There was always that one house.
A dark porch. A flickering light. Someone sitting in a chair beside a bowl of candy, suspiciously still.
Was it a decoration? Was it somebody’s dad?
Only one way to find out.
You sent your friend first.
Halloween had a way of turning an ordinary neighborhood into somewhere worth exploring. You walked past those houses every day. You knew who lived in half of them. But put a few pumpkins on the steps, let the sun go down, and suddenly that same block had possibilities.
Something might jump out. Someone might answer the door dressed like a lunatic. Someone might have full-size candy bars.
The stakes were substantial.
And you kept going.
Leaves crunched under your shoes. Your mask made it difficult to see, breathe, or do much of anything besides sweat. If you grew up somewhere cold, your carefully chosen costume disappeared beneath a winter coat.
You were a vampire in a jacket.
But you were outside with your friends, moving through the dark, wondering what was around the next corner. For a few hours, that was enough.
A Little Mystery
As adults, we get pretty good at knowing what to expect.
We check the menu before going to the restaurant. Look at pictures of the trail before walking it. Read enough reviews to determine whether an experience is worth having before we’ve actually had it.
I do this. I can research the fun right out of something.
There are good reasons to plan. Time and money matter. A bad surprise can ruin your week.
But I miss the smaller surprises. The kind you could find by walking down a different street.
Halloween gave us permission to be curious. You could feel a little uneasy and still have a good time. You could hesitate at the bottom of the steps, hear your friends calling you a chicken, and decide the candy was worth investigating.
Then the guy in the chair moved, and you discovered a previously untapped capacity for sprinting.
Fun Without a Purpose
The other thing Halloween had going for it: nobody expected you to accomplish much.
You dressed up. Walked around. Got scared. Collected an unreasonable amount of candy and went home to sort it on the floor like a tiny commodities trader.
That was the whole evening.
Somewhere along the way, it gets harder to let an experience be enough on its own. Hobbies become potential businesses. Walks become workouts. A free evening becomes an opportunity to catch up.
Even having fun can start to feel like another thing we should be doing better.
But there’s something wonderful about an entire neighborhood agreeing to be ridiculous for a night. Adults carving faces into produce. Kids dressed as monsters asking strangers for chocolate. Somebody spending three hours setting up a fake cemetery so a seven-year-old can say, “Cool,” and walk across it.
I respect the commitment.
Take the Walk
Maybe the Halloween we remember so fondly owes something to being young. We had fewer responsibilities, more imagination, and somebody else paying the heating bill.
We can’t recreate all of that.
We can still go outside after dark and look at the decorations, though. Watch a scary movie with someone who talks to the screen. Put on a costume that serves absolutely no purpose beyond making us laugh.
We can leave a little room for something we didn’t plan.
Because I suspect some of what we miss about childhood is how interested we were in what might happen next.
There was another house. Another block. A strange noise coming from somebody’s garage.
And there we were, at the bottom of the steps, deciding whether to ring the bell.
Happy Halloween.
Keep an eye on the guy in the chair.