Ed. — From the Sunday, April 24, print edition.
VIRGINIA BEACH — On Halloween night in 1976, when my sister was almost 13 and I was 11, we changed things up a bit. We had always gone trick-or-treating with our dad, but my sister and I wanted to go with our friends that year.
We knew this news might raise our parents’ eyebrows, but we figured they would let us go if we promised to stick together. Like most kids, we weren’t conscious of our parents’ emotional lives. It hadn’t occurred to us that our father might feel a sense of loss at this change in tradition.
We lived in a small, rural town. The houses sprawled out from our home on Market Street, the main drag, promising more bounty if we went with our friends to explore in every direction.
That night my mother had allowed us kids to eat dinner early so we could get into our costumes. When my father got home, he sat alone at the kitchen table. He read the paper and ate the fried clam balls my mother had prepared for dinner.
My sister poked and prodded me until I agreed to be the one to break the news to my dad of our change in plans. I stood in the kitchen doorway, facing the round table where my father sat but not looking at him as I recited the lie we had agreed to tell our parents about our plans for that night.
Trick-or-treating was undoubtedly high on our list of things, but what we had agreed to do with our friends was more dangerous and heartless.
The gang of us planned to corn and soap the “witch’s house,” a battered yellow home situated on the street above the baseball fields. Rumor had it that the old, reclusive woman who lived in the house practiced witchcraft. Every Halloween, the dare to taunt her to fire up the caldron crept through the halls of the elementary and middle schools.
This year it landed in our laps, and we couldn’t refuse.
“We’ll stick to the houses of people we know on the front streets,” I said when my father asked for more details, looking up from his paper and plate.
His blue eyes held mine for a beat longer than was comfortable. Then he closed his paper with a strange finality and gave our plan the okay.
My mother leaned back against the counter and sighed.
As I left the room, I heard my father tell my mother his stomach was upset, and my mother blamed the clam balls. But I didn’t give the two of them another thought as I raced up the stairs to tell my sister we were good to go.
That night, my sister and I and our band of rowdies passed my father and brother on our way to the witch’s house. Our plastic pumpkins were full of candy, yet we proclaimed we had no time to stop when our father asked us to show him how well we had done trick-or-treating.
I recall glancing over my shoulder to see him and my little brother, who was dressed as a clown, walking hand-in-hand up the walkway to the next house.
My father, who was only 39 then, suffered a heart attack not long after we met in the street.
After that moment, the night is a blur.
My next memory of that time is of my mother sitting on my bed the morning after Halloween, waiting for me to wake up so she could tell me my father was in the hospital. He had the heart attack during the night and had been taken down the twisting, narrow stairs of our 100-year-old house in a cane back chair to the waiting ambulance.
I was reminded of all this last week when an old family friend reached out to me, and we started sharing our memories of our parents, who had been friends at the time. My friend recalled my father’s heart attack and how he, too, had spent that night engaged in what must have been a rite of passage in those days – fulfilling a dare to soap and corn his neighborhood’s rumored haunted house.
He told me how he and his brother received a punishment reprieve of sorts for their misdeeds because my mother had called their mother to share the news of my father. Perhaps my friend’s detailed memory of those events brought to mind what I had forgotten and what matters now.
The day after Halloween, while my father recovered in the hospital, I rode my bike down to the “witch’s house” to see the damage.
I rounded the corner of her street, and the buttery yellow house came into view. I stopped peddling to watch an ordinary woman in an ordinary housedress slowly sweeping the corn from the sidewalk in front of her home. I remember feeling glad that we had lost the nerve to soap her windows, but I also recall feeling shame for not considering the possibility of her feelings.
I want to tell you that I rode up to the woman, told her what we had done, and then helped her sweep the corn until the very last kernel was gone from her property. But that didn’t happen. Instead, I rode back home and waited for news of my dad, who I suddenly realized was as ethereal as air and as human as me.
I often wonder why we remember what we do and forget what we don’t.
When I think now about that night and the following day – what we kids did, what my parents experienced – I like to believe the woman’s steady sweeping and my father’s heart attack were lessons in empathy I embrace today.
Witnessing the woman’s solitary world taught me that compassion should guide us when we approach the unfamiliar because we can never know another’s life from rumor and speculation.
Only my father knows what he felt that night when we broke tradition, but what happened after that moment made me realize that every action has a consequence. If we are lucky, we have a lifetime to pay it forward.
The author is a writer and former Virginia Beach planning commissioner and professor who lives in Ashville Park. Contact her via email at leejogger@gmail.com.
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