The evening begins with a frantic drive down crowded, rush-hour Wadsworth. People are changing lanes like crazy, nearly taking out other drivers as they try, in vain, to merge right across three lanes of traffic to get to the interstate on-ramp that they thought they had to make a left turn onto. Why, you may ask, am I on this road? I have to get to Sus’ sister’s house to pick up Sus’ niece.

You see, we took her trick-or-treating for her first trick-or-treating ever. She’s three, and absolutely talkative. She talks about real things, about nonsensical things, about silly things and fun things. She fell asleep on the car ride back to my house, and then continued to sleep even after we tried to wake her by first blowing a raspberry on her stomach, then letting the dog lick her, then by forcibly shaking her. To all this, she simply snores, yawns, rolls over, and continues sleeping.

We finally got her up and out. She was groggy at first, but she started warming up as we went. I think the compliments from all of the homeowners helped. We even got her saying “trick-or-treat” and “thank you” at every door.

One of the first houses we visited had a battery-operated halloween decoration. It consisted of a skull inside a lantern, and the skull cackled and screamed. Well, Ana wasn’t quite sure of this. She didn’t like it, even thought it was scary. She didn’t scream, or run away, but she sidled closer to Sus. We told her it wasn’t real, that it was just a toy. After that she said “Yeah, it’s just a toy. It’s not scary, it’s just a toy.” She said that to a lot of stuff tonight.

So we took the kidlet out, got her a bunch of candy, and now we give her back to her mommy. She said goodbye to me as Sus prepared to drive her home, and told me that she wants to come back next year, then Sus and I have to go home with her and play dress-up. We’ll see if she remembers.