Pandemic Halloween

Pandemic Halloween 

We had 3 kids stop by our house for tricks or treats last year.  There was a pirate, a witch, and a little kid who didn’t know what she was dressed as.

The pirate kid was proud of his costume even though he didn’t have a hat or wig. He left them in the car his mom was using to drive him from one house to another. He said, “It’s just too hot for a wig. That’s why I’m not wearing one!” We gave him a mini package of Twix and a great big smile.

This pirate boy stopped by at about 7 pm. 

After that, it was quiet.

At about 730, I went outside and stood on the front porch for a while to see if there was anyone else coming. There was no moon yet, and all the houses on both sides of the street were lit up.  I think my neighbors, like us, were waiting for the trick or treaters. A car drove past going south toward the supermarket on Boonsboro Road. Other than that driver, I didn’t see anyone.

I looked across the street then at the house where 3 young girls live. It’s a big old house just like ours. Every year we’ve been in this town, the girls have made it over–even when the youngest was 1. She wore a pink and gold princess costume that year, and she had her big white cat with her. The cat didn’t wear a costume.

This year the three girls didn’t make it.

Their house had its lights on too.  I imagined that the 3 girls and their mom and dad were probably also in their home waiting and hoping just like us for kids to come to their door trick or treating.

It was the pandemic last year that kept the kids away.  Before COVID showed up, we’d have about 40-50 kids come by the house trick or treating.  They’d start coming around about 5 pm, just before we sat down to dinner, and the last kid would be ringing our doorbell around 9 pm, sometimes even later, just before we started getting ready for bed.  It wasn’t like that last year.  

I hope it will be different this year.  We all like Halloween, seeing the kids excited and rushing from house to house collecting candy.

People talk about how the pandemic is finally winding down, and that the numbers of vaccinated people are going up and the numbers of people sick from COVID are going down faster and faster.  I hope it’s true.  I’d like to see more kids come by this year for Halloween.

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My latest column for the Dziennik Zwiazkowy, thr oldest Polish newspaper in America! 

https://dziennikzwiazkowy.com/felietony2/halloween-w-pandemii-pandemic-halloween/

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Summer Heat

Summer Heat

It’s been mostly in the mid 90s during the day and the low 70s at night for the last month here where I live in Lynchburg, Virginia.  It’s so hot that I spend most of the time inside our house with our great air conditioning.  

When I look outside, I see grass turning brown, dry leaves dying and falling from the trees around the house.  I dream of fall and cold weather and snow, and I know they won’t be here soon enough, but I’m happy that we have air conditioning at least.

It wasn’t always this way, of course. In the 1960s when I was a kid living with my parents in Chicago, we had no air conditioning, neither central air nor window units. In fact, none of my friends had it either.  If we wanted to cool off, we’d sit outside in the shadow of a tree, or if we had a quarter we’d go to one of the upscale movie theaters in the area that had air conditioning. 

I remember when I used to work in factories during summer vacation when I was a college student.  One job was particularly tough.  I loaded TV sets into trucks.  I’d spend all day every day in hot trucks. One time we took the temperature in one of the trucks, and it was 110 degrees.  The factory had no air conditioning, so the bosses who ran the place would have a big jar of salt pills on a desk on the loading dock, and we would be popping the pills all day long like they were some kind of crazy candy.  

I would come home from that job and turn on the desk fan and just sit in front of the TV watching baseball, and I didn’t even like baseball. Just sitting and not moving at all helped to push back some of that heat.

Some nights it got so hot in the house that the whole family would go downstairs to the basement and sleep on rugs on the cement floor down there. That cement floor was so cool that sometimes we had to bring blankets to the basement to wrap ourselves up in. And other times it was so hot that even the basement wasn’t cool enough. There were nights when it was so hot that we’d take our blankets and walk over to Humboldt Park and sleep in a field with our neighbors. 

I can’t imagine it getting hotter in the years to come, but that’s what people are saying.  The earth’s climate is changing.  The world is getting hotter.  I’m not looking forward to the day when even air conditioning won’t be enough.  

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My latest column for the Dziennik Zwiazkowy