Trick or Treat

(Go here to see my best Halloween costume ever.)

It drizzled off and on last night and we only got about ten trick-or-treaters at the door, all of them quite young.  (Oh dear. My husband bought the 4 2/3 pound bag of mini candy bars at Costco in anticipation of there being lots more coming than that.)

Our neighborhood has an annual block party, so that even if I can’t keep everyone’s names straight, we all know each others’ faces, which is a wonderful thing.

The doorbell rang.  A young mom with her little ones whom I didn’t recognize introduced herself as the new neighbor down the street in the “pumpkin colored house.”  Cool.

There was quite a wait, and then the doorbell rang again: four children from two families, the oldest a boy about six, the youngest a girl of maybe three and a half at the most from the nearby cul-de-sac.  The parents stayed back away from immediate sight, letting the children in their costumes have their moment.

“Is there anything else?” The boy whined, picking at the bowl. “I want chocolate.”  The rubber hand came down on his with a gravelly voice, “Trick or Treat!” He grabbed it and waggled it back and forth, trying to make it do that again.  As I showed him that waving your hand in front of it without touching it made it activate, knowing that little boys like to see how things work, it was all I could do not to guffaw out loud at his disappointment, thinking, oh, me, too, hon, me too, but I didn’t pick out the candy this year, and they rarely sell Valrhona or Scharffenberger in bite sizes.  I tried to make it up to him by offering him extras of the dissed candy, and he pocketed it, sure, glad to; the five-year-old boy likewise.  They turned to go.

The two little girls were torn: clearly, their mothers had coached them well. You only take one piece.  That’s it.  Be polite.  I offered them more like the boys had gotten, and how could they disobey their moms?  But how could they leave, given an offer like that?

I rescued them by reaching into the bowl myself and putting extra into their bags, the slightly-older girl holding hers open for me.

Now, I’ve certainly been a young mom myself groaning over all the junk food my kids gleefully counted out of their loot on Halloween night after we walked them around to houses of people we knew.

This one little girl, the littlest, looked up at me with these huge eyes and these long eyelashes, and suddenly I felt I had passed the Grandma test: I was in cahoots with her. I didn’t make her disobey. But I got her what she wanted just the same; clearly my intent was simply for her to be happy, with the candy only a sign of that, and now she was ready to come in in her princess costume for a snuggle in the rocking chair and a good bedtime story.   Grandma.  I was adopted on the spot (and I knew her own Grandmas were half a world away.)  She utterly melted my heart.

Halloween became magical in that moment.