Halloween

In Philadelphia there is an apartment complex on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway called Park Towne Place. It is a cluster of four high rises – cleverly called East, West, North and South. I had three friends who lived there – Laura, Adam and Erik – and most years I spent Halloween night with them, riding the elevators in our costumes and tearing through the hallways, ringing every bell we could get our little hands on in an effort to collect maximum quantities of candy.

It was widely understood that trick-or-treating in an apartment building was the most efficient way to trick-or-treat, and for that reason Park Towne Place was the ne plus ultra because there were four apartment buildings arranged in one lucky clover shape – the prospect of that much candy simply boggled the nine-year-old mind. Our method was to exit the elevator, dash up and down the hallways ringing every bell, and then we’d wait a breathless moment to see who answered their door.

“No,” I said to my husband, “you don’t get it. You can be born a vampire, or you can be made a vampire. Like being in the mob.”

“So how did Damon and Stefan get to be vampires – were they born that way?” he inquired gamely, steering the car through college town traffic on a bright, October Saturday.

“Well, in the book and the show, you know, they’re different in a lot of ways, but in the book and the show they only talk about ‘made’ vampires. In the book they became vampires because of Katherine. If a vampire drinks your blood and nothing else happens, you just die – like that girl Vicky – but if they drink your blood and then you drink some of theirs, you become a vampire, and live forever. You have to go through a lot of changes, but eventually you’re a vampire.”

“They must be great in bed after a few hundred years as guys in their twenties,” he mused.

My husband and I are not fans of Halloween. I hate dressing up - clearly I lack a sense of whimsy and the need to pretend to be something I am not. Or maybe I'm just content with who I am. You can be the judge. His birthday is three days before and his childhood parties were always black and orange-themed and required a costume. You'd think all the free candy would balance the drag of dressing up, but as the years went by his hatred only grew. Since we don’t have children avoiding this holiday is pretty simple…just turn the lights off and stay away from the front door.

Or go to visit relatives. We usually visit our families back East once a year and had the great luck, unbeknownst to us, to find ourselves in the quaint hamlet of Cooperstown, NY on Halloween in 2006. We honestly didn't even think about it. We were on vacation so the days just ran together. It was just the day we happened to be there. We didn't even realize it WAS Halloween until we entered the Baseball Hall of Fame.

We are big fans of America's past time and we were determined on this trip to actually take some time to see something new for once. If you've never been to the Birthplace of Baseball, well, you are really missing out. Walking around Cooperstown is like stepping back in time. It's small town America at its' best. No chains, no fast food, no big hotels. Just mom & pop small businesses - most with a baseball theme - centuries old stately homes and a fancy restaurant or two that have been providing fare since before our grandparents were born.