One of the joys of homeownership that I’ve never experienced is handing out Halloween candy to trick-or-treaters from my own doorstep.
Every time I tell someone this, I do it with an air of sadness inviting their pity. My wife Jenny got so sick of hearing it that last year she had some of her grad school friends trick-or-treat me.
But it wasn’t actually Halloween and they were full-grown adults in normal clothes so they were just as uncomfortable as I was. It didn’t count.
As a kid, I lived on the end of a busy road surrounded by convalescent homes so, no trick-or-treaters ever made it down that far. If they had, I’d have been out tricking and treating myself.
Parents were far too smart to let their kids anywhere near my college housing, which was the right call.
In my twenties, I moved around a bunch and by my thirties, I was living in Texas apartments where, surprisingly, No Solicitation rules are enforced. A staff member at the leasing office tried to organize a time for residents to meet in the parking lot and hand children candy from their cars, but for many obvious reasons, it didn’t take off.
The closest I ever came to welcoming trick-or-treaters was the one year that we rented a house in a densely populated neighborhood in Norwalk, CT, but I was out of town attending a family wedding that weekend.
We spent that Halloween at Jenny’s 90-year-old grandpa’s house in a working-class neighborhood outside of Detroit with small yards and sidewalks. They got so much traffic they would remove the glass pane from their screen door to hand candy directly to the kids.
But, since he was 90, Grandpa often missed and just sort of flung the candy at the kids. He was also fond of saying some sort of rhyme that involved the smell of his underpants.
I never figured out what he was saying, but was insanely jealous of the old man who had the privilege, for longer than I’ve been alive, of throwing candy at children while shouting about the smell of his underpants. Meanwhile, I could only dream.
Good neighborhoods are wasted on the undeserving. I went to my Dad’s house last year where he saw a steady parade of trick-or-treaters, but every time I got a text message he mistook it for the doorbell and went to check the door.
I live out in the country now where we don’t get many unannounced visitors. The last time our doorbell rang, my wife was so startled that she reached for her weapon of choice: a softball bat. It was just the UPS guy.
Despite never seeing a child on my street, I had high hopes of getting a few trick-or-treaters the first year we moved into our house. I even thought it would be a good time to meet some of the neighbors (they aren’t very friendly in Connecticut) because of the built-in time deadline caused by the awkwardness of lingering for more than a second on someone else’s doorstep.
I bought two bags of candy for the first year and sat out front waiting to welcome all sorts of ghosts and goblins and Powder Puff girls. But as darkness fell I realized just how dangerous our sidewalk-less stretch of road was at night.
Nobody showed.
The following year Jenny convinced me not to buy any candy. As I wound my way home through darkening streets, I saw a neighbor had outfitted a tractor with hay bales.
I realized – with considerable dread – that a hayride might canvass the neighborhood, perhaps even bring a wagon full of children to my house.
And here I was – after years of complaining that I never get trick-or-treaters – cowering at the back of my house without a single piece of candy, dreading the thought of hearing the doorbell ring.
With my curtains drawn tight and my lights turned off, I had tricked the trick-or-treaters.
I breathed a sigh of sadness when I heard them pass and softly mumbled to myself in the dark, “smell my underpants.”
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