Trick-or-treat, Smell My Feet, Give Me Something Good to Eat

Maddie found out Thursday she made the basketball team. G-man's team stayed undefeated. The game that was supposed to be canceled next Tuesday is back on the schedule. So he will wind up missing two games instead of one. I hope they keep their perfect season alive one more week.

Today is Halloween. The kids are passed the stage where they dress up and trick-or-treat. I remember Halloween was one of my favorite holidays. I always looked forward to going to K-Mart and picking out my costume. Mom had only one rule. I couldn't dress up as the devil. I think it was because she didn't want my sister and me saying where he lives, because we would have said it over and over again because we could have.

I don't know if they still have costumes like we did. The costumes we liked had a mask and a matching outfit. The two I remember best were a Pirate and a Skeleton. I only really remember from the photos. My sister and I trick-or-treated the whole neighborhood in a several block radius with a few neighbor friends. In those days we didn't worry about visibility of the costumes in traffic, lack of vision wearing the masks, or lead in the toys. We worried about what Mom told us about all the crazy people who lived in our neighborhood and how we had to check for poison candy and razor blades in apples that were common in the 1970's.  (Snopes) 

Speaking of something scary. It was near Halloween one year when a guy murdered a lady, a church pianist, in our town. I don't know why I remember that other than the way I understood it as a kid, she was actually playing the piano when he did it. I doubt that's how it happened, but it was the picture in my mind at the time. They knew who he was and were looking for him, but they hadn't found him when the radio reported the crime and the fact that there was a dangerous killer on the loose. As night fell, Dad was not home and Mom got kind of panicked. (I've said before, my Mom was just a kid of 22 when I was born so she was probably barely 30 at the time.) She had me search the house for the killer. I looked with bated breath under beds, in closets, in showers, and everywhere he was likely hiding in our house. Once we secured a perimeter, I loaded my BB Gun and Mom got out the heavy artillery. Now for the scary part. I was most afraid that night when I saw Mom trying to load 12 gauge shotgun shells into a Remington .243 rifle.