Poison Candy

Three years ago almost to the day, I wrote here about the Winston Churchill Effect – that odd mass hysteria that causes whole nations to believe they remember events that never happened. In the post I related as how, as a child, I read a newspaper article about a boy my age who'd been poisoned by Hallowe'en candy laced with heroin, ostensibly given him by a psychopathic neighbour.

I'd invented that memory, sceptics assured me, on the grounds that no such crime has ever been committed, and newspapers would never report such an unsubstantiated rumour.

Well, this week I learned from the Secretly Incredibly Fascinating podcast (Episode #62: "The Strange Origins [and Stranger Persistence] of the 'Razor Blades in Candy' Myth", presented by Alex Schmidt and guest Jason Pargin), that I did in fact read such a story.

In 1970, Detroit five-year-old Kevin Toston died after eating candy that was later found to be contaminated with heroin. This was first reported in national media as a stranger-danger poisoning, before further investigation revealed that Kevin had most probably died from ingesting heroin left in his reach during a visit to his uncle. His parents, according to police, had likely sprinkled more of the stash on Kevin's Hallowe'en candy to camouflage the uncle's guilt.

I couldn't verify whether this theory came out true in court, but what's certain is that as the less-sensationalistic story dropped, so did coverage, at least beyond greater Detroit.

So I did read a real article, though several supporting facts I either added freestyle or conflated with other stories. Kevin's name, for example, was obviously not Richard. And my distinct memory of a tiny hole found in a candy bar wrapper, with the unvoiced implication that it had been injected with heroin, is similarly invented, though I'm getting a dim recollection of a schoolmate including that detail in a drugged-candy tale (either this one or another).

And though I remember that both of us were about 12 at the time, I was significantly younger, and Kevin younger still. A press photo depicts him as a laughing kindergartner in glasses, wearing a sport coat. And most significantly: he was African-American. So my memory of the two of us being similar in appearance was wildly inaccurate.

But hold the phone: on that last count, an intriguing alternative arises. In 1974 – the year I was twelve – Timothy O'Bryan really did die from eating doctored Hallowe'en candy, which was also initially reported as a stranger poisoning. And the photo run with this article shows a smiling, Cold War-coiffed Caucasian kid in a checkered collared shirt very like I used to wear.

(Note that once again, the culprit was family – statistically, far and away the most common perpetrator of child abuse. Turns out Timothy's father poured cyanide into his candy to collect on a life insurance policy.)

So one more time, no evil neighbour, and no rational excuse to deprive kids of the wonderful Hallowe'ens we cherished. But two such articles were published, and I almost certainly read them both. Over the years the two melded in my mind, and as the media seems to have done that thing where it reports accusations on Page 1 and ignores or buries vindications, I never learned that both were completely bogus.

(By the way, seeing as we're on the topic: in the podcast, Alex makes the cogent point that heroin is enormously expensive. As is cocaine, another narcotic frequently rumoured to be slipped to trick-or-treaters. One does not waste these things pranking random kids, any more than one bakes diamonds into cookies to break their teeth. And while we're up, drug addicts never give their fix away, regardless of what they're strung out on. They obsessively hoard it until every last grain is gone, then desperately scramble for more. Thus it's highly unlikely that anyone possessing these substances scatters them about for the dubious thrill of getting unseen children high.)

So the personal experience I shared in my January 2020 post is not in fact an example of the Churchill Effect. Though I've experienced others as well, the candy thing was just a pedestrian matter of scrambled memory – an extremely common cognitive glitch.

But in the cases of Kevin Tosten and Timothy O'Bryan, notwithstanding a little drift, I remembered something that actually happened.

Or to be precise, I remember actual newspaper coverage of something that never happened.

First I believed I'd read it

then I believed I didn't

and now I believe again.


(Photo courtesy of Evan Amos and Wikimedia Commons.)

WW: Jack o' lantern 2022

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

A Lament For Graveyards

I augur this the right moment to mention my regret at the passing of graveyards, which ironic development has left my society impoverished to a few woeful degrees.

Many of these are practical. For starters, a cemetery contains a wealth of historical data not easily acquired else. Just the demographics are a treasure. Where did past inhabitants come from? What religions did they practice? What organisations did they belong to, and what was their mission? What light does this shed on the present community? What have we lost? What gained?

In a cemetery you're surrounded by the final statements of multiple generations, reflecting successive changes in values and perspectives. Whenever I move house, one of my first outings is the nearest graveyard. An hour or so and I've got an earthier, more visceral understanding of where I am, more tactile, if not easily quantified, than the one I'll get from the local history books I'll study next.

Burial grounds encode a lot of culture, and if you're paying attention, the whole site, properly examined, amounts to a book in itself.

Then there's the simple peace of the place – the leafy green, the tranquil refuge from the fretting living. I've often botanised and foraged in cemeteries, as being mostly uncrushed by the pounding fist of development, and am especially fond of them as a mushrooming venue.

And of course, there's the sacredness of remains, an instinctive, non-religious kind of consecration we've never fully replicated. (Some cultures – First Nations, Catholic-majority societies, traditionally Buddhist peoples, Celtic homelands – find similar awe in sites that don't contain reliquaries, but industrial values have undermined even their ability to transmit such reverence to recent generations.)

Institutional Zen, in its Confucian attachment to human authority, practices a heretical adulation of the dead – disturbingly, even of pieces there-of – and while I'm reflexively uneasy with this, I do wholeheartedly embrace the sangha of the past as an indispensible source of companionship and insight. Their presence is felt strongly in cemeteries.

Still – speaking of irony – no-one on either side of my family has been interred for 70 years, making us yet another cause of death to the dead. The usual suspects are afield: the extreme expense of burial, for the most part, but also a callow, pseudo-logical insistence that we've no need of graves to honour and remember our loved ones.

Which is, of course, tripe. I would in fact greatly cherish a grave where I could visit my parents and grandparents, and the dear regretted friends now leaving this world at ever-greater rate despite my pleading insistence they reconsider.

No, the nondescript region where we will scatter my mother's ashes will not replace her grave: that specific plot of ground where what's left of her articulated body would drift toward new and different existences under a solid square of stone that I can see and touch.

Not even almost.

And as I myself will also receive no such treatment, I must eventually commit the same sin of cenotaphery, and drive yet another nail into the coffin of, well, coffins.

Not that I'd impose a traditional burial on my survivors, of course. I get it; things have changed. And although I accept that as a Zenner, I do much regret my headstone. Because I've got the most awesome epitaph ever:

"Nothing is carved in stone."

How happy I'd lie below such a koan.

Good hunting to all of us on this, the annual Druid crusade to keep the dead dead.

(Photo of Tomnahurich, my favourite graveyard to date, courtesy of Derek Brown and Wikimedia Commons.)

WW: Bikecombed skeleton

(One thing I love about biking, rarely celebrated by those who sing its praises, is the stuff you find by the side of the road while doing it. An astonishing variety of wealth flies off the traffic speeding by, including, at last count, about half the tools now in my shop.

In this respect, bicycling helps to fill the gap left by the loss of ready access to a beach.

Another case in point: this portable apocalyptic horseman, discovered par terre last week while pumping up a long hill.

Which serves me well, because though I always candle Smiling Jack each year, I've never had any other decorations. So now there's a skeleton hanging on my door. Rather like a Christmas wreath, except, uh… bonier.)

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

WW: Hallowe'en skull

(Yet another headbone, preserved on yet another farm. Just in time for the season.)

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

Hungry Ghost

(These are the lyrics to one of my Buddhist country and western songs, offered here in honour of Hallowe'en.)

If you come 'round late
By my back stairs
When the moon is full
And there's no-one there
You might hear a sound, like footsteps on the floor
But when you turn around
It won't be there no more

No, it ain't everyone
That can see him there
Mostly kids and dogs
And folks in despair
But I give him board, and that makes me the host
To a gentle friend
And a hungry ghost

Refrain:

'Cos he's a man of hope
And a man of peace
He's a man of faith
And not the least
He's a man of heart, and that's what matters most
'Cos he's a man apart
So he's a hungry ghost

Folks down in town
Say it's all a hoax
Just a trick of light
In the prairie oaks
Say it's just the wind, blowed down from off the ridge
And if you'll buy that
I got a bridge

[Bridge]

So if you got a roof
Against the storm
If your belly's full
And your heart is warm
Then say a word of grace, and keep your loved ones close
And spare a thought
For the hungry ghosts

Refrain to end



(Copyright RK Henderson. Detail of the hungry ghosts that walk amongst us from the 12th century scroll 餓鬼草紙、平安時代 ; photo courtesy of the Kyoto National Museum and Wikimedia Commons.)

WW: Venus flytrap

(In honour of Hallowe'en, here's a shot of my latest pet. I adopted this flytrap [Dionaea muscipula] two years ago, when it was in dire straits. In its first summer with me, it reached a high of five healthy traps before lapsing back into the mandated winter coma. Today, on the cusp of the next hibernation period, it has twelve.

Caring for a Venus flytrap is great fun, and not terribly difficult if you uphold a few basic rules. I'm hoping this one comes through its incipient cryostasis in good form and ready to build even greater health on the other side, in the spring and summer sun.)

WW: Pumpkin zafus

(Saw these in town the other day. Turn 'em upside down, you got a monastery's-worth of cheap zafus.)

WW: Hallowe'en spider

(This is the giant house spider [Eratigena atrica]. It's called that because it's four inches across and we find it in our homes during this season up here on the North Coast. The house-eating spider is not native, however; like Hallowe'en itself, it came from Europe. Trick or treat, indeed.)

WW: The doorman

(No trick-or-treaters this Hallowe'en either. I've never had a single one, ever. But I buy candy every year, just in case.

I gotta start carving less-scary jack o' lanterns.)

Hermitcraft: Pumpkin Pickles

October is an odd time in North America: for these thirty-one days, you can buy a pumpkin here. Any other time, you get: "What, are you crazy?" (One of us must be.)

And it only gets weirder: virtually none of the pumpkins Canucks and Yanks buy by the metric tonne this month will be eaten. Come All Saints Day, they will be thrown in the garbage. Even the thousands that were never cut.

Why are overseas readers now aghast? Because on all other continents, people know pumpkin for excellent food. One of the most versatile vegetables on earth, useful in every course of a meal, it's both delicious and nutritious. I've no idea why North Americans have demoted it to a gourd, but if it weren't for that Druid holiday we dug up and transplanted across the sea, this First Nations masterpiece (utterly unknown to the Druids) would have gone extinct here a century ago. If the irony gets any thicker, we can carve our jack o' lanterns out of that instead.

Or you can; I pickle mine. Pickles – a staple of Japanese monasteries – anchor the flavour plates I build for sesshins. (It's an ancient Zen art intended to pique mindfulness with a shotgun blast to the senses). And the pumpkin ones are my favourite: marrowy, neon orange, and sweet spicy-sour, with just a hint of musky bitterness from the lime.

The recipe:

PUMPKIN SESSHIN PICKLES

(Makes about 3 1/2 pints. Note that after step 3, you will have to wait 24 hours before continuing.)

7 cups raw pumpkin, peeled and cut into 1-inch cubes
2 sticks cinnamon, shredded
2 1/3 cups cider vinegar
2 1/3 cups sugar
15 whole cloves
1/2 teaspoon whole black pepper corns
1/4 teaspoon red pepper flakes
2 teaspoons whole allspice
1 tablespoon whole coriander seeds
2 inches gingerroot, sliced thin
lime slices, 1/4 inch thick, one per jar
dried cranberries ("craisins")
canning jars and lids

1. Cover the pumpkin cubes with water, bring to a boil, reduce heat, and lightly blanch, about 10 minutes. (Not longer; they'll cook another three times before you're done.) Drain immediately to avoid overcooking.

2. Put all other ingredients except lime slices and cranberries in a large pot and bring to a boil. (Warning: hot syrup boils over very quickly; stay present and alert.) Turn heat down to lowest setting, cover the pot, and simmer for 15 minutes.

3. Add the pumpkin cubes and bring back to a boil. Then cover the pot, lower heat, and simmer for 3 minutes. Afterward, remove the pot from the burner and set it aside for 24 hours.

4.Next day: Sterilise jars in a water bath canner. Heat the pumpkin and syrup mixture to boiling, then lower heat and simmer for 5 minutes.

5. Remove the jars one at a time from the hot water, drop in four to five cranberries, and ladle in hot pickles to 1/2 inch from the rim. Be sure to include spices.

6. Slide a lime slice between the pickles and the jar's side, fit a sterilised lid, screw the band down tight, and return the sealed jar to the water bath. Repeat until all the pickles are packed.

7. Turn up the heat under the canner and process (cook) the jars for an additional 5 minutes after the water has returned to a boil.

10. Remove the jars from the water and allow them to cool naturally until the lids pop. Store in a cool dark place for at least a month before opening. (Any that don't pop should be stored in the fridge and eaten first.)

Specific points on pickling jack o' lanterns:

To insure fresh pickle stock, carve your jack o' lantern on Hallowe'en and refrigerate the scraps; if you light it with a candle, line the lid with aluminium foil. Make your pickles next day, peeling off any soot or scorched flesh with a vegetable peeler. Later, when you eat them, you'll recognise bits of eye and teeth on your plate.