All told, one hundred fourteen (114) trick-or-treaters came to the door last night in a 90-minute period. And this came after I was fifteen minutes late getting home from work tonight.
I'm still trying to catch my breath. I bought four bags of candy, thinking Steve could snack at two of them. In forty minutes, 3 1/2 bags were gone. So I started handing out nickels. I must have handed out almost $6 worth of nickels alone.
At one point, I walked into the kitchen to cut open another bag of candy (this year, they were Butterfinger Caramel Cremes I think -- and no, I'm not about to root through the garbage to verify that), which took thirty seconds. Eleven kids congregated on my driveway in a line in just that time. I thought, where were they bussing these kids in from?
Then I remembered: for twenty years, we lived on a dead-end street. Even to drive from the street in the complex behind ours to the home street would take five minutes. Thirty-nine homes, only half of which had kids. Any year we had thirty kids, I would marvel at their desperation.
I remember my dad's mom saying she would have a ton of trick-or-treaters every Halloween. The exact numbers escape me... but I wonder if I beat her record this year.
What I considered strange is that I didn't hear much hubbub about candy safety checkpoints like in previous years. And Detroit's "Angels Night" mission, held again over the holiday, garnered very little news. I'm not sure if that's a good sign or not, but as long as it's not more bloody PR for the city, I guess it's all good. (Though one of the drivers told me the entire Angels Night thing is pure propaganda -- it wouldn't surprise me.)
Remember this entry from last November 12, entitled "Consolation Prize For Linus"? It detailed a pumpkin patch near the airport, when I was complaining about real pumpkins laid to the side and gone to waste. As it turns out, the house on that property burned two days ago, and according to the same driver who mentioned "propaganda", all seven occupants of the house perished. Strange that I've never read that.
I passed by there today and saw the gutted shell of the house; yet there were people in the patch, picking out pumpkins without a care in the world or one cent out of their pocket. I reserve comment on that image for a moment... it's too deeply disturbing to even fathom. Death lurks by (if that's indeed what happened), and the people don't care?
Guess we need to make those gory horror flicks mandatory viewing.
