Give me some candy!

When I was a kid, I used to dream about Halloween. I wasn't that excited about dressing up--it was the candy. Weeks before Halloween, my sister and I would draw up maps of our neighborhood and plan our route, readrafting it several times to make sure that we could maximize our time. As soon as I got home, we'd dump out our candy on the floor and sort it: chocolates, caramels, hard candy, gummy candy. There were always some tough calls: does a blow pop go in the gum or sucker pile? After sorting and counting our haul, I'd tuck my bag of candy by the side of my bed. Somehow I just slept better having that candy to gaze at. It was pretty sad to grow up and have to leave that trick-or-treating behind.

Last year, friend T. and I came up with a plan to take her kid trick-or-treating. He would be two, so old enough to be a legitimate trick-or-treater, but young enough to not notice when we stole all of his candy. We had pretty elaborate plans about what neighborhoods and what costumes would get us the most candy. T. almost backed out on me when Halloween finally arrived, but I wouldn't let her. So we arranged to have dinner and go trick-or-treating with our colleague A and her son.

A's son was an ace at trick-or-treating. He was very polite and made sure to tell everyone "Happy Halloween" at least three times. He made sure to let us know that we should only say "trick or treat" and never, never "smell my feet." He was very charming. T's son, not so much. It took him a few houses to figure out what trick-or-treating was all about, but once he figured out the game he was committed. There was nothing shy about this kid. When the door opened, he just demanded, "Candy!" Once he'd been given a piece, he demanded "More!" He needed a little training. At the beginning of the night, I had to remind him not to pick the smarties, but by the end he was picking the chocolate.

This neighborhood was the shangri-la I never found as a child, where nearly everyone gave out chocolate and one house even gave the much-rumored, but never discovered full-size bar. One house was even giving hot, homemade donuts to the adults.

Since T's son is not allowed to be a sugar fiend, I got to take home the stash. I'll be sleeping well tonight.

Readering

Yesterday, I finally received my Best American Essays anthology which is my favorite reading of the year. I love the essay, in all its permutations, more than any other type of writing. I was too tired last night to read much of it, but I did manage to read David Foster Wallace's preface and some other essay which I was too drowsy to make any sense of. I'm never sure whether I like DFW. Footnotes of any kind annoy me, so his that are meandering and excessively long drive me crazy. And yet. He seems quite aware of his inability to write concisely (he speaks to this in his essay), so I have to forgive him and I find "Consider the Lobster" one of the most ingenious pieces of food writing. And yet. His intro. to the collection was delightfully strange. He argued that his role is not really as an editor but as the Decider. He then riffs on the word (in honor of GWB): Deciderization, Decidering. The latter is my favorite new noun form. One could argue that "decidering" is just a clunky synonym for "deciding," but no. It evokes something else--not just the act of deciding, but the act of being the decider. Not just reading, but acting as a reader--and those are certainly different. Reading involves turning pages and processing words. Readering involves ordering books weeks before they are released, tracking packages, and blogging about reading.

I'm not sure if I will like DWF's choices, but I already know I'll like the collection better than last year's: Lauren Slater's "Best American Essays About Death." The only light-hearted essay in the thing was Adam Gopnik's "Death of a Fish," which is a lovely thing that explores the death of his child's fish with an analysis of Hitchcock's Vertigo. If you haven't read it, you should.

Ok, back to readering. Happy bloggering.