| If you set a chiselled pumpkin on your stoop and hang a cardboard skeleton upon your screen door, they will come. Porch lights aglow, candy bowls at the ready, this was the expectation in my ’hood on October 31.
Either there are fewer candy lovin’ kids around than there were back in my day (nuh-uh!), or urban mythology – spider-egg chewing gum, razor-blade apples and some kind of sugar, dental-decay thing (again, feh!) – has paranoid parents keeping their young ’uns home on Halloween night. Like last year, a mere 15 kids showed up at my inner-city bungalow on what, next to Christmas, used to be a kid’s second-favourite day of the year.
I decided this was sad. And someone ought to have all that candy if the kids won’t or can’t go get it. And so it was that, dressed in a dad-ish fedora, ascot, tweed blazer and a first-class corncob pipe, I took university student, Good Listener understudy and Fast Forward music writer Adele Brunnhofer trick-or-treating in Capitol Hill.
"So, you made this robin costume yourself?"
"I’m a cardinal."
Hanging back a few paces as we made our first stop, I bid Brunnhofer, my only fake child (that I know of), "Don’t forget to say ‘thank you.’" Wearing a parka over her red suit, a yellow beak and a red mask, she rang the bell. An elderly gent opened the door and eagerly dropped a mittfull of treats into the faux youngster’s red paper bag.
"Can I have some candy for my dad?" she chirped.
"Ha ha ha!" said the man, giving her twice as much candy.
Again, at the next house, no one batted an eyelash at the admittedly young-looking woman in the bird suit.
"It’s a great night for semi-adult trick-or-treating," I mused.
"Hey, I’m 19," was the indignant reply. "I’m going for 13."
"And hitting 11," I estimated.
"Trick or treat!" the robin, er, cardinal yelled at house number five. A teenage girl gave us both lots more top-notch candy than should’ve been reasonably expected. I swear, this happened at every house! This kind of thing never happened when I was a kid. My pillowcase always wound up half-full of those shitty, rock-hard candies with the orange pumpkin-and-spook wrapping. The other half was stuff my mom would confiscate because it looked "tampered with."
Just then, the family’s dog snuck out the door. A friendly, over-stuffed breadbox of a golden lab, we patted it on the head as the screen door closed and the family went about their business. Opening the door, the bold bird asked loudly, "Hey, you want your dog back?"
The dad (a real one I’m guessing), clad in a T-shirt and boxer shorts, opened the door, shuffling out to retrieve the pup. "You’re wearing the wrong outfit," said my fake child to her fake pop.
At house number eight, our ploy is suspected.
"Can I have some candy for my dad?"
"Oh," murmured the woman of the house, looking my way with a hint of suspicion, "that’s interesting." But then she still doubled up on the candy.
By 9 p.m., porch lights had begun to blink out. "Let’s go anyway!" demanded my candy-crazed phony offspring, charging my next-door-neighbour’s darkened steps.
"I gotta live here," I said, and I dragged the faux tot, under protest, to a suitably inviting home, yet lit, and decked out with rubber rats and painted pumpkins.
"Can I have some candy for my dad?"
"Sure, take a bunch!" offered another real dad. The family’s friendly, over-stuffed breadbox of a black lab snuck out the door to meet us as the man and his kids retreated to their living room.
Again, the faux tot opened the screen door and chirped, "You want your dog back?"
"Oh, you don’t want her?" joked dad.
With my counterfeit kid’s treat bag overflowing, we walked home to divvy up the loot.
People, I realized, are ready, willing and able to give out a mountain of mouth-watering candy, and are even willing to sacrifice their pets for the privilege of attending to scant Halloween callers.
"What’ve you learned tonight?" I asked my falsified dependent.
"Try to act super-cute all the time and ring the doorbell four times. How do you wanna divvy up all this candy?"
"You should, uh, let me, er, dispose of this. It looks like it’s been, ah, tampered with." |
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