Oz

Why I had the need to build a float for the local Halloween parade remains a mystery to this day. It was nothing that was suggested to me and it certainly wasn’t something everyone else my age was busy doing. Yet somehow I woke up one morning in early October determined to create the best damn float my town had ever seen. 

It would be more than a parade float, it would be a national treasure. 

It would make the citizens of Centralia cheer and scream with wonder. It would make them reexamine their very lives. 

It would be a celebration of the human spirit. 

They would clear a space for it at the Smithsonian. 

All this from some paper mache and chicken wire.

I recruited my friend Brian because his parents would let us work in their garage and he had a staple gun. I don’t remember how we decided on our theme, but it quickly became clear that we should base our float on the film The Wizard of Oz. 

The front of the float would be Dorothy’s house and then came the evil apple trees, the witch’s castle and finally a rainbow soaring over a yellow brick road. On the completion of the blueprint, we began to wonder if they gave out Nobel prizes for float making. We also discussed where we would set our oversized trophies. Brian planned to put his on top of his stereo, but I was much more magnanimous. I would rest mine in the family living room so that everyone could bask in my glory and maybe feel as if they had succeeded somewhere in their own lives as well.

We decided to start building the apple tree first. I made up a list of supplies and called the local supermarkets to find out who carried green paper towels that might look like foliage. Brian and I split the cost of brown paint, tiny plastic apples and enough glitter spray to supply twelve Texas beauty pageants. 

With some newspaper and flour paste we began to build the trunk of the tree. We spent the entire afternoon into the night, elbow-high in paper mache and coughing up glitter spray fumes. At the crack of dawn I was back in Brian’s garage, stuffing Kleenex into chicken wire and painting a mouth and eyes onto the towering tree. 

Sometime that evening my stepmother and dad arrived to pick me up. Brian’s dad asked if they had seen what we had been up to. I ran out to lift up the garage door and unveil our finished product: one five-foot tall artificial apple tree. There was a moment of silence and I remember holding my breath until my dad finally let out a wonder filled, “Whoa!”

I explained that this was a very small part of the float and that I was worried we wouldn’t have enough space for the whole thing. Dad said not to worry about it, that he would think of something. I could tell my tree had inspired him. 

The next morning dad called in a few favors and our tree was moved to the local armory. We suddenly had more than enough room for our glitter spray and plastic apples. But that wasn’t the end of it. Dad also borrowed a tractor-trailer, more chicken wire and paint. He began to discuss the float with us in a very serious manner. 

One morning Dad announced, “There are three things the judges look for in a successful float.” 

It was something Dad did on a routine basis, announcing the one-two-threes of tasks he knew nothing about. We listened to him, marveling wide-eyed at how this busy physician and father had somehow found the time to take a course in Halloween float making. 

“One: the design. Two: the amount of tissue paper stuffing. Three: movement of some kind.” 

It was suggested that we make Dorothy’s house rock back and forth as if caught in a tornado, solving our movement problem. We already had what we thought of as a killer design and a respectable amount of tissue paper.

Dad helped us build the house out of cardboard and fasten it to the tractor in a way that would make it bob up and down. As the hours wore on, Brian’s family came to pick him up and it was only me in the empty armory, painting stones onto the cardboard walls of the castle and gluing sequins onto the rainbow. As I remember it now, it was a pretty pathetic float, but I remember this bizarre sense of accomplishment when the final staple blew out of Brian’s staple gun. We had created a work of art.

The day after the Halloween parade, the paper announced that we had won in our division. To our surprise, there were no trophies or medals awarded. Just being mentioned in the local newspaper was meant to be reward enough. Brian and I felt slightly crestfallen. Not that we had built the float to win a trophy, but some form of recognition other than a mention in the paper would have been nice.

A few days later, as we were tearing the float to pieces, Dad showed up with two plaques. One for Brian and one for me. They were engraved with our names and the title of the float. We pretty much knew that they hadn’t come from the parade judges. Obviously Dad had run out and had them made on his own dime. But we clung to them proudly anyway, happy to have some concrete evidence of our hard work.

I also learned something new about my dad that October.

If you talked about doing something, he would be very supportive of you.

However, if you actually took the initiative to build a tree, he’d move heaven and earth to help you build an entire forest.