String Cheese- Article Sixteen

Halloween Memories Can Be Frightening
by Aryn Corley

Halloween is one of my favorite holidays.
When I was a kid I'd enjoy dressing up in strange costumes and accosting my neighbors for something sweet and bad for my teeth. My parents weren't at all concerned with the pagan origins of the holiday. Also, we didn't have a whole lot of cash laying around to spend on costumes.
They just thought it was funny to watch me dress up like some low-budget ghoul. In fact, the operating budget carried just enough money to buy one bag of candy and that was to go to other kids who came to my house.
Life is so cruel.
I didn't know it at the time, but it was no coincidence that we always got the candy my dad liked and it was usually gone by the time kids started arriving.
Anyway, back to my costumes.
Other kids were dressing up as pirates, sports figures, some even as biblical characters. Some of them had elaborate get-ups that were store bought.
Not I.
I always had to be whatever was laying around the house. Ed Wood would've been proud of me. There was no rhyme nor reason to my look. It defied explanation. People would ask me what my costume was and I would just shrug. I was the "Dunno" for many Halloweens.
One year I had green oatmeal stuck to my face. My mom got the brilliant idea of mixing oatmeal with green food coloring and globbing it all over my kisser. I looked as if Linda Blair tried to give me a makeover.As I went from house to house I got some very strange looks.
"What are you supposed to be young man?"
"I dunno."
"You look like someone puked their breakfast all over your face."
To add insult to injury, the guy dumped about a pound of candy corn into my small bag. Ugh.
The streets of Hell are paved with candy corn.
I dragged that sack around like a bag full of fossilized dinosaur droppings. At least my dad was excited about my take."Candy corn! My favorite!" he exclaimed.
Now that I'm a parent, I've decided to spare my children the indignity of roaming the neighborhood as a pile of dirty laundry. Ironically, my father runs a chain of stores which sell, of all things, Halloween costumes. My kids received some really cool things from grandpas store. The Darth Vader costume that came was pretty elaborate and the lightsaber that goes with it is pretty cool too. Where was all that stuff when I was a kid?
Life is so cruel.
It's just as well that they got fancy commercial costumes for Halloween. I probably would have dressed them up as something completely inappropriate like an Al-Queda operative or Monica Lewinsky (dress not included).We probably won't go trick-or-treating in the traditional sense. Creeping around in the dark dressed as 12 point buck is a recipe for getting shot around these parts. We'll probably end up going to the kids' school or to some other local gathering. Maybe the kids would like to go to a bar that night.
Those kids have it so easy.