Halloween Rerun

If the networks can show Charlie Brown every year for 45 years, I should be able to repeat the post about my strangest Halloween night. Here goes:

I was 14 and too old to trick or treat, but too young to stay in. So after re-stocking drinks in my grandma’s store, I headed for the nearby sub-division to meet up with friends. It was a quarter-mile walk in the pitch black on a country road. Perfect for a spooky night.

As I neared the subdivision, I heard a commotion near one of the houses. As I rounded the corner of the house I saw a man in his 30’s pointing a very shiny handgun at four boys--who were huddling together. I was out in the open and he pointed the gun at me briefly. Without thinking about it, I walked towards him, gestured towards the kids and asked, “What did they do?“, as if I was not a kid myself. He turned the gun back towards them. I walked over next to him and he explained that his mother’s house had been egged—and he was tired of her being harassed. I introduced myself as the grandson of the woman who ran the little store down the road (everyone knew her) and told him I’d talked with his mom many times.

Then I turned to the only one of the accused I knew:

Me: Andy, did you and your friends throw the eggs?
Andy: No.
Me: Do you know who did?
Andy: We saw guys running that way just before we got here.
Me: Okay, you two go look for the other guys and try to get names. You two help Mr. Wilson clean the egg off his mom’s house.

Mr. Wilson put his gun away, apologized to me for losing his temper, and then they all did what I told them to do. Whew!!! That’s when I realized if you act confident and that you are doing what you're supposed to, people will cooperate. It all happened so quickly, I didn’t have time to get nervous. But I did feel shaky as I went in search of my friends. That’s when I encountered the girl.


Okay, I'm not going to repeat the girl part. She kissed me, I caught mononucleosis and then pneumonia. I missed school almost the entire month of December. There were rumors I'd died, so my first week back at school was a little strange.

I ended the original post by wondering who would have guessed the girl would end up being more dangerous than the gun. But that was mostly my doing. I recognized the danger of the gun, but it never occurred to me that a girl could be dangerous too. What a naive boy. LOL!

PS - Here are this year's Halloween pumpkins.