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"A coot, a codger, a crank and a curmudgeon all walk into a bar. Who orders a drink first?
-None of the above, they just eat all the free peanuts, complain, and go home." - d.d.s

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“I got an old rusty bolt.”
“I got a door hinge, but it doesn’t even work!”
“Well I got two things this year. Two of those gears.”
“Were they from the front porch buckets?”
“No, he dropped them into my sack this year, almost went through the bottom, like McDimitt's fork two years ago.”
“That was neo-classical.”
"Well I can top all of you...I got a shoe.”
“A whaaat?”
"A tennis shoe. One shoe. It’s all green, and smells like it came out of the river.”
“Grosssss!!"

One Sweet and Glorious Night

You just gotta love Halloween. Every year, a new adventure in theoretical CandyLand. Halloween, that magical holiday. When you dress up in your best alter ego, with the potential of scoring enough candy in one night for the next 57 school lunches.

Not that your booty would even last half that long. Enough candy to provide everyone in our group with at least two new cavities and the misery trots for the next week and a half. All that fantastical, sugar-sweet stuff.

We dreamt about it all year long. Three Musketeers, Snickers bars, Rootbeer Straws, Milk Duds, Bit-O-Honey's, tongue-destroying giant Sweet Tarts, and all the other glorious sugarfectious delights of the season.

Look What I Got

It was always a huge adventure to dump your bag out on your bed at the end of the night and compare what each of you had scored.
“I got six Mars Bars, and SEVENTEEN MilkyWays.”
"Well I got a pile of Twix and Butterfingers.
“I can beat that. I got a whole bag of Candy Corns.”
“Orange, or brown in the middle?”
"Orange.”
“Aaah...I like the brown, taste better.”

In most neighborhoods of Middle America, you rued that next day, October 32nd, when it was all over for the year. That next day, when you traded handfuls of healthful foodstuffs with your best friends, and discovered way too many green-dyed popcorn balls, or worse, taffy apples on a stick.

It's Stuck To The Roof Of My Mouth!

The infamous candied apple with a handle. Affectionately referred to as 'potatoe mashers', after the German grenades tossed during wars past, since they were shaped somewhat the same. At least in our budding minds.

Those things tasted great, for a boringly healthy snack surrounded by pure goodness. And you COULD eat them, as long as you scraped the outer casing of taffy off with your front teeth like a snow shovel on a curved driveway, just as soon as you got them. But leave them in the booty sack too long, without gnawing off that outer layer like a pond beaver? BIG trouble.

Those gew-balls on a stick would suck up and glom onto anything within twenty feet. The bottom of your sack would end up a huge mishmash-ed ball of inedible, unintelligible, paper and chocolate-bar mess. Hard to chisel apart, and even harder to eat.

The worst was to just get a regular apple.
Those usually got thrown at a regular telephone pole.

Such were the pits and pratfalls of the annual foray into CandyLand.

And On Into The Holiday Wilderness We Go

But not in our neighborhood. Halloween was MUCH more adventurous than all that. Each year we got to visit Curmudgeonville.

It was the only time we went anywhere NEAR that house. The house on the corner with the old guy inside. The house without much sticking paint. The one that looked scary EVERY day of the year.

Curtains always drawn tightly shut. Stuff piled up in front of the garage door all year long. The house with the roof that looked like it could use a whole new one.

It was always a new and scary-grand experience, come the end of the night, to discover what you got from the crusty old guy that lived there. At least this year he was personally doling out the surprises as we filed up the long, cluttered walk, and on past the front door. Last year was more of a Halloween smorgasbord of self-help collection-ing.

I remember it like it was just a year ago.

YOU Go First!!

We steeled our nerve out front in the darkened street, then traipsed up the long, even-darker driveway and up onto the front porch, to ring the doorbell and wait. We pushed the button, and nothing happened.

To the left of the screen door in front of us, he had a row of plastic 10 gallon buckets, lining the front porch walk. All stuffed to the brim with old car transmission parts. Short, shiny drive shafts, large and small gears, and odd bearings of all sizes and shapes.

Mostly stuff that only a guy in coveralls with his name stitched over the ripped pocket, and fingernails that hadn’t been clean since 1972 would be able to properly identify.

We rang the doorbell again, and still, nothing happened. We collectively pondered huffing it back down the driveway before it was too late.

Soon, the front-window curtains swayed back and forth ever so slightly. Something was stirring within. Suddenly, the screen door swung violently wide on the stressed hinges, and out popped a bald, fuzzy-eared, bushy-eyebrow-ed head.
“WHADDAH YA WANT?....Oh.”

We eek-ed out a high pitched, “Trick or Treat”, in feeble, fearful, costumed unison.
“What are you supposed to be?...A Damn Pirate...a goofy looking Ghost...and a Square-Headed Green Man!” We just stood there stark still in full, shaking, quiet costume.
He bellered even louder than before, "WELL?”
We gave a group shrug, all the while still playing silent, dressed-up statue on his front porch.

The furry man behind the screen barked at us once more, “Hmmpf. Help yourself to whatever you want outta them buckets there. Only take one or two each though, I got a long night ahead of me!”

The three of us looked at each other, and though we couldn’t actually SEE each others faces, there was no doubt that each of us had a total look of huuh, going on behind our pirate eye patch, goblin hood, and Incredible Hulk mask.

We were shocked into a full-group trio of inactivity.
After a moment or two, and some further admonishment from behind the screen door in front of us, we stirred to life.

“Go ahead, it don’t bite...and don’t take all day...I’m not paying good money to heat the outdoors.”

Even Dark Clouds Can Have A Silver, Moonlit Lining

We all spun, grabbed whatever would fit in our bag from the buckets, and headed back off the porch as fast as possible. Not that we particularly NEEDED any old automobile parts for anything we could think of at the moment. We just thought it prudent to hurry along on our way.

Wandering the long walk back down the driveway, we passed many more piles of unidentifiable detritus lining our path. Old wet cardboard, bent bicycle wheels, broken yard implements, eggshells and other discarded foodstuffs, and many more unidentifiable oddities.

Suddenly, the clouds parted, the Harvest moonlight streamed down, and a bright yellow patch of something caught our eye from deep within the junk-filled shadows. On closer look, it turned out to be a large, old, homemade balsa-wood and paper model airplane, that had obviously experienced a bad run-in with a large tree.

Though a bit beat, the plane still looked pretty promising to each of us. We all stooped to stare at it with thoughts of a major fix-up whirring about in our small, creative heads.

We were all still fully entranced, marveling at the bright yellow plane project in quiet thought of possibility, when that voice echoed our way from behind the front door bushes, causing all of us to jump in full, Halloween-uniformed unison.

“DON'T TAKE THE YELLOW PLANE THOUGH, I MIGHT STILL FIX IT UP!”

Once our hearts kicked back into gear, we clutched our sacks, doubled our pace, and scurried on down the drive as fast as we could. We soon found ourselves out into the inky-black of the neighborhood streets beyond.

As In Space, Everything In Life is Relative

After the long walk up and back that crazed driveway of the night, the standard evils of Halloween seemed pretty tame to our still-wet-behind-the-ears-of-life, experiential ways.

All those things they discussed with such gloomy abandon, like clockwork each fall as late October approached. Each year it was the same, rather horrifying talk, delivered as part of an all day, in-school assembly.

Alcohol sodden drivers in large automobiles, madly running down small children in ghost costumes with eye holes cut way too small for adequate visual safety.

Razor blades carefully tucked away in candied apples to slice through our gullets with reckless abandon.

And the worst, small-child costume-flambooee. According to the program, it happened every year, in just about every neighborhood of every city far and wide. The sad, unsuspecting trick or treat-er in their shiny new discount costume, wandering too close to a candle-lit pumpkin, instantly bursting into full conflagration, running this way and that with reckless abandon across the neighborhood. Spewing fire everywhere in their wake.

“Remember your fire safety children, there's a lot of dried leaves out there this time of year.”
"...??"

The Horrors of Halloween...drilled into our still-soft heads of youthful experience by our adult leaders. Somehow, these horror stories all paled by comparison, when you had just run the drive and walkway gauntlet of the Curmudgeon of Crosswood Avenue. We figured we were ready for anything after that spooky trip up the sidewalk.

Back To The Halloween Auto-Parts Collection Business At Hand

Once we got away safely and on down the block, we stopped under the hedge-apple tree in old man Kurths' front lawn to dump out our new-found scrap metal booty. Time to compare, see if we had topped the previous year's visit.

The metal, internal combustion car parts all smelled really bad. A strong odoriferous combination of transmission fluid, chemically altered white-plastic bucket, and very old motor oil. Not much of anything useful, except a lot of shiny, stinky metal.

“Remember two years ago, when he tossed handfuls of silverware into our bags?”
“Yeah, we didn’t know WHAT it was...making all that katink-ka-link noise when it fell into the bag. Until that fork tore through Jimmy’s bag, and stuck right into the top of his shoe.”
“Do you suppose that old guy was giving away his good silverware?”
“Ttch...”
“What a weirdo.”
“Where does he GET all that stuff!?”
“I don’t’ know, but he sure has a lot of it.”
“But did you see that airplane!!?”
“Yeah, I bet we could make it fly again.”
“Maybe next year, he’ll give us that plane...”

The silence of deep, combined three-person dreaming and giddy possibility was deafening.
Finally, Jimmy S piped up. “Nah, probably get a dead BassFish in our bag instead.”
We all laughed hard and loud under our masks, as we hefted our bags, and headed for the next row of promising houses on down the block.

~ Finto ~

Happy Halloween Everyone - And To Everyone, A Good Night

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Thanks for stopping in and viewing the Halloween Curmudgeon Story. If you have any thoughts about trick or treating, old car parts, model airplane fix-ups, your own Halloween stories of note, or anything else this post reminds you of, please feel free to comment away in the spaces below. I'd love to hear from you.

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Poste Script: This story appeared in similar form last year on the wondersite of Steemit

_{Posted: 10/31/2017}