Halloween

Bob and I live in what was, for most of its existence, a real family neighborhood.

Fact is, until this year, two of the houses nearest to us were owned by the children who grew up in them. Multiple family members live on our block, too. Across the street, we have a neighbor who bought his house in the seventies. Catty corner from us was an old Danish woman who came here as a war bride, raised her children, buried her husband, and refused to leave the house she and that long dead husband built--until her daughters, both now well over sixty, forced her to do so. The Christmas before they made her move, she brought us white camellias from her garden.

For all of these reasons, we expected Halloween would be a big deal. More like the Halloweens of our youth than those of the mixed-use neighborhood in which we used to live.

Our first Halloween in the house was 2000. We saw some kids on the street, but very few ventured up our 20 steps. "We're still pretty new to the neighborhood", we said to ourselves as we wistfully watched the little groups pass us by. "Next year, they won't be afraid to ring the bell."

In 2001, Halloween came six weeks after the Twin Towers collapsed and two weeks after the anthrax attacks, so we were sad, but not surprised, to see almost no children on the street at all. 2002 brought a slight improvement--maybe a half-dozen masked faces at our door and several collections of costumed kids on the sidewalk. 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006...the numbers improved, but still, the high water mark wasn't more than a score.

We were both more than a little deflated by year after year of empty streets and quiet door bells. We talked about it, but felt it more keenly than we wanted to acknowledge.

It was as if something innocent had been lost, a homely ritual that bound us to this neighborhood as well as to the neighborhoods of our pasts. Once we were the giddy kids running along the darkened streets; now we are the grey-haired ones who answer the door and sprinkle candy into outstretched bags. As we waited in vain, I felt as if we were vastly poorer for not being able to play the part of the "old folks" in the traditions that make a neighborhood. I also felt as if another piece of the fabric that holds us close to one another had been ripped away, leaving us all a little more exposed to the cold.

This year, I only bought two bags of candy. I figured it would be more than enough. After some hesitation, I bought a pumpkin, too. We didn't carve it, but I put an old hat on it and set it up on the retaining wall at the edge of the driveway.

By seven o'clock, we'd had so many groups of dragons, Spidermen, trolls, and ballerinas that all our treats were gone. I had no choice but to turn out the light and close the curtains. At 8 o'clock, one of our neighbor's children braved the darkened stairwell to bang on the door. When Bob opened the door, she demanded, "Do you know who I am?" He passed her test, so she introduced her best friend, Max, to him as well. We gave the two of them some hard candies we had in a bowl on the coffee table. It was all we had left.

The next day, I found myself smiling frequently. The world seemed so much more right. Knowing that fear of poison may mean that the hard candies we gave to our last callers will never be eaten casts a bit of a pall over my sense of well-being, but it is outweighed by the feeling that the Lyman Road has been restored to itself, to what it was meant to be.

I'm not sure exactly why Halloween happened on our block this year. It may be that the transition of the neighborhood from grandparents to young families has finally reached critical mass. It may be that the world situation was just easy enough to ignore this year and not quite easy enough to ignore in years past. Or it may be that the pumpkin with the hat was all that we needed to signal "We're a part of this, too!"

Whatever it was, I'm glad to see that my neighborhood is back to being what it was meant to be: A family neighborhood, a place where people aren't afraid of one another. Somehow, the familiar chorus of "Trick or Treat", my weekly shopping trips to the Farmer's Market, and the new family moving into the long derelict house next store makes it just the tiniest bit easier to face the big issues--global warming, martial law in Pakistan, the continuing war in Iraq....Why is that, I wonder?