To the Finish Line

I remember a particular November 1st, once upon a time, in a land deep in the heart of New York suburbia.  It is probably a Sunday, and there is young Debby Solomon, suffering from acute post-Halloween blues, or something like that.   More likely, I am just bristling with boredom.  Maybe I am in fourth grade.   I think it was pre-hang-out-near-the-powerlines-and-smoke-Marlboro-Lights, so, yeah, it must have been fourth.  We smoked’em young in Dix Hills.  Or, who knows?  Maybe I am twelve.  Or maybe this is that one year where I had that crazy Dorothy Hamill haircut, the result of Mom saying, “If you don’t start brushing your hair…”

Why is memory so woefully out-of-focus?

Anyway, I think I remember that Elyse Kaplan (gosh, I hope I have the right characters for this story) and I were doing some version of twiddling our thumbs upstairs in my bedroom, trying to figure out how to make the long day pass.  And we were hungry.  But, no, that doesn’t make sense because it’s post-Halloween Day #1, so there would have been mounds of candy in the kitchen.  Okay, slash that.  We weren’t hungry, or, if we were, it was just because we were too lazy to haul downstairs, or, maybe it was a hiding-from-parents thing, who knows? Anyway, we decided to do what every other bored, maybe-hungry kid would do on November 1st.

We decided to go trick-or-treating.

I mean, this was a town where backyards grew swimming pools and even tennis courts, where couples joined Gatsbyish country clubs, where kids wore Jordache jeans.  Dogs in Dix Hills owned sweaters.  You get the point.  So, Elyse and I reasoned that there must be mountains of Kit Kats just awaiting our arrival on the scene.  After all, Dix Hills shoppers always overbought.  There just had to be leftovers sitting in those newly remodeled kitchens.

We trekked downstairs.

I should probably write a glorious end to this fine story.  I should tell how our neighbors embraced our maverick attitude, hugged us, even invited us in for a cup of hot cocoa with mini marshmallows.  I should tell how they filled our bags with king-sized Snickers (”Here, take an extra one for your brother”) and pronounced us the most ingenious rebels ever to land in this fair town.  I should share the larger message of how the entire month of November magically transformed into a bonanza of neighbors offering free stuff to other neighbors.  “Trick or treat?  Here, would you like this scarf that I just bought at Bloomingdale’s?  Or, here, how about this vanilla-scented hand lotion?  Oh, and take this handful of Three Musketeers bars home for the youngins’.”  One skimpy day of Halloween?  No way. Not in Dix Hills.  Not once Elyse Kaplan and I came on the scene and broke that silly rule.

But, in truth, I think we rang just one measly doorbell on that fine November 1st afternoon.  We rang and then we ran, ran as if we were inches away from being mauled by a herd of German Shepherds (complete with fancy sweaters, of course).  And then we laughed.  That part I remember well.  And even though it was certainly not a prolonged act of mutiny, I remember how  deeply we reveled in our glorious Halloween subversion.  We talked about it for years.

So, today, on this November 1st, decades later, when Max starts crying because our bassett hound has pierced a hole in his favorite ball since toddlerhood, I say to him, “Buddy, I have an idea.  Why don’t you grab your pumpkin face bag and head back out into the neighborhood to get more candy?”  And he looks at me like I am half-crazy, half-savant.   And, he laces up his shoes.  And…

No.  I never tell him that.

Instead, I resort to boring ol’ mommyhood.  “We’ll get a new ball.”  “You’ve got lots of other balls.”  “I know how frustrating the dog can be when he eats your things.”  And I hug him and, eventually, he stops crying.

Part of me wishes that I had ordered my show-me-a-rule-and-I’ll-follow-it son to head outside, to ring some doorbells, to run like crazy.

Go break some rules, Son.  Go raise some hell.  Go.  Go.  Go.

But that, of course, isn’t exactly how parenting (or, for that matter, rebellion) usually works.

I guess, in the end, Mr. Rule-Bound will need to figure out his own noble cause.  And then maybe, one day, years from now, he, like his mom, will sit down to craft some cloudy version of the truth.