by William Smithy

Created on: October 03, 2009   Last Updated: October 06, 2009

Reflections: The Trick in Trick or Treat, version two

It really all started with a Halloween I had when I was 12 or so. My family was just pulling into the driveway when we saw a hooded figure run into the shadows from our front porch. To our surprise, Jack-o-lantern remains were splayed across our driveway. My dad ordered the family out of the car and we pursued the intruder in our car down the street, the kid was fast for a freshman in high school, but his speed and agility were no match for our car. We cornered him behind a boat in one of our other neighbor's driveways. We knew exactly who it was and my dad ordered him to go home. We followed him the entire way down the dead end street, all the while driving behind him. Our house must have been last on his list or perhaps there was an accomplice still hiding in the shadows, for as we drove down the cauldasac it told a story most foul of jack-o-lantern massacre, with the Jack-o-body-parts of broken smiles and orange brains smashed on every porch and left strewn in the street . I'm sure that kid got it good after my dad escorted him inside his home and informed his parents what he was up to. He had always been a troubled kid, always picked on in school, always in trouble, the kid everyone had a bad word about. He had started his little tirade after all the tricker treaters had gone home for the night. He wasn't really vandalizing anything that was of use to anyone. Those poor pumpkins had served their purpose and in many ways he was giving them a much more dignified death than the rotting molds that would have otherwise consumed them within a few days. Perhaps we should of done like the ancients and looked at it as some sort of sacrifice appeasing the spirits that had somehow taken over his body and possessed him somehow. But we definitely should have seen it as an act of desperation from a very troubled kid, a kid that would take his own life a few years later.

The thing that bothers me about telling this story was the fact that I never was really offended from the act of him killing our oversized squash on the front porch. My grandfather had told us stories about how Halloween was in his day before our culture became consumed by consumerism. How, when he was a boy during the depression, teenagers would go out tipping over outhouses and putting peoples' wheelbarrows on top of their roofs while they slept. It was a night of mischief, not of treats and candies. I enjoyed those stories that my grandfather used

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