Hallowe'en 2005

Over and done and lived and enjoyed. Daggone! Sugar rush and holiday high and Scooby-Doo on the tee-vee for the past 5 days = good times. Man! Woo!

Two little spooks, running through the house
One spook says - what rhymes with mouse?
The second spook says - who cares at all?!
We've got candy! Let's have a ball!!!

I mean, really people - what's to argue with 3 pounds of candy for each child gotten within a 2-hour town-allowed period of time in which you scour 2 neighborhoods and breathe deeply of the angst-ridden air as parents try to relive their youth and children try NOT to be scared by every goblin and poorly-done ghost wheeling around the next corner? Atmosphere here, people, atmosphere! Black of night and mossy tree, brush me by and speak to me, turn my head so I can see, what the new year's planned for me - right? Right? Divining spirits of the dead so that we can embrace those that were before us and welcome those who are to come?

Isn't that what this is about?

Or,,,, is it just about candy and running around in the dark, wildly bumping into other children and their tall escorts, being on your own, in the dark, where anything can happen?

Aside - When my mother was young in New York City, the night was known, I think, as Mischief Night, and they all went around smacking one another with chalk dust-filled socks, and the child who was most marked was somehow "out." Mom said that sometimes the smacking got rather energetic and there were bruises to be had, there in the confines of New York's streets in the early 1940's. She also rode around the city at 13 years old on her bicycle with her best friend, and they'd be gone hours at a time. All alone in New York! Sometimes she'd be sent down to the corner pub with a nickel and a bucket to fill her Dad's beer for the afternoon radio fights. Sometimes I wonder if the perverts and sickos were farther away at that time from the young innocent children, or if the sentimentality and value placed on children today simply wasn't present for parents of that age, and if one went missing then, then that was the expected allotment to the "the gyppies" for having several others that made it to healthy adulthood.

I wonder. I wonder how parents did it without tee vee and games and pandering and soccer and art camp and scouts and church and gifted programs and all-A's and college goals and college loans and every single other thing that comes with the bringing up of children in this materialistic and avaricious, greedy, clamoring society in which we burrow out our existences.

I do. I wonder. Because even though I breathe of the moment more than the preoccupied parent of this modern first-world nation typically does, I find it hard to let go of my child's hand on a gorgeous Southern Hallowe'en night to let him run for candy. Too long gone...too long gone for me.