students for this set of topics, it fails to really click with us. This is true of any of The Bard's plays. As I said to a friend of mine who expressed a lack of appeal in Shakespeare, mainly because it was hard to understand, you have to see the plays performed. They are meant to be acted, not read, and, if performed correctly and well by those thespians trained in the art of Shakespeare's genius, they come alive in a way where we cannot miss the themes and moral lessons built in.

I have always been a bit of a nerd, of course. I fell in love with Shakespeare in middle school, when a family member bought me a graphic novel version of Hamlet. It was suitably dark, gloomy, and with themes of betrayal, poisoning, vengeance, and ghosts that suited me right down to my Doc Martins, and it captured my imagination. It was abridged, as I would find out later, and it glossed over some of the best bits, but it was one of my favorite stories. This was when I began to understand the significance of that particular play, but also the Bard as a writer and genius generally.

When it came to learning Romeo and Juliet, in high school, Mrs. Hooven did the play justice. She managed, somehow, to make it relevant, but the sessions in class where we circled our desks and were assigned parts to read were intolerable. With no context, Elizabethan stage English is not the most clear. When we watched the Franco Zeffirelli Romeo and Juliet film in class, which employed actual teenagers (and won several Oscars, as I recall), the story made sense and suddenly felt poignant and stirred emotions and other feelings, too.

That tiny glimpse of power was not felt again for me until the January term of my first year of college in Indiana, where I took a classic cinema course and we watched the 1948 Hamlet adaptation with the Prince of Denmark played by Sir Laurence Olivier. Again, my spirit was moved. Here was a tale that resounded in me. A son whose parent has died, expelled from his inheritance, and with a distracted, dramatic disposition, no self-confidence, and feeling lost and filmed moodily in deep shades of black and white. My situation wasn't exact, but it was close enough to feel a connection. Except for the “everyone dies at the end”, obviously.

This was when I started to become a Hamlet freak. I memorized the Yorick speech (“Alas, poor Yorick, I knew him Horatio”) that everyone remembers because the prince holding a skull is primarily what we think of when we think of Shakespeare. This may also be around the time when I started to feel more comfortable, more myself, like the prince, dressed all in black.

Later, I watched the Mel Gibson version, and secretly loved the atmosphere but hated Gibson's prince. He missed the nuance and the emotional anguish and, in place, gave a histrionic performance that missed even the most obvious rhythms of the iambic pentameter the play is written in. I must not pretend to have understood all this, yet. That came later, but I knew somehow it was wrong. Also, sadly, once again, the Gibson version cut out much of the original play. 

In school in Greensboro, working on my English degree (this was before I went back to my home country of philosophy), I signed up for a Shakespeare class, but two minutes in, I hated it. Here was a syllabus for dullards who had to take an English credit, not for those who respected the Bard. In a panic, because I needed the class, I asked another professor if I could do an independent study with him, about Shakespeare. Dr. Rosenblum assented and, for the next semester, we wandered the many hills and valleys of William Shakespeare's four best tragedies: Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, and Macbeth (or, The Scottish Play). I wrote four papers, read and watched each play done in various forms (it is the vogue now to set Shakespeare's plays in other eras), and found myself absolutely enamored of the brilliance not only of the Bard himself, but also of the many, many scholars and actors and directors—like Orson Welles, for example— who have managed to perform his plays with the true dedication and respect they deserve.

The BBC made a host of made-for-TV versions of the tragedies that were not abridgements. They combined the various available versions, from folios to quartos, to make a comprehensively accurate representation of the plays, using the same minimalist staging that would have been seen at The Globe Theater in London. The best version of Hamlet, at that point, was the 1980 version, called Shakespeare Tragedies: Hamlet, starring Sir Derek Jacobi as the indecisive prince and Sir Patrick Stewart as Claudius. I cannot remember much about Macbeth or Lear, but this version of Hamlet struck me dumb, and I watched it over and over on our old VHS machine. At three hours, thirty minutes, it captured, at that time, the most comprehensive performance I was aware of.

I passed the class with an A and suddenly, as Dr. Rosenblum had predicted, the play was lodged in my soul. Later, but around that same time, I bought a book with the play in it, which had a dramatized radio version of Hamlet on a CD in the back cover. I ripped the CD, so that I could listen to the performance while choring. This Naxos version is now my absolute favorite and, in my opinion, the best. It stars Anton Lesser as Hamlet and has excellent Foley theatrics, pacing, and honor of the music that followed the several songs in the performance. Around that same time, I bought a book at the Friends of the Library Bookshop, downtown, called The Oxford Shakespeare Hamlet, a complete and annotated version of the play with every historical reference footnoted, the music, the means and timings, and the various folios and quartos. 

I also have Dr. Rosenblum's four-volume series called The Greenwood Companion to Shakespeare, the massive Globe Illustrated Shakespeare, with The Complete Works Annotated, and volume two of Shakespeare for Students: The Tragedies. The only other truly faithful performance of Hamlet, based on all of these various versions (and depending heavily on the criticism by authors like Harold Bloom and Isaac Asimov—yes, that Asimov—of which I also own several copies, is Kenneth Branagh's 1996 version. This four-hour symphony gets almost everything right, accompanied by an all-star cast. It's not perfect, but it is well done and enjoyable. Branagh, who plays the ghost-addled prince, is too old (as were Gibson, Olivier, and Lesser) to capture a believable youth struggling with “an antic disposition,” but it serves as an excellent teaching mechanism for those not familiar.

When Elliott was learning about Hamlet in high school, and struggling, I was able to quote several passages “trippingly on the tongue,” obeying Hamlet's instructions to the Player King to a ‘T’. He kept asking questions because the play didn't make sense to him. It doesn't seem like a big thing to us, these days, perhaps because we're not monarchical or pestered by ghosts, but there is, as yet, a deeply moving story and one that “hath been taught us from a primal state”.

Hamlet, set amidst the looming stone walls of Elsinore Castle in Denmark, opens with a world unsettled by grief and suspicion. Prince Hamlet, reeling from the death of his father, is forced to confront a court reshaped by his mother’s hasty remarriage to Claudius, the new king, his uncle, and the suspected architect of his father’s demise. The supernatural makes its mark early: Hamlet’s late father’s ghost appears in the midnight gloom, urging his son to unveil the truth behind his “foul and most unnatural murder,” a command that changes Hamlet’s course and sets the shadows of revenge threading through the palace corridors.

As Hamlet grapples with the moral and existential weight of this revelation, the play becomes a study in delayed action and tangled emotions. Hamlet’s keen intellect and skepticism lead him to devise a play-within-a-play—“The Mousetrap”—meant to catch the king’s conscience, exposing Claudius’s guilt before the assembled court. All the while, the prince’s relationships fray: Ophelia, his lover, becomes collateral damage as Hamlet’s erratic behavior spirals and his trust in those closest to him—except Horatio—dissolves. As tension between outward appearances and inward truth grows, spies and double agents fill Claudius’s ranks, until nearly every character’s motives are suspect.

The tragedy explodes in the final act as the carefully set traps and grudges fester into violence. Poisoned chalices, rigged swords, and desperate confessions culminate in nearly universal destruction—royalty and innocent bystander alike. Hamlet, dying, finally enacts the ghost’s vengeance, but too late to save Denmark or himself. Amid the carnage, the play’s legacy sharpens: Hamlet’s struggle is both intensely personal and brutally political, highlighting the murky lines between action and inaction, justice and revenge, and the constant, restless search for truth in a world full of deception.

Like all of Shakespeare's plays, there are secondary and tertiary plots. After hastily—and accidentally—killing Polonius, while confronting his mother, Hamlet is set to be exiled to England, where he will be executed. Laertes, Plonius’ son and Ophelia's brother, returns from France in rage at his father's death and his sister's subsequent madness and questionable demise. Claudius and Laertes plot to kill Hamlet and make it look like an accident when he reappears on Danish soil. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, school friends sent by Claudius to spy on Hamlet, wind up on the chopping block in England, in the prince's stead. 

Meanwhile, the son of the king of Norway, in a posture of war toward Poland, invades Denmark under the cover of permission he had to cross the land, and usurp the Danish crown, but what he finds leaves him distraught, a hollow-eyed Horatio and the corpses of Laertes, Claudius, Gertrude, and, sadly, Hamlet himself.

The family is set up on a stage as a warning against all their sins, and so the play ends.

Despite the apparent differences in usage. Shakespeare's words from all his plays populate our language. His coinages are uncountable. We don't even know all of them. There are so many from Hamlet that I could write three essays, just listing them.

However, I feel compelled to share a few of my absolute favorites, and I encourage you to listen to or watch Hamlet again. Yes, I know it is gloomy, and everyone dies at the end (except Horatio), but you may learn something of value. And maybe, if you're lucky, you will find that it speaks to your soul.

Enjoy these quotes, but feel free to find ones that speak to you.

“So full of artless jealousy is guilt, it spills itself in fearing to be spilt.”

“Sorrows come not in single spies, but in battalions.”

“Rightly to be great is not to stir without great argument, but greatly to find quarrel in a straw when honor's at the stake.”

“Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried, Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel; But do not dull thy palm with entertainment Of each new-hatch'd, unfledg'd comrade.”

 “Let the Devil wear black, I'll have a suit of sables.”. This one needs explanation: Hamlet is saying that the Devil may come ready for mischief, but that he (Hamlet) will be even more ready and better dressed in black fur.

“Seems," madam? Nay, it is; I know not "seems." 'Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother, Nor customary suits of solemn black, Nor windy suspiration of forced breath, No, nor the fruitful river in the eye, Nor the dejected 'havior of the visage, Together with all forms, moods, shapes of grief, That can denote me truly: these indeed seem, For they are actions that a man might play: But I have that within which passeth show; These but the trappings and the suits of woe.” 

Esse quam videri about sums it up.

What Afterlife Will You Choose?

Author’s Note: 

Sometime in 2018 or 2019, I was accosted by a man holding a “Heaven or Hell?” sign while walking to get lunch at a local town festival. He was polite enough, but I’d had long years of preparation to answer his sign’s query. He didn’t like my answer. I quoted scripture to him, directly out of Jesus’s red ink, and he got rather peeved with me (the man, not Jesus). Later that day, police rounded up this man and his fellows because they did not have the proper paperwork to be at the festival, and they were made to depart. However, all of this got me thinking about what really happens after we die, and it is a topic I have returned to many times in the intervening years. 

The Scripture I quoted? It’s the one where Jesus tells people not to be performative with their piety. Matthew, 6:5: “And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward.” In this case, I’m pretty sure that reward is a reference back to one of the options on the man's sign. But who can know for sure?

I hope that, when the time comes for me to expire, I am surrounded by my loved ones. Nothing would please me more than to spend my final moments with the people I love most in the universe. If, however, that option is not left open to me, I have often fantasized about going out while doing something terribly heroic, saving lives or defending the innocent. I know that's not very likely, but I can honestly say, of all the possible endings, they both fit my philosophy.  

As Hamlet so eloquently points out, death is “the undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveler returns.” Over the eons of human history, our species has created millions of possible afterlife scenarios, all of which are based on no evidence at all that we know of. A recent book about the topic, the 2010 bestseller *Heaven is For Real*, is ostensibly about a little boy’s trip to Heaven when he briefly “died” from complications of appendicitis. The book blew up, and I remember people putting it on hold and complaining that we didn’t have enough copies. In the years since its publication, though, it received a lot of criticism, mainly by other Christians who called it “Heaven Tourism” and a “cash grab to pay medical bills.” There’s no evidence to suggest that the boy in the book was ever clinically dead. The whole thing seems like a ploy to exploit rubes, like all such books and stories, but people still read it all the time and probably believe it.  

It’s not just Christianity. I know of no monotheistic religion that has ever managed to believably prove its own version of the afterlife. Not that most of them have created an appealing afterlife to begin with. Some seem brutal, others unspecific, still others cannot seem to agree among themselves about what their own books say. Despite this, they proclaim to know without doubt what each of us can expect when we, again quoting Hamlet, “shuffle off this mortal coil.”  

Evangelicals have very strong feelings about heaven. Indeed, they use it as one half of a hammer-and-anvil combo intended to guilt people into belief. Problematically, Evangelicals claim to want everyone to go to Heaven, while simultaneously holding the incoherent belief that not everyone can be “saved,” as they put it. This goes nowhere in explaining the incessant Bible-thumping. Yet, specific questions about heaven are rarely forthcoming. I was told, as a lad, that we would get to see our lost loved ones, live eternally, and enjoy things that our fragile terrestrial bodies couldn't manage while living. When I dug deeper, though, I was put off by what I found.  

Heaven, it turns out, is not endless ice cream without tummy aches and soaring like an eagle. Rather, it is the mindless worship of a capricious and disturbingly self-absorbed deity, who demands constant adoration for all eternity. That sounds too much like the DPRK to me. Even the examples of heaven given in the scriptures that differ from this are dubious. References to mansions, pearly gates, and storing up treasures feel too full of avarice and greed to be anything truly heavenly. The message seems to suspiciously address the poor masses with an unctuous promise: “Just wait till you die and things will get better.” If one is living in a Hobbesian nightmare, like serfs in a feudal dystopia, then images of relief from pain, being reunited with lost loved ones, and eternal joy probably sound great. Still, to enjoy that one has to cease to live. It feels like a scam.  

As a child, I was told that I would be able to meet members of my family who had gone on before, so long as they had accepted Jesus as their personal savior. Of course, there was no real way to know who had agreed to this proposition. A question of this nature plagued my mother about her father's position in that afterlife for most of her own life. Since she could never know, it was a source of doubt and pain. He became, in essence, Schrödinger's father, and the only way she could ever know was to “wait and see.” She truly suffered and yet said little, because we were also told that longing to see our loved ones in heaven was akin to ancestor worship and idolatry and therefore, a sin.  

As bald-faced and tawdry as these doctrines appear in hindsight, they are specifically designed to hold people hostage by their legitimate grief and longing to be reunited with those who have died. Emotional manipulation and coercion seem a high cost for the proclaimed certainty of heaven. When I see proselytizers holding signs with “Heaven or Hell?” painted on them, I have an answer prepared that might shock them if they ever ask me which I’d choose.  

Judaism has a heaven, possibly borrowed from its ancient Hellenic or Mesopotamian traditions, where we might be able to commune with our ancestors or great ones from ages of yore. I admit that this is desirable to me. Judaism is less of a gatekeeper than a speculator, it is true, and places more value on legacy in its most temporal sense than on some paradise in the clouds. Those who don't rate that afterlife wind up in Sheol, a bleak and gloomy underworld, sometimes translated as “the grave.” Hey, at least there isn’t eternal torture.  

It would be interesting to be able to commune with Einstein or Spinoza in a Judaic heaven. Sadly, a cherem was placed on Spinoza by his coreligionists for his writings, which they believed he composed to disprove God. This excommunication was intended to deny him access, among other things, to his faith's afterlife. Pretty audacious, we might think, but this sort of thing happens all the time in monotheistic faiths. However, Spinoza was far too humble and never said a word against his accusers. I take pleasure in noting that we remember him and his incredible contributions to philosophy and human thought, while the greedy and dogmatic mammals who signed the ostracism order have long been forgotten.  

◇◇◇  

Buddhism and Hinduism take pages from earlier, possibly pagan religions far older than Christianity or even Judaism, and add ancestor veneration as a noble and expected practice rather than a sin. Both describe Nirvana not as a place, but as the final achievement of absolute emptiness after eons of purgatorial reincarnation. Loved ones who live good lives may progress from human to more noble beasts, but weak or evil humans could be demoted to bugs or worms or other vermin. Eventually, if one lives well enough, ultimate emptiness can be achieved. This afterlife, although the multiple-lives aspect seems absurd to me, has the merit of at least nodding at the most likely physical reality, to which I am coming.  

The polytheisms and folk religions, generally, have no afterlife to speak of, but my favorites are those where the way one leads life determines their afterlife. The Norse mythologies depended heavily upon a fatalistic belief system. If one died in battle, a most desired end, one could be sent to Valhalla, to battle in the coming universe-ending cataclysm called Ragnarok. If one died at sea, one went to the realm of the sea god, Ran, and his wife, and ate roasted fish for eternity. A more underworld-like afterlife awaited those who died in bed because of illness. None of it is particularly attractive, but it says a lot about how people imagined that what they did in life echoed in eternity.  

The many natural religions, which are sometimes called heathen, pagan, or indigenous, seem to have a deeper respect not just for humanity, but for all life and the planet as well, and therefore, often feel like a more believable solution. In these faiths, after we die, our bodies go back to the earth to make something else grow. This seems a desirable form of eternal life and also puts the final, inarguable position into play: that we are made up of what makes up our planet, our galaxy, our universe, and that, in the end, we go back to it. As Carl Sagan so beautifully put it, “We are made of star stuff.”  

I find this deeply enchanting. It is likely the most reasonable and scientific reality as well, and as such, is the least problematic position. However, if one really feels the need for a defined afterlife, then I propose another option, which is that we make our own afterlife. And no, I'm not talking about consequences, as in Hell or damnation or reincarnation. Rather, I am suggesting that we literally compose our own afterlife, as we would like it to be.  

I'm not a fan of the traditional afterlife options, but I can take the best elements from some of them. I love the idea of huge tables of food, each surrounded with people one might wish to speak with. I would obviously choose Tolkien, Orwell, Lewis, Doyle, Churchill, the Cromwells (Thomas and Oliver), Socrates, members of my family that I have missed or never met. We could eat without getting full and chat without getting tired. We could even have debates, where I could continue to have the brilliant experience of learning and growing. I mean to say, why stop after death, right?  

Then, of course, there are the other desirable possibilities. I could imagine myself wandering the edges of a Scottish loch, dwelling in a deep pine forest on the side of a mountain, just sitting, listening, feeling, observing, never cold, hungry, wet, or tired.  

I could wish to see the progress of my children and grandchildren and other members of the family that go on without me. Since the one unbreakable rule seems to be that one cannot ever come back, though, it might cause stress or strain to wish to intervene, like the ghost of Hamlet's father, to the benefit of reputation or to aid in some way.  

Ironically, that brings me back to an aspect of the afterlife that has always fascinated me but which I find to be more daunting than any putative damnation. What if, when someone ceases to live, rather than passing on completely, they get stuck, unable to find peace, and wander in a twilight realm between life and death? Sounds too much like other silly ideas, like purgatory or limbo, to me. Still, it is a daunting idea.  

Speaking of Tolkien, his idea of Valinor, the Undying Lands beyond the western sea, has always been something I wished were true. The idea that death is not the end, and that we go on, is one that is a formative part of the way we see the universe. The hardest thing in the world is to imagine a world where one no longer exists in any way. This is impossible for a conscious mind to consider, specifically because consciousness cannot imagine no consciousness.  

The ancient works of Bushido, as written in The Book of Five Rings and Hagakure, both express the requirement of the human mind to contemplate death at every possible opportunity. This sounds morbid, but there is a point beyond the depressing nature of the topic. Thinking of oneself being burned alive, cut open, attacked with spears, swords, bullets, wasps, a gang of hoodlums, or even being rent to pink mush by a trampling rhino are all intended to get the mind used to the idea that we are impermanent. Life is fragile. None of us will get out alive.  

That thought is daunting. Our natural position is to fear death. We know at some very intuitive level that, to quote Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men, a thing we don't talk about at parties, that we are not here for long. We manage to convince ourselves otherwise and live in a veil of self-delusion. This deception is compounded by the lies told by religions that pretend there is something else beyond the wall of death, which both cheapens and ultimately negates our behavior in the moment.  

This mindset is off-putting. Why should I only do good in life because of a promised reward after death? I also shouldn't behave in life because I fear eternal punishment when I die. Neither of those positions puts the onus on us to be our best selves in the moment for the right reasons. This is why it seems that some monotheists are miserable.  

Focusing on death may seem to be a similar motivation, but there is one difference. Understanding that we are going to die—must die—and that our end can happen at any point and with little input from us, means that we have to try to take advantage of living in the moment. Understanding our mortality boosts our morality. If we know that this moment is all we have, we tend to behave better in that slice of time.  

It also helps us to be less egocentric. I’m not the only one who suffers and eventually will die. Everyone else is experiencing those things as well. How can I help them? By telling them that things will be better when they die, or by showing them the compassion and empathy of solidarity in mortality? I know which one seems right to me.  

I know what my answer would be to the “Heaven or Hell?” question on that sign, and I have and will give it again. Neither. I certainly don’t want to be remembered for spending my Saturdays holding up religious signs by the highway. To me, focusing on what happens after we die cheapens the one real miracle most of us take for granted every day: we’re alive now. Since I don’t know if I’ll be here later, or tomorrow, or even in a week, I want to spend more time with the people I love now. That’s the legacy I want to leave behind.  

That’s the one thing that I think the Norse and Germanic folk religions get absolutely right. Our legacies are the part of ourselves that really do live on in the hearts and memories of those who knew and loved us. That is how we go on. Someday, when our grandchildren are old, they will look back, hopefully with joy, and remember me, and in that way, I will live on. When they tell their children and grandchildren about me, I will live on, just as my mother, her father, and my grandparents live on in my heart and mind. That’s the real afterlife. That’s the one that I will ultimately choose. Unlike other variants, the work starts here and now, and, it makes the most sense.

Jean Therapy

The best pair of jeans I ever had was in high school. They were dyed navy blue, had a button fly, and fit my skinny pins perfectly, which is always an issue, as I have—as Micki has frequently put it—disturbingly long legs. I won't speak to the density of my stockpile in those days, however. I may have had three pairs of jeans, twenty t-shirts, a handful of favored flannel shirts, and a teenager's penchant for (or lack of) self-care, but of all my clothes, that one pair of jeans was perfect.

By the mid-90s, they wore to the point of tearing. One of the knees blew out, and I retired them, a little heartbroken, to be used as choring wear. The thing is, I distinctly remember wearing those jeans even with a hole in the knee for chores, not because I needed them, but because I had become so attached. I loved them.

Despite my love of Grunge music, which was quite new in that era, I wasn’t Eddie Vedder or Kurt Cobain, so I didn’t wear torn jeans to public school. The rest of their style I adopted, but torn or shredded jeans is where I drew the line. I still have that same sartorial instinct. On a walk about the neighborhood with Micki, several years ago, I fell and tore out the knee of a pair of grey chinos that I loved. Aside from the pain of the skinned knee, we went straight home, and I tore them up for rags and put on something with full knees in them.

Today, torn jeans are the fashion. I hear myself writing this in my head, and I know that I sound old, but I’m not criticizing so much as remarking. On a recent dinner date at our favorite local sports-themed restaurant, I counted no less than nine people wearing jeans with whole sections missing. Thigh, knee, shin, just gone. One person (they were all females) had so many holes, they were more akin to poorly made shorts than jeans. Fashion, for me, has a great deal less to do with looks and more to do with practicality. A good pair of jeans looks good, yes, but they are also reliable at keeping one’s legs covered and protected, which is the point, right? Maybe not.

Morbid curiosity impelled me to look up what a pair of dismantled dungarees cost, and I was stunned to find that a good pair of fashion-forward holey jeans went anywhere from $60 to $160, depending on the retailer. Imagine paying that for a partial pair of jeans. Style is important—too important. Humans like to look nice, and at some point, trends and fads dominate our thinking so that, if we’re not wearing what the cool kids are wearing, we feel as though we don’t fit in totally. This ought to end a minute after it starts in middle school, but it lasts through the professional years, too. I just don’t see how shredded jeans, no matter how trendy, can ever really be useful. Other than large bits of thigh, shin, and ankle showing between tiny strips of denim, what do they do?

Now, I have to say this here: I own a pair of jeans that I wear for yardwork that have a pretty significant hole just below the fly. I noticed this one day while wearing them to a friend's house to clean up leaves and debris from a fallen tree. I hope I'm the only one who noticed. Other than this one failure of the fabric, they did yeoman's service for keeping my legs safe from saws and axes and flying chips and splinters. I only wear them now if I'm working alone in the yard. They aren’t appropriate for anything else. They only lasted a few years, too, which is unusual for jeans.

Actually, industry standards have fallen off somewhat in the last few decades. I wear jeans every day, and they lose their shape, their color, and their durability very quickly compared to what I used to be able to get. Also, it must be said, jeans in my day (ugh, that phrase!) were not woven with stretchy fabric. It took months of wear, maybe even years, before you got them just right. They were hard-wearing, though, and dependable, and unless you gained some serious weight, they fit just right for even more years. 

When I outgrew something, a common problem for a kid who reached six feet in third grade, my mother would bring me to the VF Outlets, as we called them, and stock me up. Jeans in those days were not what you would call stylish, at least not the ones I was getting. They were coming pre-faded, or “acid-washed”, but they were still like putting on cardboard. They required a great deal of stretching and bending. Early on, she would wash and hang them dry outside, which reinvigorated whatever fabric toughness they were woven with. They totally resisted prickles and thorns, were impervious to grass, mud, sand, grit, ice, snow (so long as they didn’t get soaked), and fire. They were easy to clean, relatively inexpensive, and, if I didn’t grow out of them too quickly, lasted forever.

The first time putting on new jeans was always disheartening. They were stiff, and the creases could bite tender skin. They also had massive brass zippers that were the closure equivalent of a grinding maw near one's most delicate parts. It was best to never be in a hurry when zipping up, as that zipper could mangle like throwing a hot dog to a hungry Doberman. This is why I loved those button-fly jeans so much. It took longer to undo the fly (best not to wait until back teeth were floating) and a bit longer to redo them, but there was never any chance of damage to the male anatomy. 

Jeans in those days didn't require a belt. They were a bit longer in the loin area, and one could be assured that, bending or stooping, the pants wouldn't rip or slide down enough to reveal a partial view of foundation garments. This is one area where modern jeans have failed every test. I always wear a belt and have done so for years, but even with a belt strapped tightly across one's midsection, bending or kneeling causes the back of the jeans to slide down. They can pull down skivvies and untuck a shorter undershirt. Thus, I am forever pushing my shirts back in and hitching the jeans up. Anatomically speaking, I’ve got super long legs, as I’ve said, no butt to speak of, and a long torso. Because jeans are now made to fit the greatest common denominator, I have trouble finding long handles that fit my specific needs. They either come with absurdly short legs or absurdly wide waists or both. I’m not judging. I’ve been tubbier than in my whole life in the last eight years, but I never went above a size 38 waist. Now that I’m back to something more like when I was in my 30s, despite the normal changes to one’s body and the inevitably odd body shape that the universe granted me, buying jeans can be difficult.

Most styles are preshrunk, which is helpful. I remember getting a pair of jeans for myself, on one of my first forays into the world of buying clothes with my own money. They fit perfectly, looked amazing, and I remember feeling truly excited about them. I took them home and washed them to get out the sizing and that new clothes smell, and when I went to put them on the next time, I nearly broke my leg trying to get it through the pant hole. When they were finally on (not zipped or buttoned), I almost wept. They were, like the Grinch’s heart, three sizes smaller. 

Shrinkage of that sort is not common anymore. However, black jeans (which are what I like to wear for work) fade quickly. The sable beauty of a new pair of jeans begins to fade after just one washing. Soon enough, they are charcoal grey. They still wear well, considering all the emotional and stylistic accommodations I have to make for them, and they don’t shred at the knee quickly, which is nice. They’re Levi’s, which I never wore before, having always been a Lee man, but you gotta get what you can get.

My grandmother was a seamstress, and she, like the Animals song says, sewed my new blue jeans. Nana was amazingly gifted when it came to making clothes, and all of our baby and toddler stuff was of her vintage. One of her former coworkers gave her a bolt of truly traditional indigo denim, and she bought rivets and golden thread. Jeans of the true, deep indigo, are now popular again and can be seen worn by gents two decades my senior who can make casual look like a GQ cover. I'm not a fan, per se, but probably because of my earlier experiences.

Nana's jeans were hard. They were almost black, but the bright golden thread and brass rivets were fodder for my school peers to mock. They were straight-legged dungarees, but that is not what is meant today. Nana, bless her, cut the legs dead straight. If one could run in those jeans, excess fabric to either side of the leg continuously flapped against the other side. As if it wasn’t bad enough that I was already a laughing stock for this and the bright yellow twine, they actually made crinkling sounds when sitting or standing, and turned my legs blue. Jeans made from new sailcloth would have been more tolerable.

As a kid, it was almost impossible to say no to clothes from family, so I took them, and after begging to be allowed to not wear them, I only wore them when I visited Nana. On those visits, I was usually hanging with Uncle Dan, and not likely to cause hysterics with him, as he usually wore the same style. 

Jeans today come in so many shapes and sizes that it can be hard to find anything even remotely close to my “style”. I wear jeans daily, so I like to have multiple pairs of the same black color and style, which, like Einstein (and this is the only way I'm like Einstein), I only have to pull an outfit, not think about it. Saves time and mental power for other things, like walking into rooms and forgetting why.

Modern fabrics have all but made denim irrelevant in its former role as tough-wearing, resilient trousers for the hardworking cowpoke or welder of radio towers. I can buy a pair of pants made from fabric that makes them warm in the winter, cool in the summer, flexible, stain and moisture resistant (I sweat a lot), and essentially water resistant. As it happens, I do have some of these, and I like them. This style of lower-half coverings is great for hiking (jeans are not, and I'm getting to that) and packs beautifully in tight rolls. Many of them can also be worn more than once and resist odoriferous emanations caused by unavoidable flatulence or a day of hard, sweaty work.

Jeans are tough, resistant, and durable. They don’t keep you warm in the cold or cool in the heat. If they get wet and it is cold, you could be in the worst situation of your life. They are great for work, if you're allowed to wear them, and while they are perfect for just about any situation, from heavy labor to the GQ gent cover, they aren't welcome for most office dress codes (except for Fridays, if you've paid your dollar) and only for undercover police work. 

I'll never understand paying full price for a partial pair of jeans, but then, I'll never understand fads where people wear things because other people say it is cool. The chunks of missing denim fad is, I think, an attempt on the part of Big Fashion to see just how far they can take absurd ideas before the public says “Hell no!”. So far, the public hasn't uttered a peep.

Even so, I like jeans. They just wear harder. They really are the ideal fabric for tough, outdoor activities in dry, moderate weather. Given the chance, I would add jeans to a list of free, perfectly American things that anyone and everyone could order forever. 

The next time I blow out a pair of jeans, though, I can just cut chunks out of them and be really hip for a while, and I can use the squares of fabric left over to wave away mosquitoes, snakes, and maybe UV rays.