halloween

This is where I stand on Halloween candy. Get a lot. Save most of it. Eat it judiciously.

I collected and stored candy in a pillowcase with a draw string. The pillowcase had blue and red stripes. I think this is a tradition that has fed away. Now people use plastic jack-o-lantern tubs. Anyway, my pillowcase stayed under my bed. That was for security. I would triage my candy. I ate the jawbreakers right away. They were of no consequence. So too with the pez, an incredibly overrated candy. The baby ruth mattered. A bed of nougat laden with peanuts in a bath of chocolate. The baby ruth was eaten last. Often it was never consumed, but thrown out in a fit of parental oversight. "you cannot eat that, it will make you sick." And so it was never eaten, but truly savored.

My sister was able to save her candy as well. She kept hers somewhere in her room. I do not know where. It was the princess room and I was a foreigner there, given only an occasional visa to its environs.

I know Gretchen saved her candy well, though, because it was still in the house on one fateful Thanksgiving dinner with The Binghams. The Binghams lived about two miles away. We went to church with them. I think their son, Tyler, went to school with my brother. Tyler Bingham was perfect. Well, not as perfect as Bruce Balastier. Obviously. But still, pretty close to that standard and certainly a more ideal expression of the good son than myself or my brother. I think he had an acolyte collar on him that day, actually. Did I mention he was a great alto in the choir? I am sure you already heard that from my mother. Anyway, so Tyler is perfect but he had a sister, much older, who I had never met before but who came to dinner that year. I think she was somewhere between 17 and 30. Being about 10, it was hard to tell.

In our house, Thanksgiving dinner was as much about method as about content. The point was to eat in as long and drawn out a fashion as posssible. Dinner might last about 150 minutes. You were not supposed to get up the whole time. There would be a short break before dessert, and then another 60 minutes at least of eating and talking. Even the food was formal: There was no banana pudding with nilla wafer dessert. No sweet potato with marshmallows and pecans. No cheerwine. There were dishes like succotash, waldorf salad. Cranberry dressing without rings. Anyway, I am going on too long. The point is that this was part fun and part work, especially if you were impatient.

Tyler's sister was impatient. She got up from the table early in the meal. That was apparently ok. We didn't hear from her until dessert. Or, her mother didn't find her until dessert. Tyler's sister was upstairs, though, in the princess room, eating candy. All of Gretchen's candy.