Halloween

I like Halloween, among the top 10 days of the year.  ( like a lot of things…)  It’s that day to dress up or dress down or just be a little goofy… and not be out of line with everyone else.  It is the day that I can wear my kilt to work, and not worry about getting sent home.  Sure I get the “what do you have on under your kilt” question, and being in the harassment free work place (No Fun Zone), I reply with a “yes” or simply smile.  Other work friendly costume I have worn, a toga as I was Socrates, a custom home-made Cowardly Lion, and this year a frontier bartender, of course I was tending bar, so not much of a stretch.

I also like the benefits of Halloween, candy, especially the small size.  It is the only time spending more money for cute little candy bars is not frivolous.  Since I have decision making problems, I can have two and satisfy myself doubly!  And Smartee’s and Skittles’ and Tootsie Rolls and…

Past my trick-r-treating days, I can also get a great measure of joy handing out candy.  In years past there has been a party surrounding this, the first one when I lived in Prairie Park, across the street from a grade school.  As with many of my parties, adult beverages where served and we took turns handing out the candy everyone brought over.  When we ran out of candy, we broke into the freezer and started to hand out frozen burritos, until reason prevailed and we turned off the porch light.  There were quite a few kids, but nothing compared to our current location.  Old West Lawrence, maybe due to it’s proximity to downtown and that candy handout, or maybe the reputation of the neighborhood, we get A LOT of kids!!  For several years we had parties, we needed extra people bringing goodies to supply candy to all the goblins and princesses, and then last year I took a tally, 170 something, if I remember right.  Broken down by time, there was a quick start about 6:30, then a lull followed by a rising tide that crested around 7:30, and slowly receded until 8, when all that was left roaming the streets where bands of teen agers. 

This year, we were prepared.  With the house in various stages of (dis)repair, we didn’t have a party, so my wife bought 10 bags of candy, including 2 super sized bags.  Wading home from Angler’s though the sea of people sucking up the candy handouts down town, I knew we had it coming.  The doorbell rang with the first pair of kids just before 6:30.  I grabbed the caldron of candy and my beer and headed for the porch.  4 super heros  into it, we got a note pad and pen to keep track, and soon after that I went in and filled a pitcher of homebrewed IPA for the parents.  It was fast and furious and when we ran out of candy bars at 7:30, our tally was in the 170’s again, and we were down to the tootsie family multi pack.  I wanted to make it last, so 2-3 treats got handed out instead of handfuls, and it worked, at 7:58, we hit the magic 200 trick-r-treater mark.  And as I ran glass the last of the 3 pitchers of beer I poured next door, 2 more came up, final tally 202!!  Whew!

Now a short little complaint.  I don’t think kids know what Halloween is, or even what they are supposed to do.  Half the kids mumbled “Trick or Treat”, and only one offered to show us his trick.  And while some parents stayed on the sidewalk, many walked all the way up to the porch escorting the little zombies.  I suppose it was crowded and busy enough there was not time for tricks, but at least say the line.  My first Halloween memory, I was a football player, and for my trick I would pose with the football like I was OJ running past a defender, the posture that I later recognized as that of the Heisman trophy.  I was cute.  And my little sister was a cheerleader, even cuter (but cant find that picture…)

Here is one with the two of us.  I don’t think this is Halloween, but it could have been, or maybe someone’s wedding, Upton is pretty rural. 

Cute, cute, cute!!!

It's Just a Flesh Wound...

Not that it explains any of my oddness, but I was once shot in the head. It was a friendly fire incident, the worst of all reasons to get shot. It was Easter of 1982, I think, and the emergency room was quiet compared to many of the other times I visited there. They saved the projectile that they dug out of my skull for me in one of those urine sample jars, which is now labeled and lost among the boxes and drawers of memories. I was so lucky…

My friend Adam lived in KC with his dad during the week and came out to his mom’s on weekends. We would pal around, hiking, hunting, camping, stalking, mini-biking and all that other fun stuff on the quarter section of wooded hillside between our houses. We build hay forts and tree stands and hydro-engineering projects in the ditch just for the fun of it. Anything we could figure out to do with firecrackers, we did. He brought some bottle rockets from home and we would take turns shooting at each other as we zipped by on the mini-bike. Being the young engineer I was, I made a launcher with a flag pole, capped at one end, a hole cut to light the fuse, and a tennis ball can as a flash suppressor, which gave the game some surprisingly close calls. But it was all harmless.

You might be thinking 1982, what were you doing with a firearm? But I was living “in the country”, a couple miles outside of town where boys and guns went together like, well, boys and guns! And our arsenal was comprised of pellet and BB guns, hardly lethal, at least to boys. Now pigeons and grasshoppers might fall prey to the mighty guns every now and then, a squirrel once and a lot of cans, but nothing much bigger than a shoe. This particular spring, we had gone down to the pond to shoot (at) frogs. I had left the nice .22 caliber pellet gun at the house, preferring the cheaper ammo of BB guns. The drawback of BB’s are their accuracy, saving the lives of countless critters. When we ran out of BB’s, we tried hunting them down with pocket knives, and when that fun wore off, we started to trudge back home, me in the lead. Adam had a CO2 powered BB pistol, with a 50 or so shot reservoir for BB’s, and you could shake and hear the rattle of your remaining shots. Well, since we had long exhausted our ammo, firearm discipline had lapsed, and for no reason that anyone can explain, Adam took aim at me from 30 feet or so and pulled the trigger. Hey, it was empty, right? Well that puff of compressed air pushed the real last BB out of the chamber on a trajectory towards me. Continuing in the series of unlikely events, the .177 caliber slug, travelling at hundreds of feet per second, founds it make, me, striking me in the back of the head, several inches behind my ear! I thought I had been stung by a wasp, and flinched, bringing my hand up to my head as I turned around. The shocked look on Adam’s face (and the gun pointed at me) quickly informed me to what had happened. Not content with giving me a welt or just a small flesh wound, the BB pierced my skin and imbedded itself between my scalp and skull a good inch from the entry point. I told Adam not to worry, I would tell the parents that it was a ricochet, so he wouldn’t get in (too much) trouble, and turned and ran the rest of the way back to my house, where I told my mom I was shot. Shocked, she cleaned up the blood, scalp wounds are bleeders, to find a tiny hole and a bump, and after tying for several minutes to move the BB back to the hole, decided this might be best left to the professionals, and loaded me up in the car and we headed to the Emergency Room. There, after a requisite wait, a local was injected and a small X was cut to remove the BB. And continuing the cover up, I had to get a tetanus shot (since it had bounced off the ground). After returning home, I found Adam waiting on the back porch with his mom, and a large basket of Easter apology candy.

Well, it sits in a plastic jar labeled “The BB that got me, Easter ‘82” and is packed away somewhere next to the chunks of cartilage from my first knee surgery, a reminder of how lucky I was.