The Bag on the Dining Room Table

Halloween as we had it

Halloween has gone a little strange. The lawns fill up with horror now — the gravestones, the blood, the shrieking machines — right at the turn when the grass is going from green to brown. I don’t begrudge anyone the fun of it. It just isn’t what we had.

For my brothers and me, it ran second only to Christmas.

No Halloween lore came down to us. My parents had none to tell, and neither did my grandparents — not of costumes or candy or any of it. What they had instead was the season.

My grandparents owned and ran a small gourmet grocery, and my father stepped in later in their years to grow the business with them. The last weeks of October, November and December were the busiest of their year. It went back to the farm: the harvest, and then the celebration that everyone had made it through to the holidays.

Which is why my parents were gone late through those weeks, and why my brothers were mine to look after. The youngest most of all. I was his caretaker, and he was in everything we did.

My grandfather’s bear

We were never read to. But my grandfather had a story in his pocket.

We begged him for it when we were little, and hardest at Halloween. It was never the same story twice — only the same line through it — and it was always told at bedtime. A boy walking in the woods comes upon a big old brown bear. The bear finds him, and the bear gives chase.

Then my grandfather would look at one of us with his hands up in the air, growling, walking a slow circle around our beds, and ask: if you were the boy — where would you hide?

The way I remember it best, my middle brother went first. He always went first, and he was by a wide margin the most animated of us. He said he would run home. The bear is faster than you, my grandfather said. Where would you hide? The two of us shouted suggestions at him until he settled on a hollow tree trunk, and by then it was far too late. The bear pounced on the boy and tickled him to tears.

I was next. I ran to a river. I couldn’t touch the bottom, the bear swam better, and he caught me and tickled me until I begged him to stop.

My last brother — the smartest one in the family, and the one who grew up to be an engineer — climbed a tall tree. The bear climbed after him. So he went higher, to the very top, where the branches would not hold a bear’s weight. They didn’t. The bear came down on his backside and ran off into the woods.

Then the scrum: all of us piling onto whichever brother had beaten the bear, with my grandfather on top of the heap handing out hugs and kisses.

That was the scary story we had. It wasn’t Halloween’s. It was his.

“What Actually Stays”

What Lingers — September. A burn at the candy table, a blister, and the one story the family never stops telling.

Read the Essay

Made, not assembled

What else we had, we built ourselves — mostly out of my grandmother and my aunts.

The costumes were made by hand. Not assembled — made. They would sew the body, build the head out of papier-mâché, and then pin or glue the fabric onto it, which is a far more patient operation than it sounds. A frog. A leopard. A circus clown. And because they lasted, we wore them in turn, each of us aging into the next one, which my youngest brother considered a serious injustice. He got everything third.

Set those next to what hangs on a rack today and there is no contest. Theirs were beautifully crafted.

School was parades and treats all day and a costume contest, parents crowding the edges of the room to admire the fanfare. Then the evening, and the part that mattered.

In the early years our father walked us, with the dog. Every porch light on the street was lit. If it wasn’t snowing we covered what felt like the entire city, house after house, until the bags got too heavy to carry and somebody had to admit it.

My father’s last year as our escort was a snowy one. The walks had been shoveled clean and the snow was banked three feet high on either side, so there was nowhere for a dog to go. He wouldn’t let him into the drifts. The dog solved the problem by treating my father’s leg as a tree. That ended the evening, and it ended his career.

The bag on the table

The best Halloweens came after that, when our parents decided we were old enough to go on our own. Those were the Indian summer years — the moon nearly full, the grass still green, six of us including my younger brothers, running house to house in pure delight. Friendly to all the neighbors, even the ones who made you earn it by asking for a trick before any treat was handed over. It was our own small adventure, and I have held onto it.

Then home, and the bag onto the dining room table.

Out of that bag came an inventory. Mellowcremes. Bon bons. Tootsie Rolls and Tootsie Roll Pops. Black Cows. Chewing gum. Jawbreakers. Starch jelly shapes. Sweetarts. And on, and on. Sometimes homemade cookies, or fudge, or a piece of fruit from somebody’s kitchen rather than somebody’s purchase order.

This was the late sixties, when the papers started carrying stories about razor blades in apples. I have never known whether any of it was ever true. It didn’t matter — once it was in the air, the fruit and the home-baked things were lifted out of our haul when the inspection came, and that was that.

And then, the inspection finished and the goods laid out, the trading began. Three brothers, one table, every piece on it assigned a value nobody had written down. You learned fast what a Tootsie Pop was worth against a Black Cow, and that a boy who loved jawbreakers could be taken for everything he had.

The Tootsie Rolls went down to the youngest. So did anything with coconut. He didn’t even like coconut. He traded them away one at a time, cheerfully, until he looked at what was left in front of him and understood his situation — at which point a parent was generally called in for a realignment, and got one. It righted itself the way these things do. By the end of the week we were all eating out of each other’s piles anyway.

What lingers from October

After forty years of making candy, I look at that table differently now.

Most of what was on it came from different makers, each with his own idea of what a nickel’s worth of sugar ought to be — or that is how it looked from where I sat. We didn’t know we were looking at the trade. We only knew we hadn’t seen half of it before.

Today the bag comes mostly from a few very large companies, and it is the same few things wherever you go. I am not complaining about the candy. But it is harder now to empty a bag onto a table and find something you cannot name. That was half the fun.

The costumes went the same way, in the same years. Handmade, then bought off a rack.

So: what lingers from October.

The candy I could buy tomorrow. What lingers is a table covered with it, and three brothers arguing over an exchange rate nobody set. A house full of women who could make a leopard out of paper and cloth. And an old man with his hands in the air over our beds, telling it differently every time, never writing a word of it down.

And he was always the bear.

Confectionally Yours,

Emery