The Great Treat: Dipping into the large penny-filled bowl on Halloween.

by James K. Sayre

It was in the late 1940s, in suburban Ridgewood, New Jersey, and I must have been about 6 or 7 years old. We were out on a little evening Halloween candy-gathering expedition. We came to a nearby large fancy house with a big front lawn and went to their front door. We were ushered inside into the dining room, which had a large glass bowl that was filled with pennies, with the addition of some nickels, dimes and quarters. We were each allowed to take one handful. My eyes grew very large. Greed seems to have warmed the cockles of the heart that night... On the other hand, I have no idea what I ever did with this handful of coins, maybe I fed a piggy bank; I seemed to have had a strong streak of thriftiness as a child.

Anyway, that one visit was the highlight of the Halloween night experiences in my young life. Many years later, in my adult-hippie years, I went out trick-or-treating with my teenaged girlfriend, her two sisters and her mother. We all had devised rudimentary costumes to go along with our face masks. It was pretty funny: we were all very big kids, but the neighbors we visited gently humored us and gave us some candy treats for our bags.

End.

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