Halloween Lite

OK. I've shown enough of these photos, but it is all I have. This is the last one, but I don't know what I'll do tomorrow. I'll reach back, back, back. . . and pull something from the files. Maybe. After all this sweetness, maybe something. . . .

It was a perfect night for trick or treating here, the sky clear with a few clouds drifting across the face of a nearly full moon that lit the trees and yards and road with a ghostly hue. And I live in a perfect neighborhood for trick or treating with winding roads (an anomaly here) and big oaks lining the streets.

And nobody came.

My friend brought his kid over to trick or treat here, and he was all alone. People didn't bother to come to the doors, he said, but put the candy out with signs that said, "Help Yourself." What happened?

I won't bother to editorialize. You know what happened.

Now I have about ten pounds of candy. It must leave my house.

And so the night passed. Sort of. It was not so uneventful for me, but I won't share that tale here.

One short story, though. I rode with my friend to the grocery store, and she sort of cut into an empty parking space in front of two fellows. I pointed and shrugged my shoulders, but they ignored me. "Jesus," I said, "I hope these guys aren't mad." But when we got out, they parked in the space closest to the store entrance. "Employees of the Month," I yelled.

We went through the sliding doors and stopped at the big industrial scale they have at the entrance where we always check our weight. I like this one because it tells me I'm lighter than the ones at other stores. So I step up and the two fellows we might have cut off step in right behind me. My friend is waiting to get on, but when I turn around, I'm face to face with one of the fellows. And I hear him say, ". . . but Sissy got on before me." The fellows were young and fit and my mind was racing with clever comebacks and recent instructions on how to take a fellow down with a single blow. I looked at my friend whose eyes looked as if someone might have just stepped on her toe. Then the fellow turned to his friend and said, ". . . and she almost broke the scale. She weighed like a buck eighty-five." And I realized he wasn't referring to me as "Sissy."

"Jesus, I thought you were talking about me," I said with a laugh. Then my friend started laughing, too. "Holy shit, I thought it was 'Go Time,'" she said.

"What? Oh, no, no, he's talking about a friend of ours. . . ."

We chuckled as we shopped.

Later that night, we watched the movie "Old School," which I had never seen before. And in it, one of the characters yells, "It's Go Time!" I think this was Will Ferrell just before he streaked.

It turned out to be a good night anyway.