Blog From The Bench

My son, Gavin, is now three years old and since we finally live in a house in a decent neighborhood (clue: they bring kids by the vanload from "across the tracks" to trick-or-treat here), it was time to take him trick-or-treating. Which takes me back...

My parents were the conservative sort (still are, actually; I'm pretty much the leftist weirdo in my family) and didn't believe in Halloween. Every year we'd go out to dinner on Halloween night -- not so bad in and of itself, but no T-or-T'ing. In grade school, I'd be the lonely kid sitting in the library re-reading Beatrix Potter's books for the millionth time while everyone else was off having fun, wearing costumes and eating candy (which my parents didn't believe in either; they were, and are, health food nuts). The first, last, and only time I ever went trick-or-treating I was right around Gavin's age. We still lived in southern California before moving up to Oregon. My mom made costumes -- matching costumes -- for my sister and me (she's a year-and-a-half younger). We went as Raggedy-Ann and Andy. I think I was Andy. It's one of my earliest memories. I remember my dad walking us around the cul-de-sac we lived in, and the yarn wig being all itchy and we finally just stopped, took them off, and threw them away.

Anyway, with all that in my mind, I really wanted to give Gavin that memory too. We've been planning for it for months -- since his birthday, in fact. We had two costume plans. For his birthday, Melanie (my wife) talked one of her co-workers into making a custom Superman cape for him. It makes me wish I was two feet tall so I could wear it. Then, as a birthday present, my sister got him a Darth Vader outfit, which neatly accessorizes with the red and blue lightsabers he already had (hey, someone's gotta be Luke or Obi-Wan!). Then a wrench got thrown in our plans. Gavin goes to a Montessori preschool, and for their Halloween party (hey, at least they celebrate Halloween, not "Falloween" or a harvest party) they specifically stated no superheroes or threatening costumes. So, there went both of our costume ideas -- Superman defines superhero, and let's face it, Darth Vader isn't exactly cute and cuddly. We hunted through several stores to find him a non-sucky costume that wasn't a superhero, didn't have weapons, and was "non-threatening." At Target we stumbled on the perfect costume...

Frankenstein.

(Okay, so it's technically Frankenstein's monster. So sue me.)

It was abso-freakin'-lutely adorable, with raggedly clothes and a green hood with bolts and fuzzy hair. There's no way you could construe it as threatening, even though I taught him to growl and wave his arms like Boris Karloff. He wore it to school, and had a blast donning it again tonight (along with his yellow rubber boots) and going around the neighborhood. He didn't quite have the hang of saying "Trick or treat," though at least he (almost) always remembered to say thank you.

But, our next door neighbor had to put the damper on the evening. She lives by herself and you can hear uber-annoying Christian music blaring from her house from time to time. (I actually did feel sorta bad once though. Once, while Mel and Gav were visiting her parents, I was at home watching The Boondock Saints at a deafening volume with the front windows open. She came over to talk to me about some ladders she left on our property, and while I hunted around the house to find some pants before I answered the door, she must've been subjected to about 20 f-bombs.) All week she's been reminding us that we needed to keep our cat (a black cat, by the way) in the house lest she fall victim to the dastardly punks who live around here. To make matters worse, tonight all her lights were off...which is cool if you don't want to hand out candy, but she even roped off her driveway. What sort of person ropes off their driveway so you can't even get to their door?

I hope that this will be a yearly tradition. How can you deny a kid this much fun?