It’s just Halloween.
I have my Bob Dylan mask on.
Bob Dylan

Yeah everybody wear the mask but how long will it last…
Fugees

It’s the week before Halloween.
Got my Yoga for Cynics mask on…
me

I wear masks under masks…under masks under masks…until I don’t know myself where they end…or begin, for that matter…or which mask is doing the thinking about it…or if there’s anything underneath at all…or if that’s really a problem.

Maybe, a different perspective is required, coming, perhaps, from a different mask—they turn different ways, work in both directions…some cool like Bogart, others sputtering like Don Knotts…and all look different to others than they do to me.

People say I’m laid-back, even happy-go-lucky. Once, long ago, a close friend for years said she couldn’t imagine me angry, when it seemed I’d been positively seething for all the years I’d known her.

More recently, a very smart older gentleman I didn’t know so personally said I was so up-beat he couldn’t imagine me depressed or unhappy about anything. Then, I suspect that wily old coot may have known more than he let on, seeing through my masks and telling me through his own up-beat and genial mask that he wasn’t buying it.

But what if those masks are actually the deeper ones…and rage, hurt, and reflexive irony  merely thin, crinkly layers of onion skin, waiting to be sloughed off?