We saw a river of souls. It flowed into the Parque San Juan in Mérida, Mexico through a stone gate barely removed from the middle ages.

I’ve never been in a crowd like that. It pulsed and vibrated and bellowed in and out. Roared and whispered. It processed us, nothing short of that, from one end to the other. We lost ourselves in it. Not in the mundane way that term is used. We were each a single cell in a new creature, buoyed on a tide of remembrance, leavened with optimism for the future, but somehow still a complete surrender to the here and now. Dancing on a billion graves, and billions more to come. Hell, our own.

Halloween? Halloween in the United States is a joke, a sad joke. It’s nothing but Stephen King pablum regurgitated into a sugar bowl, then consumed over and over like a holiday for house flies. It’s trivial. The Day of the Dead is joyous and silly and dead serious all at the same time. It means something, but the meaning doesn’t run roughshod over the simple enjoyment of it, or vice versa. It brooks neither sanctimony nor frivolity. It stares death right in its painted skull face, real death, Mesoamerican death delivered roundhouse, over and over, muerte doled out on the scale of a scythe in a field, while dancing in looping circles around it. Unafraid, not unaware.

And so trick or treaters are transformed into a river of souls, marching in no kind of step to music made fresh coming from all points of the compass. The crowd roars and shows their fealty with iPhone fascist salutes. The marching children hold candles that flicker inside little plastic shields, mimicking the lives they represent, protected only barely from being snuffed out by the motion of passing through this world. They are the dear departed, babies snatched from their mothers before they’re ready for their first breath, children boiling with fevers, mothers struggling to produce their ration of life, fathers who put one foot wrong on a scaffold just once in their lives.

The Jesuits told the Mayans that their soul is immortal. It cannot be taken and it cannot be given away. The Maya scratched their heads and said heavenly immortality is a poor substitute for walking the earth in the shadows forever. They nodded and smiled in churches built on the rubble of their temples, because it was close enough to suit them. Still they build altars that would make a bushido blush to greet the shades of their dear departed. The river of souls rolls on.