Pranks

The other day at work we were discussing some pranks that have occurred there. In one of them, a stuffed moose from the Holiday Party Yankee Swap was kidnapped and held for ransom. In another, the Manager of Development came in to work to find his office filled with white and pink balloons, wall-to-wall and almost floor-to-ceiling. He could barely even get in the door to his office. In the most recent prank, everything at one guy’s desk was covered with plastic wrap. His chair, his laptop, his monitor, his pens and even his sticky notes were all individually wrapped in plastic cling wrap. Though there were suspects for all these pranks, no one took credit for them.

I’m not against pranks as long as no one gets hurt and nothing is broken. Growing up in a family with nine kids, including seven boys, you either have fun with pranks or you cry and whine all the time. My older brothers played a great prank on my younger brother and I. Three of them would be in their room and they would have us wait in the hall outside of it, then they’d let us back in and one of them would be gone! We’d look under the beds, under the blankets of the top bunk bed, in the closet, and out the windows in case he was hiding outside. He was nowhere to be found. Then they’d have us go back to the hallway for a minute and when we returned to their room, there he was! They did this multiple times and every time one of them was gone. It took us a few years before we realized that there was a trap door to storage space in their closet and that’s where the “missing” brother was going.

Being taught well by my older brothers and being a bit of a wise guy myself, I participated in far too many pranks over the years to detail here, but here are a couple that I remember like they happened last week. 

I used to have an obsession with throwing things up on the ceiling that I think came from The Three Stooges episode where Moe throws a pie up on the ceiling, which then falls onto the face of a rich woman when she looks up. In the fourth grade, Ms. Silverstein, my teacher, stepped out of the room for a moment and I promptly took a Fudgie (a piece of chocolate candy for those who don’t know what I’m talking about), rolled it in a ball and threw it up at the ceiling, where it stuck – just above the door. Most of the kids thought it was funny, so I did the same thing with another, which was followed by more laughter. Ms. Silverstein, sensing something was wrong, came back in and looked around the room trying to figure out what was going on. Meanwhile, the first piece of chocolate was loosening up and barely hanging on to the ceiling right above her head. Just after she turned to go back to her desk, it fell to the ground, missing her by about an inch and landing on the floor. Luckily for me she never did figure out what happened.

You think I would have learned from that near miss, but no, I did something similar in eighth grade. We were doing an “International Week” in Social Studies where each student gave a report on a different country. Someone’s choice was Italy and the person brought in some cheese to share with everybody. While most of my classmates tasted their cheese, I rolled mine into a ball and threw it at the ceiling where it stuck just above my desk. Too many of my classmates were looking up at it so I thought I better get it down before the teacher, Mr. Lown, saw it and gave me detention. I hit it with my pen, but it didn’t move. I waited a minute, so as to not draw attention to myself, and threw my notebook at it, but it held on tight. I figured I needed something bigger, so after another minute I threw my text book up at it and knocked it down – along with the whole ceiling panel that was then all over me, my desk and the floor around me in about a hundred pieces! Needless to say, I got caught.

Looking back all these years later, the pranks I did in school were stupid, as was shutting the classroom closet door on my friend Smitty. Many pranks are kind of stupid. They’re fun at the time, but not so much later. Thankfully no one got hurt in any of the pranks I was involved in, although I did have to sit below a gaping hole in the ceiling of my Social Studies class for about a month. That was painful.

Haunted Houses

Despite Superstorm Sandy’s best efforts last week, we made it through Halloween. We had a slightly higher number of kids this year than last year, but still not that many. We didn’t even finish off two bags of candy, despite more kids. We saw some really cute kids, their little faces happy and smiling as they loaded up their bags with Kit Kats and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. One little girl took a Peanut Butter Cup, looked at it and said “Ooh, what’s in this?” To which her mother replied “Don’t worry. If you don’t like it, Mommy will eat it.” Just a hunch, but from the way she was clutching that piece of candy I don’t think Mommy was going to get it, no matter what.

While watching the news over the weekend to get an update on the storm, I saw an interview with a person that does a haunted house every year for Halloween. Due to the storm they were going to have to cancel it this year. Somehow that story sparked a memory for me. It had nothing to do with Halloween, but it did include a haunted house. Sort of.

I don’t remember what time of year it was, but it was during the school year because everyone but my younger brother and I were at school. We were in the backyard playing before lunch with the sun shining brightly, warm enough that we didn’t need a jacket that day. There was a small hill at the back of my yard that led up to another street and a wooded area. At the top of the hill there was a small building, which I had only seen from down below, and which my older brothers had told me had been a chicken coop but had nothing in it now. They had also told me that the house beyond the old chicken coop was haunted, so I shouldn’t go near it. How they knew this I didn’t know, but at that age I thought they knew everything and I believed everything they said.  

My younger brother and I must have gotten bored playing with our Matchbox cars and Tonka trucks because we decided to go up the hill a bit. The hill was sandy and there were lots of rocks of varying sizes mixed in. We threw rocks down the hill for a while and we pretended they were bombs hitting the ground and blowing our enemies to bits. At some point we went to the top of the hill. We moved toward the chicken coop and I picked up a couple of good size rocks to protect us in case the house really was haunted. The old chicken coop looked abandoned and there were already a couple of windows broken. I remember throwing a rock at one of the windows and it broke with a marvelous tinkling sound, like it was tickling my ears.

We took turns throwing our rocks at the windows, missing some and hitting others, laughing the whole time. We were pretty good shots for two little kids and were having the time of our lives. We had just picked up another round of ammo when a loud voice rang out from the direction of the house, telling us to stop. We both slowly turned toward the voice – if it was a ghost we didn’t want to see him. To our surprise, it was just an older man. To our horror, he was starting to come down the stairs to the yard and toward us.

We turned and started to run for the hill, no words necessary between us, and my heart beating in my throat. I figured he’d stop at the edge of his yard, but when I glanced back I was shocked to see that he was coming after us. We ran down the hill and tore across the back yard toward the door and safety. We ran inside and sat down at the dining room table, ready for lunch. Mom was in the kitchen and turned around when we came flying into the room, probably because the door slammed. Or maybe because we were both out of breath.

I’m sure my Mom was wondering what the heck was going on with the two of us, especially when the older man just walked right into the house. He was not a happy camper and told Mom we had broken some windows. When she asked us if we had, a brilliant explanation came to me and I told her it wasn’t us, it was two kids who looked like us. Needless to say, Mom didn’t believe us. She was pretty angry and I think she even threatened to tie us to a tree so we couldn’t get out of the yard. I should have learned at that point not to believe everything my older brothers told me, but unfortunately, it took me a few more years to learn that lesson. 

So there was no haunted house that day and there was no haunted house this year for some people, nothing to give them their Halloween chills. Maybe next time I’ll talk about politics – now that would be scary.

It's Beginning to Look A Lot Like...Halloween?

There are some people that decorate their house for everything these days. Decorating for Halloween seems to be getting as big as Christmas. People have lights in their house and outside of their house, they have lawn and tree decorations, and they put them up at the beginning of October. It even looks like people are starting to try to outdo their neighbor, just like they do at Christmas.

There’s a house near me that has candles with orange lights in every window and orange lights in their trees. They also have cob webs, spider webs and bats in their trees, and there are about 10 pumpkins in their yard. Another house I go past on my way to work has lights in the windows and trees, and four interlocking ghosts around the base of a tree, looking like they’re praying to it. A third house has skeletons hanging by their necks and a cardboard cutout tombstone in the front yard. That’s a lot of stuff and it’s all store bought.

I remember the “good old days”, when Halloween was for the kids and mostly by the kids. In my house we used to make our own decorations, some at school and some at home. We would draw and/or color our own jack-o-lanterns, ghosts, bats, skeletons, witches, and other assorted monsters, and hang them up in the front windows. My Dad brought home these huge rolls of paper so we had plenty of it to work on. The paper wasn’t too thick, so we could also trace pictures out of coloring books or magazines and then color them in. We did our best work and then we’d tape them to the front windows. We’d even go outside and admire our work so we could see how awesome it looked from other people’s points of view.

It wasn’t just my family either. Every house with kids had homemade decorations hanging in the windows. As I went around the neighborhood on Halloween night, filling my bag with chocolaty goodness, I checked out the art work, too. I compared and critiqued, and I usually thought ours were the best, but there were a few here and there that were just as good. Not better, but just as good. After all, I thought that we were quite the artistes.

Personally, I think these homemade decorations were way better than what people buy today. Not because they were higher quality, but because the kids did them. Instead of the parents spending hundreds of dollars buying decorations, the kids spent hundreds of minutes making their own decorations. It didn’t matter if you were a great artist or not, most of us weren’t, myself included. The pictures and drawings we put in our windows were ours and we were proud of them.

Another thing about Halloween in the “good old days”: we weren’t trying to scare the snot out of everybody. There were no realistic looking severed limbs or decapitations and there was very little blood and gore. Sure, there were ghosts and Frankensteins, but that’s about as far as it went. I see stuff today that I wouldn’t have wanted to see when I was a kid and wouldn’t have wanted my kids to see when they were little. When I was younger, it was all about the fun and the candy, not the lights and paraphernalia, and certainly not the scare factor. Since Halloween is really for the kids, isn’t that the way it should be?

Candy Bar Memories

I mentioned once before that I test software for a living, and when we do our final testing before a software release goes out our group gets some candy to keep our spirits up and keep us going. We usually get a few bags of the “fun size” bars (why those little ones are called fun size, I’m not sure; I’d have more fun eating a regular size candy bar) and sometimes some Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. Without sounding like an old man with the “Back in my day…” speech, the candy today just doesn’t measure up. At least not in my mind.

I used to absolutely love Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. After not eating any for a long time, I had some two times. Both times I had them, they were poor excuses for Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. The chocolate had the look and feel of plastic, although it did still taste like chocolate. I wonder if I held it in my hand, would it melt. Then what passes for peanut butter today is this dry, grainy stuff. Disappointing would be an understatement. I know they could make it like they used to because we bought some peanut butter cups from Trader Joe’s and there was a huge difference. No plastic on the outside and real peanut butter on the inside.

One of my other all-time favorites is Snickers bars. My complaints against them are that they are much smaller than they used to be, the chocolate on the outside is paper thin and the layer with peanuts and caramel is skimpy at best. As with the Reese’s, they are disappointing. I know, I know, things change. I know the argument that they’re cutting costs by doing what they’re doing. And I know that some people may even think, “Who cares? It’s just a stupid candy bar!” But think about it for a moment. Don’t we all have pleasant memories of eating candy bars? I do and here are two things I think of when I eat candy.

The first goes back to my childhood. At Halloween, we could take a little candy for our private stash and the rest went into a community bowl for the family and under the control of Mom. I would always take as many Snickers bars as I could. However, since they were limited I devised a way to make them last longer. I didn’t just take huge bites out of them and be done in a minute or two. Oh, no. Not me. I took my time and enjoyed them. As a matter of fact, I enjoyed every layer of them. How did I do that, you may ask. By eating the layers one at a time. (NOTE: The squeamish may skip the next paragraph. Parental discretion is advised.)

First I would eat all the chocolate off the sides, the ends and the bottom by carefully biting off small pieces and letting them melt in my mouth; I did not attempt to eat the chocolate off the top at this time. Next I would slowly eat the nougat center, being careful to not bite into the caramel and peanuts. By this point, which could be anywhere from 20 – 30 minutes later,  I was left with a piece of funky looking caramel, peanuts and the chocolate on top of that layer. It was like seeing a chicken ripped open and seeing the insides! You may not want to eat it after seeing that. Just knowing that it grossed out my sister was enough to make me want to continue eating my Snickers bar that way. However, it tasted great eating the individual parts and it lasted a lot longer than eating it the conventional way. Only after I was sure that all the nougat was gone did I slowly eat the final stage (and what I considered the best part!) – the caramel, peanuts and top layer of chocolate. Yum!

The second memory comes from when my wife and I lived in California. We lived there for about 18 months and were pretty much broke the whole time we were out there. My in-laws were horrified when they came out to visit us and saw how little food we had in the house and how thin we had gotten because of that. There were no extras. Well, one time we found an extra 50 cents and we went next door to the convenience store and bought a candy bar…to split…between the two of us. We ate that candy bar like we’d never had one before and we savored every small bite we took. We each ate our half slowly, enjoying the flavors rolling across our tongues, feeling like if that was the last candy bar we ever bought, we were going to enjoy it. And we did. Believe it or not, that is one of my happiest memories of our time in California. Forget the glitz and glamour of Hollywood, forget all the “beautiful people”, forget the sunny-almost-every-day lifestyle. That one day, sitting in our apartment, broke, my wife and I shared a candy bar and a memory that we will never forget. We may not have had much, but we had each other.

We all know that too much candy isn’t good for you, but here’s something a lot of us forget. Sometimes just a little candy, eaten slowly and with happiness, is just enough.

Trick or Treat

Halloween is just not as fun as it used to be. There was a time when my wife and I were the young couple in the neighborhood and our kids were the little ones. We’d take them around the neighborhood and everyone would say how cute they were – my son in his Sponge Bob, Woody and Vampire (way before Twilight ushered in the vampire phenomena) costumes, and my daughter in her Pocahontas, Dorothy and Minnie Mouse costumes. Now we’re the “old” couple with the older kids and we marvel at how cute all the little kids are. It’s kind of sad, one kid in college and another in high school and we’re relegated to the over-the-hill gang.

In the neighborhood we live in now, all the kids grew up at once. We used to have tons of kids walking around the streets and coming to our house, now we get about 15 or 20 kids. And half of them aren’t even from our neighborhood. But the little kids are still so cute! Especially when the kids do what kids do and not what the parents want them to do. One mother was trying to do the polite thing and get her little girl to say thank you. “Do you have something to say?” asked the mother. After no response, the mother asked again, “Don’t you want to say something?” The girl, starting to walk away, turned around and gave one of those irresistibly cute little kid smiles and said, “See you later!” Totally innocent and totally cute.

We had a great neighborhood for trick-or-treating when I was growing up. Nobody had a huge yard so the houses were kind of tightly packed together, which was great when we were little because we could do both sides of half the street in a relatively short amount of time and have enough candy to last for weeks. Well, that is, if we could have kept all our candy. When we got home we were allowed to keep some of the candy and the rest went into a big bowl that Mom was in charge of. I don’t remember how much we could keep for ourselves, but it was somewhere between not enough and too little. Nevertheless, we’d choose what we wanted for our private stash and Mom would either approve it or make us put more into the community bowl. You would have thought we were hoarding gold instead of Snickers, Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups and M&M’s. I always knew exactly how many of each type I had, just in case someone tried to steal one of my prizes. I don’t think that ever happened, but I just didn’t trust my older brothers. Sorry guys. 

When we got older and were able to go out on our own, we did our street and the next street over. Whoa baby, did we get a lot of candy! We got a little smarter as we got older, too. We ate some of the best stuff before we went home and had to give up most of the good stuff. We even got creative a couple of years and would go around once, mix and match our costumes, and go around again. Of course, most of the neighbors knew what we were doing and would give us the “Haven’t I already seen you tonight?” speech and not give us more. Back then, everybody knew everybody in the neighborhood, so even with costumes they knew who we were. However, there were a few neighbors who gave us more anyway and we added to our loot.

I vaguely remember what our costumes were like back then. I remember wearing a Casper the Ghost costume for a couple of years, which was a cheap pullover with one of those plastic masks that made your face sweat even if it was 30 degrees that night. I think I went out as a baseball player one year, which meant putting on my team jersey and hat and carrying my glove. Low cost or no cost costumes were the rule. I also remember going out as a girl when I was about 10 years old, borrowing my sister’s skirt, tights and shirt, and using the smaller end of L’eggs eggs for a chest. I wore a wig, too, but I have no idea where that came from. I never did that again because a couple of my friends were looking at me in an extremely creepy way all night. It kind of made my skin crawl.

Back in the present, the trick-or-treaters stopped coming fairly early and we were left with half of the candy we bought, even after we were giving out multiples to everybody and me and my son had a couple of pieces ourselves. The fun was over before it began. Sure, there were a couple of cute kids that came by, but there was just something missing. A terribly scary thought has just crossed my mind and I can’t believe I’m even thinking about it, but maybe when we have grandkids Halloween will be fun again. Until then I’ll just have to reminisce about how incredibly cute my own kids were on Halloween. Even as I marvel at how they've grown into pretty incredible young adults.

Found Money

I decided to do a load of laundry the other day, and as usual, I checked the pockets of the pants to make sure there was nothing in them. When I check pockets I find things like gum wrappers, miscellaneous pieces of paper, earrings, even used Q-tips. Sometimes I find some money, usually change, but once in a while I find a dollar or, hold the phone, a five dollar bill! Any money I find is mine. On this particular day, I found two quarters in one of my own pair of pants.

I know you’re probably thinking something like, “Big deal, 50 cents. That can’t buy you anything these days.” Well, maybe if you’re a glass-is-half-empty person, you’d be thinking like that. But if you’re a glass-is-half-full person, you might be thinking something like, “Bonus! I got something for nothing!” That’s kind of how I felt, even if it was my own pants. That was money I didn’t know I had. And you just never know when you’re going to need a little change. Here in Massachusetts if you buy something for $5.00, the tax on it will be $.31, and you’ll be glad you have those two quarters. Who wants a pocket full of change when you can use the few coins you have and only get a couple more back? Who wants to sound like the school janitor with his 57 keys jangling on his ring as he walks around the hallways? Not me.

When I was a kid, we walked to school from first grade up through eighth grade and we’d occasionally find some money while going to and from school. I don’t know why, luck I guess, but we usually found money on the way home. Sometimes it was nickel or a dime, and sometimes we’d find a quarter. Before you start thinking, “So what?” let me tell you what a quarter used to be like. A quarter back in the early 1970’s was a gold mine for a kid. How? A measly 25 cents would buy you not just a candy bar, but a can of soda as well. That’s right, 25 cents would buy you a Snickers Bar and a Pepsi; or a bag of M&M’s and a Mountain Dew; or a Snickers Bar and a bag of M&M’s with a nickel left over. That’s what one quarter would get you, so imagine what two quarters got you, or what the Holy Grail of found money, a whole dollar, would get you! If you found a dollar, everyone around you was suddenly your best friend.

When we found money we’d go to Walt’s Sunoco, a local gas station/car repair shop, because there were candy and soda machines inside. The owner also raced cars and had a hot rod there sometimes, which we could look at and look into, but not touch. We thought he was just about the coolest guy! When we went in to get our food and drink, he’d ask us how we were doing in school and tell us to keep studying. If he was in an especially good mood, he’d give us some stickers for our notebooks, usually STP or Raybestos. We didn’t know what those were, but they sure were cool stickers – and no one else at school had them. So out we’d go, candy bar in one hand and soda in the other, feeling like we were on top of the world. 

We’d take our time going home, laughing and talking about what we’d do with our next big score, all the while scouring the ground for more cash. Anything that was round, shiny or both was pounced on, examined and then pocketed or tossed away. Nickels, dimes, quarters, it didn’t take much to make a young guy happy. Not when you were sharing candy and soda with your brother and best friends. Who says a quarter isn’t worth much?