Saddle Sore: Still in good hands

So, we’re sitting around the table at a business breakfast meeting, and my colleague Amy starts telling me about the haunted house she and her family do every year on Halloween. She gives me the general location and says that her house and the neighbor’s pretty well fill up the street. “Wow, that sounds interesting,” from me, and she says, “You should come by, Tony. I’ll text you the address later.”

The next night — Halloween — I check to see where the grandkids might be spooking around Aspen with their friends and decide I’ll just stay home. But then a flashback memory hits: A few years ago, a lady friend and I, both of us in our early 30s, were walking past the old Epicure when some revelers came the other way. “Wow, even the old people are out tonight,” one of them slurred as he stumbled past us. I should’ve handed Mr. Cool a mirror if he thought we were hard to look at.

Anyway, staying home started to feel a bit chicken, so I found an old black parka with a hood, slipped into some black jeans, pulled on a pair of black gloves, and cinched the hood around my face. Didn’t look terribly menacing, but amorphous enough that I might blend in. Amy hadn’t texted me her street address, but from the description she’d given of her place in Blue Lake, I figured I didn’t need one. I’d dropped off and picked up my daughter from friends’ houses there, lined the soccer field for years, and my uncle Victor used to live there. Hell, I thought I knew that neighborhood fairly well.

First thing, I saw a couple of adults and about six kids in costume emerge from my left — good, at least I had the correct night. Then, to my right, the parking lot by the park (the soccer field) was completely full. Figured there must’ve been a show or something going on. Ha! Just getting a preview.

From there, people were coming and going on both sides of the street, but kind of strung out, and when I turned right on the next block, I dropped into another world. OMG.

The sidewalks on both sides of the street were crowded with kids — young kids — with a few adults sprinkled in, all of them moving slowly, enjoying the night. There were cars, too, but not so many that the two people who knew my vehicle couldn’t spot and holler at me. Scooting along at about one mile per hour, stop and go, it was incredible to see so many young people bounding about. Someone even knocked on my passenger window — “Trick or Treat!” — two girls about 10, dressed up in some kind of Halloween hybrid, liberated by the crowd and the holiday.

It made me smile, knowing the excitement those kids were feeling — a once-a-year production where you can be anything you want and collect candy for the privilege. Three years old and up, it was a mass of families being the wonderful, messy, magical groups that they are. It made me miss my daughter’s young days of being a witch (I still have her hat) and my grandkids running through North Forty with pillowcases full of loot.

And sometimes, we just fall into it — something totally unexpected that pulls us back into our own seemingly forgotten memories of youth, no matter how much we thought the seam may have been closed. Maybe what struck me most that night was the innocence — kids laughing, parents guiding, everyone moving together under the glow of porch lights and spooky yard displays. For at least one evening, the world felt like it was still in good hands.

One house had a long line in front of the garage, an elaborate haunted setup — I figured that must be Amy’s. But wait, just down the street less than a block away was a similar scene, both with older kids lined up, excitement thick in the air. No time to wait.

Two for the price of one, I thought, as I turned around and headed home — checking, of course, to see how my grandkids were making out.

Tony Vagneur writes here on Saturdays and welcomes your comments at ajv@sopris.net.

Tony Vagneur writes here on Saturdays and welcomes your comments at ajv@sopris.net.