Thoughts by Richard Bleil
You say it’s your booday? Well, it’s my booday too, yeah. You say it’s your booday? We’re gonna have a good time. You say it’s your booday? Happy booday to you!
Okay, my apologies to the Beatles for stealing their song. I hope it’s okay that I absconded this song to spoof it, but it was for a good cause. It was to celebrate Halloween. What better cause can there be?
Halloween has always been my favorite holiday. I think it’s just the concept that you can be anything you want to be, even if it’s only for one night. It’s really kind of sad; we should always be free to be who we want to be. But one evening is better than never at all.
This will be a very interesting Halloween indeed for me. Halloween this year falls on a weekend. What’s more, it’s a full moon, and a blue moon at that (the modern definition of “blue moon” is the second full moon of a month.
More frightening than Halloween this year is the Presidential election, just three days later. And this election will be a nasty one at that. Add Covid and it just keeps getting spookier.
When I was married, many years ago, we were contending with our own pandemic, namely the H1N1 flu. I’ll be honest with you, I love Halloween. It takes a lot for me to want to give it up, but I wish I could have then. My wife and one of our boys were desperately sick that year, quite probably with that very virus. I tried to convince them that we just shouldn’t go out, and even volunteered to take the other boys out and collect extra candy for them, but my wife insisted on all of us going out. Yes, family activities, including Halloween, is important, but not important enough to risk harm. We’re lucky they didn’t get worse than they did.
A few years later, I was living in Rapid City. Now, for Halloween, I always get full-size candy bars. None of that “fun size” nonsense, and I always get what I love the most, usually Hershey’s chocolate bars, Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, and some other kind of candy. And I get far too much, knowing, and hoping, that anything I don’t give out will be mine.
Well, at this apartment, I wasn’t sure if I’d have Trick or Treaters, so I went very overboard. The next day there was a knock on the door. Most of my candy was never even taken out of the package; there was no need as I only had maybe two or three visitors. A mother stood there with her child in full Halloween costume, and she explained that her child couldn’t trick or treat on the proper day as he wasn’t feeling well, and if I had anything left over, could I spare it. Well, of course I did. I picked up the pack of six full-size Hershey bars, and thought about opening it for a moment. Then I slipped the entire pack into the child’s bag and bade him to share it with his mom.
This year, along with everything else, I’m starting my motorcycle riding lessons. It was too cold to do the practical last weekend, so this is it. And my house purchase is moving on. I’m thinking I’ll be closing in the next couple of weeks. Too bad, really. It would be a marvelous house, huge with two floors and three doors that would be perfect for a walk-through haunted house for kids with their parents. Well, maybe next year. How fun would it be to have the kids reach through a skull to get candy?
With Covid, I urge my readers to enjoy Halloween with care. Of course, be careful of any candy you collect, be careful of drivers and dress in reflective costumes. But have fun. I used to live in Boston and have visited Salem. That is a very cool place to visit if you’re up for it. I wish I had visited during Halloween. Maybe someday I’ll have the chance. Maybe I need to drive my motorcycle out for it!
And please don’t forget to vote. At this point, I wouldn’t trust a ballot to get there by mail in time, so I recommend voting early if you can and have not done so yet. I’m guessing November 3 the lines at the polls will be nightmares. But I guess that’s okay. It’s the season for nightmares!
Bleil's Banter 