Just five kids braved our cul de sac to trick or treat last night. Can’t really blame them or their parents who tagged along. I wouldn’t have gone out last night, either. Then again, I never really liked Halloween. I don't remember dressing up in a costume to go trick or treating as a youngster. My antipathy toward Halloween carried over to my parenting. I reasoned that since Halloween really was All Saints Day it was a Christian holiday, one good Jewish children shouldn't celebrate. Besides Gilda and I didn't want Dan and Ellie eating candy. I'm also not into scary movies, especially ones wherein a haunted house plays a central role.
Perhaps my aversion to haunted houses goes back to my early childhood. Across the street from our brick row house on Avenue W in Brooklyn in the early 1950s stood a dirty grey, two or three story clapboard structure recessed back from the road. I say dirty grey, but in truth the house started off white. Years of neglect turned it dirty grey. The small plot of lawn in front of the house was overgrown with weeds.
No children lived there. The only person we ever saw going into and out of the house was a wizened geezer. He walked stooped over, his grey suit jacket draping a skeletal body. His cheeks appeared sallow and shallow, as if he had no teeth to keep them from caving in on his gums. A stub of a cigarette dangled from his lips. His grey hair ran wild. He was, to a young boy and his friends with furtive imaginations, a most scary fellow, the type of shadowy figure Scout and Jem envisioned of Boo Radley in To Kill a Mockingbird. Even his name made us squirm—Pupkis.
My friends, Lenny and Richie, and I weren’t old enough to cross Avenue W by ourselves, so we never threw rocks or fuzz balls at Mr. Pupkis or his home. One day, maybe when I was eight or nine, Pupkis and his home were gone. In short order they were replaced by side-by-side adjoining brick homes. Into one of them moved a family with a daughter, Sherry, who became one of my sister’s best friends. The most memorable aspect of Sherry’s home was her living room furniture. Her mother encased the sofa and chairs in protective plastic. People did that back in the 1950s and early 1960s.
One other noteworthy event occurred on Avenue W between East 18th and East 19th Street. A few years later on a Friday evening in the spring, just as our family was sitting down to Sabbath dinner, we heard sharp popping sounds—gunfire— from across the street, followed by a man’s anguished cry. We looked out the dinette window to see police detectives stuff a portly man handcuffed from behind into an unmarked car. Turned out he was a drug dealer. The detectives had pursued him down his driveway into his back yard, firing their pistols in the air to get him to stop fleeing. We didn’t know the family. I don’t think they would have been the type of folks my parents would have had as friends.
More Sandy Fallout: Wednesday’s NY Times carried a letter from Joseph McCaffrey of Bala Cynwyd, Pa., arguing for early voting legislation in all 50 states so that future disasters, wherever they may occur, don’t limit suffrage opportunities. “Mother Nature is nonpartisan and could take out red or blue states in the future and severely affect national elections,” he wrote.
McCaffrey must be a Democrat as he tagged Mother Nature (another euphemism for God) as being nonpartisan. No self-respecting Republican, at least in this time of Akins, Santorum, Bachmann and Mourdock, would declare God to be anything but a card carrying member of the Grand Old Party.
My Mistake: Another example of why it’s very hard to copy edit yourself. In Wednesday’s post I wrote Hurricane “Sally,” not Sandy (since corrected). My apologies. To those who wrote in, thank you. To everyone else, this is another example of seeing what you want to see, not what the reality is.
