Halloween night was uneventful at our house. A steady drizzle fell with the dark, and the black-jersey clad Vols game was broadcast on ESPN. That special day has changed in Ball Camp over the years.
When Jim and I were kids, we’d hook up with a gang of boys in the community and begin our search for candy. It wasn’t unusual for us to walk as far east as Lobetti Road and as far west as Ball Camp School. In all, our youthful legs would cover three or four miles. Houses with huge yards were sprinkled along the roads. We had to travel long distances to have even a modest amount of loot in our pillow cases or paper bags.
In those days, we didn’t waste precious time tricking many people. Every once in a while one of the boys would mark a window with a bar of soap. Toilet paper was too expensive to be throwing into trees and lining lawns. Besides, we boys had only a limited amount of time to complete our rounds before curfew arrived.
When my kids were little, their first trip was through the woods to Mother’s house. She loaded their bags with candy and rice crispy treats. Next, we traveled through the small subdivision where we live. Some of the houses were dark, a sign that folks weren’t home. I’d walk with Dallas and Lacey to a few houses on Ball Camp Pike, where traffic had become much heavier than in my time.
My children learned early to hide their candy stashes. I had a habit of raiding their piles of candy and would leave only the yucky stuff for them. Hey, it wasn’t as if they ate the stuff because neither of my children had much of a sweet tooth. One year Dallas hid his goodies and left them there. The result was a mouse invaded his closet and munched himself into obesity on the sweets.
Lacey sent us pictures of Madden in his Halloween costume. He wore a lemur outfit with a long tail. Amy and I “oohed and aahed” over the pictures. We miss our grandson, but two hundred miles is a bit too far for me to drive to see him in a costume. The family says that it’s good to have the distance between us because, if nothing else, Madden’s candy treasures are safe. They will be thrown out since Lacey and Nick don’t allow the boy to indulge in too many sweets.
The past few years, the number of trick or treaters has dwindled. This year, the doorbell rang one time. Neither of us answered since Amy was prostrate with the flu. We had no callers the year before, so I didn’t bother buying any candy. I looked out the window and was that most houses in the neighborhood were as idle as ours.
Ours is an old neighborhood. Once it was filled with kids. Now, younger families live in subdivisions on the far end of Ball Camp Pike and Ball Road. Moms and dads load up the kids in cars now and let them loose on communities that have braced for the onslaught of ghouls and goblins. That’s okay. I have plenty of good memories of past Halloweens to make me smile. Besides, I watched the entire ball game without having to answer the cry of “Trick or treat!”
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