PASSAGE FROM THE BOOK:
“Ok ok, whip out your bag!”
On recruitment day, I’d made clear our mission: fill a pillowcase full by night’s end. Never again would I lust for then beg my mother to buy that colorful yet flesh irritating plastic pumpkin container with the hard plastic strap sold in Myers Thrifty Acres. The pillowcase (a technology I’d heard about in school) was flexible, durable, and easy to fling over the shoulder. Perfect for the efficient Halloween Night ‘GET’. Get in, Get out, Get going.
“Now, everybody costume up while I talk about the map.”
I pulled from my pocket a mud spattered piece of lined notebook paper whose edges I’d torched with a lit match to convey an impression of antiquity. My recruits were dazzled, “Oooo aaaahhh.” Pointing to the evil death’s head I’d crayoned in to represent the hated Mrs. Schmidt— stingy, tight lipped, critical neighbor who called the cops on kids who cut through her backyard after school, “No Schmidt.” Schmidt never gave out anything good. Anemic sweet tarts. Chalky Neccos wafers. Tasteless candy corns. (jabs at drawing) “No Schmidt!”
“Yes sir…”
Next, pointing on the map to a depiction of a stick figure bent double, holding a cane, “No Aunt Matilda.” Aunt Matilda, as she insisted the neighborhood kids call her, was a kindly old woman with a wrinkled face, dry as a desiccated apple, who took too long in enacting the door ritual. Aunt Matilda, her myopic eyes filled with goo, would spend whole minutes reaching for and opening the door on hearing the bell. “…coming…” Then, whole minutes ogling the kids: “oh… how pretty you are little girl. Oh, you look like a witch; isn’t that cute… and you look like you might be a pirate… that reminds me of my little Julienne when he went out as a pirate, he–” Then, tortured minutes moving on hobbled feet from the door to the candy bowl back to the door back to the candy bowl; plucking with her long knobby fingers a single candy at a time, usually an irrelevant disk of peppermint, then returning to drop the inept sweet into a waiting Trick or Treaters’ bag; then hobbling arthritically back to the candy bowl; plucking, hobbling, plucking, hobbling… a plodding, painful, slow motion graveyard march. (jabs at drawing) “No Aunt Matilda!”
“Yes sir…”
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