The lost Halloween

With Halloween upon us, I was having a conversation with a co-worker on trick-or-treating as a kid and started to reminisce the last year I did go around the neighborhood and the first year I didn't.

Here's what the last trick-or-treating venture was like -- I went with a couple friends on a journey for a house where an owner of a taffy apple company supposedly lived. Though it wasn't too far (and we never got taffy apples), it was out of the way enough that walking home, I trick-or-treated more houses than a 10-year-old should. I was dressed as a vampire that Halloween. When I got home, I went with some of my other, older friends to a high school football game (thinking back, was that a playoff game for the high school I'd eventually attend?), got my hand on a field goal kick after it went through the uprights, and had one friend take by force a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup (crunchy) after I waffled on giving it to him. That was 1980.

Here's what the first year I didn't trick-or-treat was like -- I guess I outgrew dressing up, though the next year I would be costumed as a wizard though I didn't hit the neighborhood. It was the year of the big Tylenol cyanide scare in Chicago, so there wasn't much trick-or-treating anyway. I stayed home that Sunday and gave out candy to just a few trick-or-treaters, and remembered hearing "Who Can It Be Now?" on the radio that afternoon in my living room while manning the candy (I guess I wasn't watching football, wait it was the strike year!). That was ... 1982?

Yes, there's a whole Halloween in there I don't remember. Did I not dress up in 1981 and just forgot I hadn't? Or did I and just have forgotten any memory of the costume or if I trick-or-treated? And it's not like that I blocked out that fall from my memory, either -- I would get an Atari for my birthday a week later, and that I remember vividly (but that's for another post). So what did I do that year? It's bugging me, because usually my memory for things like this unusually lucid, yet not for Halloween 1981.

I do have one thought on that year -- maybe I dressed up as an amnesia victim and took the part too literally.

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