The Calorie Corridor

I have to go out and buy some candy for Halloween. I do this every year. Now most of you are probably saying “Big deal, we all do that!” The difference is, in the 14 years I’ve lived here, no one has ever come Trick or Treating at my door. I live on a dark country road in an area known as “The Park”. There are only a few houses on my street and the wooded road is so steep even goats avoid it. But every year I worry: maybe this time.

When my son was younger, we used to leave a bowl outside our door with a note, “Help yourself! Happy Halloween” and we’d get in the car and drive around to an actual neighborhood. The neighborhood is on the fringe of “The Park”, accessible if we were to walk across the woods but who wants to do that at night on Halloween? So we’d drive down to the bottom of our hill, around the turn and up the next winding road to the neighborhood behind our house where quarter acre zoning and modest houses produced a bonanza for costumed kiddies and their goodie-bags. These people really knew how to throw a Halloween party! Every house would be decorated; cemeteries, ghouls, music, sounds… We stopped at a house the first year that had four ghouls seated at a card table, locked in an eternal game of poker. The hostess told us to check out the hand one of the ghouls was playing; a sort of in-joke for the adults. My husband walked over to the table and looked at the hand. My husband has glaucoma and doesn’t see anything to his side so he didn’t notice when the ghoul started to rise… and rise… and rise. He turned in time to see this apparition towering over him and he screamed so loud I think the entire neighborhood turned to look before breaking into hysterical laughter. That’s how we met Bruce; 6’5” in his stocking feet but, on this night, augmented by small stilts, he dwarfed my almost 6 foot husband. Bruce loved Halloween and would create a new display every year to keep us all guessing.

We’d return to our own home hours later to find our own bowl untouched; another bonanza. And I’d start eating.

The two months from Halloween to New Years are fraught with excuses to abandon all semblance of self-control. I call them “The Calorie Corridor”. Candy, turkey, sweet potato mousse, pumpkin pie, leftovers, and just as you’re getting the refrigerator back to normal, here come the potato pancakes and brisket for Chanukah followed by Christmas with the in-laws.

The kids are grown and gone now and the granddaughter is too young to appreciate Halloween yet, although my son and daughter-in-law did have her photographed in a pink bunny suit with both the ears and the puffy white tail on her head so it looks at one time like she had been swallowed by the rabbit and was being extruded, smiling and happy, out the other end of the alimentary canal. I will still put out the candy, just in case. Then I’ll turn out the lights and hide in a back room with the TV. The Yanks are in Phillie for game three. Baseball in November? Did I miss something?