Halloween

It’s that time again, that time I used to dread like a den of rattlesnakes, Halloween. I know, I know, I sound like an old fogy again, or a spoilsport. But this night has always been one I never cared for. I guess in my childhood I must have done something about trick-or-treating, but for the life of me I can’t remember ever donning a costume and going out to knock on doors. My one and only memory of Halloween is a party at the house of one of my parent’s friends, bobbing for apples. That’s it. Just bobbing for apples. That may have been one of the reasons I never cared much for swimming. As I recall, in the old days the night was as much about tricking as treating. It gave nasty little boys the excuse to do really nasty things to the houses of those who had crossed them, neighbors who had banned them from their yards, teachers who had punished them with failing grades, coaches who had overlooked their athletic talents, or simply anyone who had ever looked crosseyed at them. The tricks were usually the soaping of windows, but sometimes they involved toilet paper strewn everywhere through trees and bushes, or eggs thrown against the sides of houses. I always thought I was a good teacher, a popular teacher, but I always feared the egging of my house by kids from Busti, a tiny village south of Lakewood, NY, where I taught, and the youthful vandals of Busti every year would rape and pillage the village square by depositing outhouses there, streaming miles of toilet paper from trees and telephone lines, smashing pumpkins and other smashable vegetables and fruits onto every square inch of the square. Ah, what fun, they must have thought. And now, this night is nearly as much over-commercialized as Christmas, with kids demanding ever more elaborate and expensive costumes, with homeowners buying pounds and pounds of candy to thrust into clutching hands and opened bags, with practically every television show devoting its plot to a Halloween theme, even the comics in the daily newspapers feeling obligated to get into the act. (Garfield today left fang marks in the pizza and sucked up all the tomato sauce.) But tomorrow, as it always does, follows today, and I’ll have a whole year to forget about Halloween. Now I have to get out my Scrooge outfit for Christmas.