October 27, 1999

The treats and tricks of Halloween

By GARRET LEIVA
Herald editor
       A great many of the dozen fillings capping my molars can trace their direct lineage to Halloween night: 1976-83. Each cavity having six degrees of separation from an O! Henry candy bar.
      Of course my "lick and a promise" approach to brushing teeth - as my mother called it - may have contributed to Dr. Bailey's down payment on his Corvette.
      What is truly amazing, though, is how I amassed any sugar saturated candy on allhallows eve. Living on a road where you drove with your brights on to give the deer a head start, door-to-door trick-or-treating was a concept as alien as a Star Wars prequel light saber. Mischievous things that went bump in the night were so quite around our house I once asked my dad if I could 'teepee' the oak tree in our own front yard - he politely refused my offer to squeeze the Charmin between branches.
      Instead, the highlight of Halloween was the "guess-who-waited-until-the-last-minute-to-make-a-costume-so-I'm going-as-a-ghost-again" all-school parade.
      Kindergarten through sixth-grade, we lined up between the blacktop kick ball diamond and the chalked-out hopscotch squares. Class by class and two by two, witches, vampires, pirates and princess would march down main street, passing under the town's lone red blinking light, before circling the block and stopping back at the brick elementary school. The route never changed, yet every year I was caught off guard.
      Creating a Halloween costume before the bus arrived at 7:45 a.m. became something of an annual tradition at my house. The 'cowboy' became a perennial favorite - with a quick draw of straight-leg Wranglers, an embroidered 4-H county fair shirt and dusty cowboy boots from the hall closet. A black cape on permanent standby next to the pink Allen's Lil' General Store bowling shirts and plaid ties gave 'Dracula' more bite and 'Zorro' much needed swashbuckling.
      It was, however, a simple white sheet that made all my other costumes pale in comparison; although I didn't realize it until a phone call from my mom 21 years later.
      Costume-wise, being a ghost for Halloween was usually a dead giveaway that someone forgot why October 31 is printed in red ink on most calendars. One such year, when I was 8 years old, I went to school as one of those forgetful ghosts.
      Of course, not every kid that came to school with a sheet over his head was your traditional white linen specter. Every year a few faint stripes and paisley prints would float down the M-65 and Esmond Road parade route. My ghostly garb faux pas, if you can call it that, had nothing to do with fashion sense. Instead, it pertained to the sheet's previous owners. It seems my mom, unable to find a white sheet she would willingly part with at home, found a slightly used model.
      Now I'm far from a sheet snob. On the contrary, the top sheet on my college dorm room bed was capable of not only standing up in the corner, it could have sat in on my biology class and probably pulled down better grades. Wearing a sheet from a funeral parlor over your head, however, conjures images impervious to any detergent; even those stronger than dirt.
      Perhaps my mother left out this bit of detail until recently because the sheets were clean and their past lives should have no direct bearing on whether I cut out holes for eye slits.
      More likely it would have made me cry.
      Being a sensitive child, I expressed my emotions through tear ducts. Anger, frustration, fear, no matter what the adjective my eyes would well up. Throughout elementary school I never set foot in the haunted house constructed on the gymnasium stage, even though I knew the plate of 'brains' behind the cardboard box was only spaghetti.
      Stepping on the school bus that morning- white ghost sheet in my duffle bag- ignorance was indeed bliss.
      I still eat Halloween candy by the handful, although my latest cavities have more to do with my disdain for flossing. Living in a subdivision these days, I expect to hear 'trick or treat, smell my feet, give me something good to eat' about a hundred times Sunday night. And I do wonder if I run out of O! Henry bars before 9 p.m. if my pine trees will be 'teepeed?'
      By the way, if you do show up on my front porch wearing a slightly used white sheet I promise not to cry.
      Herald editor Garret Leiva can be reached at 933-1416 or e-mail at gleiva(at)gtherald.com.