By Elliot Doomes, October 24, 2019 — I could never fool anybody at Halloween. It never mattered what I put on. Everybody always said, “Come on, Elliot. We know its you.” I guess I had a distinctive walk or something. One time, I dressed up as a cowboy with a mask, but I didn’t fool anybody. I had a devil costume with a hood to it, and I still didn’t fool nobody. Sometimes, I would just put on some old clothes I had out grown and cut some holes in them, put on a floppy hat and old shoes with iron on the heels and tips and put soot on my face and dress up as a hobo. And, I’d have an empty wine bottle with tea in it and stable and stagger down the street like I was a drunken bum.
That’s what people called you back in the day when you were a consistent drink[er]. It didn’t matter if you were a working many with a steady job. If you got drunk on the weekends, they’d say, “There he goes again, that drunken bum.” People didn’t use as much profanity back in the day as they do now. Nowadays, they’d call you much worse. The biggest par about Halloween was pretending to be someone else. That was a big kick for me.
Did we get a lot of candy on Halloween? Yes, we did! We got everything. We got packets of candy corn. We got miniature Hershey’s; we got potato chips, we got those sour jawbreakers. Sometimes, we even got apples. I never liked the jawbreakers because they were hard. I used to trade them off for chocolate kisses. Once in a while, one of my friends mom would have a little party where they’d put apples in a tub and we’d try to bite them.
We had pretty safe holidays back then. We never had candy with razor blades in them or pills that looked like candy. And we had an area we went to and we never went past there. And by 8-8:30, we were exhausted and ready to go home and go to ed. It was easy back then. We didn’t need to be chaperoned by an adult to make sure we were safe. And we used to brag about. “Oh we got this,” or “I got so many of that” and it was fun. But Halloween is not fun today for most kids in certain sections of the city. It’s not safe or fun. I mean you have to tell your kids to inspect the candies they receive and make sure they’re in a sealed package, and make sure they never go alone and only in large groups.
Children today don’t remain children for very long. Childhood ends before their time and I think children have to grow up real fast in this society in which we live today. They grow up real fast. I wonder one day if we’ll have no children, if the circumstances and conditions forced upon the at an earlier age now a days. I mean, we expect children today to be little adults. We don’t want them playing, we don’t want them to get their hands dirty. I mean we played baseball in the dirt, we wrestled each other and played football without helmets and all that stuff. We caught the ball and they would tackle us and our shirts would get torn in the dirt and it would be all in good fun. But kids nowadays are not allowed to remain kids anymore. I’m glad that I had the experiences of being a child to explore my curiosities, to try and attempt to do things that I was told not to. I still agree that we learn through our experiences. I remember reading with a question asked of a man how would you describe the sum total of your life. And he answered, the sum total of my life is my experiences.