This Year I Dressed as 'Sexy Old Man With No Sense of Style'.

 

As an adult, I only dressed up in costume for Halloween a couple of times. It just isn't the same as when we were children. There is no excitement as an adult like there was for kids in 1950s Tinley Park. Even if I dressed up as a sexy construction worker, or sexy priest, I don't think it would excite me. No, Halloween is for the kids. In post war Tinley Park, in our little subdivision, the place was crawling with us baby boomers. On Halloween, by the time we got home from school and changed into our trick or treating costumes, the daylight would be quickly fading. Literally, hundreds of kids would be traipsing up and down our suburban streets with no adult supervision. If we ran into friends they would clue us in on which house was giving away the good stuff and who was giving away healthy stuff. There would always be a lot of discarded apples up and down our street the morning after. I still remember the joy of finally arriving back home with my wrinkled, paper supermarket bag, heavy with booty. Before I even took off the costume I would dump it all on the bed and check to see just how well I did. Ugh, I hated Mary Jane candy. It was a sticky peanut butter candy that you could break your teeth on. Also the Tootsie Rolls. Little cylinders of brown that did not taste like chocolate to me, and also weren't anywhere sweet enough to go through the trouble of chewing on them. It was the candy bars that made it all worth it. Out of all that candy, you would be lucky to get maybe a dozen good candy bars. And the only reason we got any good stuff is because we would go across 167th Street, into the snooty subdivision. KImberly Heights, that was where the 'rich' people lived in our town.

I bought a large bag of Sour Patch Candy and Swedish Fish to give out this year. I was worried because there were only fifty packs in the bag. There have been a couple of years more than fifty trick or treaters came to our door. I needn't have worried. I waited all day for the dogs to go bat shit crazy because of little kids at our door. Nothing. Not one child came to our house this year and yelled "Trick or Treat!" At 8:30 PM, I turned out the living room lights, turned off the television, and retired to my little office. At 8:35 both dogs started barking. Sure enough, there was somebody at our door looking for free candy. Two adult women dressed as witches. I gave them two packs each of candy. I don't know why there were no kids this year. Two years ago there was ice and snow on the ground and nobody wanted to go out in that freezing weather. Last year it was the covid. Maybe that was all it took to break the ritual. All I know is that I have forty six packs of Sour Patch Candy and Swedish Fish sitting in my house now, tempting me to put those twenty three pounds I lost, back on.