Pumpkin

We carve up the pumpkins and crack each other up.  Sonnet misses the fun as she works late, but I rip into a bottle of wine and allow my creativity to flow.  Oh boy.  The best part of the massacre the mess - I pull gooey pulp - brains! Eitan skins off the face on his and we revel in the gore.  Madeleine goes for the standard 'triangle' cuts while mine has 'personality' (ie, ugly). The pumpkins sit in front of the house waiting to get tossed by the local teen-agers, saving me a trip to the dump's compost heap.

I vaguely recall our growing-up Hallowe'ens on San Ramon, where there was a gang of kids who begged for candy.  We did a fairly good job, too, since this part of Berkeley a family community who knew the difference between an apple (bad) and Milky Way (good).  Every block has the spooky house, and ours the dark, pointy brickstone across the street owned (I believe) by the Cliffords, an elderly couple who nobody ever saw.  We sometimes ran through their backyard always looking over our shoulder to ensure nobody watching from the top floor.  On Hallowe'en, their windows dark and we dared not trick-or-treat.  Once we moved to the North Berkeley Hills, Katie and I old enough to go out with our peers .. and eventually, the parties more absorbing.  Alcohol, you see.  Past costumes were ghosts (1970-75); Rocky Balboa ('76); witch ('77, also my 'first kiss' to Sarah where I tripped and fell into her garden); Spider Man ('78) and no more from there on.  Or at least until college when it became fun - and sexy - to dress up and flirt (or more) with the party girls. And why not? At Brown, every other night locked up tight.

Madeleine: "Dad! Tell Natasha you almost squashed Monty." (when trying to corner the thing after her jail-break).