#157. Trick-or-Treat (Friday, October 30, 1998)

What was your best day…or sharing a best day with someone else?

There isn’t too much you can infer about someone’s deeper psychological architecture from a brief eighteen-month period when you were best friends in third and fourth grade—especially if you haven’t even seen that former best friend since. But there was one subtle aspect of Harry Liu (#98) that, even at that age, seemed almost perfectly, destiny-like aligned with mine.

Our reflex of just “knowing” both the obvious and subtle things that made a day good or bad. And natural tendency to form a taxonomy around different days based on that definitionally abstract variable.

No, there was no 1998 precursor of 100 Best Days from either of us.¹ But, when a day went particularly well or just stood out—in any of infinite possible ways—it would be given a semi-permanent place in our bilateral vocabulary. Where it would be common to just refer to “that day”, and its nuances and complexities and emotional swings would be instantly understood by both in the context of the ongoing conversation.

Just like that night at McDonald’s (#98) or with The Incredible Machine (#83) or with the Pokémon Fossil Set (#76), this Friday had a regular place in the roster. So, even if most of the striking details have since disappeared, I owe it to him to reconstruct it the best I can (even the pointless parts).

In the days leading up, we were hard at work completing our “Halloween activity books”—basically a series of coloring pages and basic mazes and (even more basic) crosswords—to hand in to Ms. Watson on Friday. Where a male winner and female winner would be crowned. The strange part is that there was no set syllabus: Ms. Watson had a lot of printouts, so we had to be selective on which ones to include, and then curate them in what we believed was a logical and aesthetically pleasing order. This third-grade project had such high standards of fine art that I had a massive argument with mom late on Thursday night about how disorganized it was; but somehow we settled down and she helped me put together something respectable at the end (deciding that the picture of the witch at her cauldron was the most appropriate title page).

Before finding out the winners on Friday, though, we have a full-day Halloween party. The only costume I remember is Harry wearing a mask of Slappy from the Goosebumps (which I didn’t recognize). I don’t even think I wore a costume myself—extremely out of place in grade school in the late-90s—or at least I can’t remember any.² In French class, we play Bingo: where we fill out our bingo cards with different French Halloween terms, where I miss the big prize because I tried to be fancy and use the word “reglisse” (licorice) for the key spot instead of “monstre” (no translation needed) for my key space.

After lunch, we go to a legit haunted house that some older kids have put on. The thing has high production value (from my third grade vantage point), with eerie lighting, ghoulish sound effects, and scary creatures in all forms of costume—with the loudest (and hence scariest) of them being this girl claiming she was Geri, who’d left the Spice Girls five months earlier, and had “returned”. Then amid a mass of further Halloween partying that afternoon I can’t recall, I randomly get specifically called down to the office to give my side of a conflict between David and Tom where one of them tried to poke the other’s eye out (which I wasn’t even there to see).³

Finally, the day draws to a close, and the time has come for Ms. Watson to announce the winners. And…

I win. My work of Halloween curation is judged as the best among the guys, miraculously. For my victory, I get a cool ghost banner, some other miscellaneous Halloween door prizes, and four coupons for McDonald’s—two for ice cream, one for a drink, one for fries. I give two to Harry, and we promise to go McDonald’s together later in the year (leading to #99).

The full Halloween experience wraps up with the traditional trick-or-treating experience the next night—on actual Halloween—with Harry and a girl (who I never saw before or since). It’s my first time trick-or-treating with a friend, and this just elevates the day before in our collective memory another few levels higher. We pound the pavement hard, and by the end of it I have enough chocolate and candy to slowly eat away in my room for the next two full months.

I recall my parents did not ration the candy at all and let me just eat freely, which makes me astounded at whatever level of self-control had allowed all of it to last that long. But perhaps it was the sheer diversity. Because through this Halloween candy consumption, I encounter singles or pairs of most of the famous confectionary products for the first time⁴—Starburst (my favorite, #63), Coffee Crisp, Crispy Crunch, Crunch, Crunchie (real creative naming), Mars, Reese’s, Hershey’s, Caramilk, Snickers, Aero, Whoppers, Chiclets, Nerds, Fruit Roll-Up, Fruit to Go. I’m definitely missing some.

A day Harry and I agreed on to be one of the best of our lives. Persisting for the rest of 1998 (and far beyond, thanks to associative memory), one prized trick-or-treating acquisition at a time.

Though if you had forced us at the time to come up with that (maybe less ambitious, like 25), I’m sure I could have produced some even wilder stories that have since been lost to time.
For the record, those handful of times I do remember dressing up in grade school was essentially just a mask (Darth Maul since fourth grade), with maybe a generic black sheet one or two years. Save for my Cardinals cap “costume” in 2013 (#140), seventh grade was the last time I dressed up.
I guess as I was interpreted as some kind of neutral, impartial arbiter or something in that class. I recall being called down for similar reasons—and not providing any help—at least one or two other times during that period.
I’ll exclude Oh Henry!, Smarties, and Kit Kat here, because those two I actually ate in volume before. Harry was especially addicted to Kit Kat.