brushfire"This, yes, this, it was always like this." -Stanley Koehler
REFLECTIONS OF AN EMPTY NESTER
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My best friend Helen and I trick-or-treated together every Halloween when I was a kid. In the early years, we were allowed to visit houses only on our street and around the block, making one full circle, while our older siblings ventured farther afield with their friends. In our neighborhood, doors remained unlocked day and night. My father had a habit of leaving the car keys in the ignition. The only bad thing that ever happened was a group of kids would come around each year and smash our carved pumpkins. Yet for some reason, my father always accompanied us, lurking at the foot of a front walk or behind a shrub, a steady, watchful presence on a cold, dark autumn night in Massachusetts. What was he afraid of? This was a simpler time — no cell phones, cable TV or online shopping for costumes. We played outside, unsupervised, till the ring of the dinner bell or the bats came out at dusk. The news was delivered in a daily paper or evening television or radio broadcast. Our biggest fear — later deemed an urban legend — was razors in apples and LSD-laced candy. Whatever private concerns my parents harbored for our safety back then, they weren't the ones who forbade us from going to the house of the young couple renting the house across the street while the permanent residents spent a year abroad. They were graduate students at the local university. With no children of their own, they must have been thrilled to live on a block with so many kids. I imagine they stocked up with candy, turned on their porch light and waited for the flood of trick-or-treaters to ring their doorbell. It broke my heart a little when we passed by their house. My friends’ parents said they were strangers and couldn't be trusted. Later I told this to my mother, who scoffed at the notion. Flash forward to the present day in Grosse Pointe, the closest recreation of my own childhood of neighborhood trick-or-treating since we moved here with our three young children 20 years ago. I love the way Grosse Pointers go all out to decorate their lawns and houses, from spooky to kooky. I love the festivities in the parks and The Village. And Halloween night, I love the eerie glow of headlights snaking along our street, the sidewalks lit up with flashlights and packed with children transformed into otherworld beings. I love opening my door to each group of trick-or-treaters, some familiar faces from our neighborhood, others new, but always polite. I love complimenting their costumes and seeing their faces light up when I tell them they can select their own candy from the bowl. I love the way the parents — watching from a safe distance on the sidewalk, like my father — wave and say thank you. Sure, every year there are grumblings on social media about kids who are “not from the neighborhood,” “too old to be trick-or-treating” or “not wearing costumes.” There are even complaints about kids being driven in and dropped off from neighboring Detroit. Honestly, in two decades, from the tiniest fairy princess or Power Ranger to adolescents making lame — or no — efforts to dress up, we’ve never encountered a single issue. Not even a smashed pumpkin. When our kids were old enough to venture farther afield than our own neighborhood, they figured out which houses handed out the full-size candy bars. To get there meant crossing invisible borders from their own home city into another. I likely even drove them there, dropping them off to join a group of friends. Never once, to my knowledge, did a homeowner hesitate before handing candy to my child and say, “I don't recognize you. Are you from around here?” Each year it amazes me how many porch lights are off. I’m not talking about parents trick-or-treating with their kids or joining forces with other families. I’m talking about people who routinely go out for the evening or huddle in darkened houses, pretending not to be home so they don’t have to open the door to strangers. It’s one night and all that’s asked for is candy and kindness. We keep our porch light on until the candy runs out. If we gauge it correctly, this is usually around the time the hustle and bustle has died down and only a few lingering trick-or-treaters remain. Our lit jack-o-lanterns — jaunty or mad, goofy or sad, depending on my husband’s fancy when he carved them — have darkened on our front step, the candles burned to a pool of molten wax. If there’s one last hopeful knock at the door, I open it and say, “Sorry, guys, we’re all out of candy. Come back next year.” We’ll turn the porch light on. This appeared in the Oct. 31, 2019 edition of the Grosse Pointe News.
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Mary Anne BrushJournalist, fiction writer, wife and mother |