Accepting Candy from Strangers

We both carved pumpkins and lit candles inside them. I looped garlands of plastic spiders and rats through the banister and along the eaves of our front porch. I sprinkled our slate steps with creepy crawlies, purchased twenty bucks worth of candy and grabbed a beer. We considered playing music out the window, but the night was fairly still and crisp. The sound of children shreiking from house to house was sharper in the silence.

We waited on our porch with buckets of candy. And we waited.

We waited as we watched kids climbed stairs of neighboring houses, collected their bounty, and skipped past our house, parents in tow, to the house next door. What? We shook our pumpkin buckets of candy. We stood up and sat down. We walked down the steps to see the house from the sidewalk, confirm that it was well-lit, and walked back up, avoiding the plastic centipedes and skulls, to sit on the porch.

And we waited. Kids approached, considered and veered away. We had only four trick-or treaters demand candy, but many others who didn't even ask. I started to wonder, even if we are eager, and even if they don't know us, and we are strangers, isn't Halloween the night when we, as American children, bravely cast aside our fears to get the candy, no matter what the cost? When I was little, candy may have been laced with razor blades, arsenic, codeine, rat poison. But still, we went to every house, light or dark, and we begged for whatever they might give us because something was better than nothing. And if it was nothing, we could toilet paper the house later.

We ended up with two full buckets of Halloween candy that I didn't want to eat. We left the house and walked to the Castro with our dog. The seven policemen at the barricade told us that no dogs would be permitted inside the militarized zone, an area otherwise known as the Castro Halloween Party. It was also quiet, but eerily so. Two hundred thousand people corralled into the street, shoulder to shoulder, were making little noise because there was no music or entertainment to outdo. We tried to hand out candy to partygoers, half of whom accepted eagerly, the other half unwilling to accept candy from strangers.

Later, we learned that 10 kids between the ages of 15 and 25 had been shot after a minor altercation started. I thought about these kids, and wondered if they would have taken our candy with a smile like some people did, or whether they would have passed it up. I wondered if we could have just gotten to them, and given them the entire bucket of candy, whether maybe things could have been different. Maybe they could have just tossed leftover candy at each other instead of aiming and shooting bullets at others' heads. That's what we would have done, or, I guess, would still do. What a shame.