My neighbors still have Halloween decorations out, so… 

The photo above is not a Halloween pic, but I don’t have one with me in a costume, so you’ll have to be satisfied with me in a Peter Pan cap.

My only memory of going trick or treating is when I must have been about five years old, give or take a year perhaps.

We would have been living in the Great Stone House on the farm, but we were doing most of our socializing in Richland, as that’s where my mother grew up and my father had grown up just outside of town. Plus, my grandparents (my mother’s parents) lived there, as well as my aunt and uncle Joan and Mark and a few other relatives.

All I really recall is one silly little incident. We were on South Race Street, and I was the only little kid but I was with a couple adults, presumably my mother and perhaps my aunt Joan, or possibly my aunt Jane, or maybe both of them. All of us in costumes of some sort, though I don’t remember what the costumes were.

We were roughly across the street from where my grandparents lived, at a house with a porch that wrapped around to the side which is where the door was. I knocked on the door while my mother and aunt hung back several paces.

An older woman answered the door. By older I mean “older” in the eyes of a five-year-old. She may very well have only been 40 or so. But she was a bit surly, so that made her seem even older.

She wanted to know who we were and wanted us to take our masks off or she wouldn’t let us in or have anything to do with us.

I turned around to question the adults. They shook their heads.

So I shook my head as well.

Then she wasn’t going to let us in, so we’d better go on our way.

Which is what we did.

I have no idea who that woman was.

But that’s my only treat or treat memory.

When kids, or perhaps I should say boys, because I don’t recall any girls going in for the practice… When boys got a bit older and thus too big for treat or treating, they would start going out tic-tacking at Halloween.

I never did, because I could never understand the point of it.

I recall one year when we were living on the hill on West Main Street, so this was probably in 1959 or ’60.

Reed, my mother’s brother who was just three years older than I was, stopped in with a couple of his friend, probably the Botz Boys, the twins Ronnie and Roddie, because that’s who he usually hung around with. (Sorry but I don’t have a pic of Reed and me from around 1960.)

Anyway, they were about to start their annual bout of tic-tacking, and Reed said they’d have to do it to our house as well.

So when they left, several seconds later we heard the unmistakable sounds of corn kernels being hurled onto our porch.

Because that’s what tic-tacking consists of.

If you can explain the point of it to me, I’ll gladly listen.