Senseless Ramblings

It wasn’t quite dark yet and we’d set off. Tigers, Genies, Hobos, and Clowns. Our house at the end of the street seemed the perfect start and end to the Halloween loop. We were already fired up from the Halloween parties we had at school, a day where we were allowed to dress up in our costumes for the day

We’d leave with our old pillowcases ready to collect candy. Pillowcases were the best! They were strong and they held a lot. We had one goal in mind… The same goal every year. We needed to reach the fire station where Buckeyewood dead-ended into Schaffer Street. The fire station always gave out full size sugar daddies. No snack sizes there!

It seemed like such a long walk as a kid, and as an adult when I have driven it, it is one of the few memories that seems pretty accurate in scale; it was a long walk. On the way back, we skipped some of the little cul-de-sac off of Buckeyewood. By then our pillowcases were getting pretty heavy, it was dark, and we wanted to make sure we hit all the neighbors on our street that were on the opposite side from which we had left. Also, truth be told, we wanted to get home, dump those sacks out and see what we had gotten. 

It felt safe and comforting walking those neighborhoods. It was the early and mid 1970s and Orange California was an expanse of family homes with kids that matched our ages. Parents didn’t walk with us. We didn’t worry about child abduction or poisoned candy. Trick-or-treating didn’t have community enforced start and end times. We left at dusk and got home when we were done. There were kids everywhere. You saw your friends along the way and compared everyone’s costumes. A few houses would even have haunted houses set up in their garage or their yard. I remember when I got to junior high school, my friend Chris had one in his garage, and we all helped out. Great Halloween memories. 

Halloween continues on! Kids still go out on October 31 in search of candy. They still dress up in wildly elaborate costumes. As a parent I enjoyed watching my kids take their turns dressing up in costume and heading out for candy. But something seems to have changed. Many schools have started to limit what costumes kids can wear to school, and some have banned wearing costumes altogether. In my case, we didn’t let our kids go alone until they were older than I recall being. Communities now set times when kids can go door-to-door and there also seem to be a lot more parents who drop their kids off in certain neighborhoods rather than take them around their own. No longer does it seem to be just the kids heading out on a fright night adventure. My own neighborhood now, out on the edge of a small town so far away from where I grew up, is so likely to get no children at all, that we don’t buy candy and we keep the light off. The world has changed… Or is it just me? 

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