Hooray! ... it's Halloween!

The last time I spent Halloween in the U.S. would have been 1978, so I was quite excited at the thought of kids trooping up to the door, doing the "trick or treat" thing (only because I probably really shouldn't be dressing up and traipsing about, ringing doorbells myself...though I don't know why not, actually - it is somewhat of an ageist thing to think that only kids can do this!).

Anyway, Mary Sue, Diana & I got dressed up for the occasion. Mary Sue found this really cool cow costume complete with an udder. Diana dressed up like a gypsy, and me like a hippy. I will say the kids seemed to like the fact that we were into it just as much as they were.

And so many kids came to the door! We actually ran out of candy, which was a real shame, as I was counting on some of those Reese's cups and little Hershey's bars coming my way afterward. The kids started coming in a trickle, so we gave them handfuls. But after a while they came in carloads. Some were really into the costume thing... Spidermen, Princesses, a tiny Ninja Turtle, one Hannah Montana, witches, vampires, pirates...(interesting...we were the only ones dressed as a cow, a gypsy and a hippy). Some told us jokes, Hannah Montana even sang for us. Others didn't even bother with the costume (maybe we should have withheld candy in those cases, as we deserved it more than they did!), and some were a bit pushy about the candy. But for the most part it was the spirit of Halloween, just as I remember it when I was growing up. The kids were so excited about their bags and plastic pumpkins full of treats, and the streets were full of people, as moms and dads, older brothers and sisters, escorted young kids eagerly about.

Since we ran out of candy, we turned off the front porch light and closed the blinds in the front of the house. But after a while, at around 8:45 we started hearing a commotion. I heard sirens and a helicopter overhead, and Mary Sue came into the kitchen and told me that she thought she had heard gunshots. We looked outside and could see lights flashing. I raced up to Diana's 3rd floor gable window and saw just a few hundred feet away (we're on the corner of Russell and 39th, and this was about half a block up on 39th) an ambulance, a hook and ladder truck, and a half a dozen police cars. The 3 of us (at this point no longer a cow, a gypsy or a hippy) threw on our coats and dashed out. When we got to the scene, a young man who lives a block over explained to us that there had been a shooting! The guy who had been shot was in the ambulance (and apparently not very seriously injured) and 4 guys had been seen running from the scene of the crime, which explains why the helicopter was roaming above with its search light on. While we were standing there a police canine unit pulled up, and a crime lab van, but the police just kind of stood there chatting, and a few seemed to be looking around for shells or something. So we kind of lost interest, talking to the neighbors. We actually walked up the street a bit to look at one neighbor's Halloween decorations in his front yard...complete with a graveyard, Dracula in an open coffin, skeletons, and a fog machine (I'm surprised so many trick-or-treaters made it to their front door!).

This morning there was not a peep in the newspaper about this shooting incident. That added to our cavalier attitude about hanging around the scene of a shooting kind of worries me. Are these incidents so commonplace right in the neighborhood where we're living that it's not really that newsworthy? It really is shocking to think that on the one evening when the streets are full of kids this would happen.

Rather an eventful Halloween. Perhaps that's what I get for letting almost 30 years go by!