A Halloween to Remember

Back in 2002, the Mrs. and I were eagerly anticipating Halloween. This was pre-Olivia and pre-June, and we were celebrating our first Halloween in our first house. In our years of apartment living, we never had trick-or-treaters, so this was going to be a lot of fun for us.

We decorated the house, we lit our jack-o-lanterns, we got a big bowl full of candy, and we settled in for a great evening of kids coming to the door, dressed as all sorts of things, handing them candy, and enjoying the smiles on their faces. We were giddy with anticipation, wondering how many little boys and girls would come to our new house.

It wasn't long until we got our very first trick-or-treater. She was a cute little girl, probably 6 or 7 years old, blonde hair, all dressed up in a 1950's style pink poodle skirt. Her hair, shoes, sweater, bows in her hair.....it was all vintage 1950's. We watched her walk up our driveway, a little nervous about leaving her mother behind at the sidewalk, but with some coaxing from mom, she worked up the courage to approach our front door and ring the doorbell.

Two things I should probably make clear at this point. First, our front door was open, and our storm door is all glass, top to bottom.

Second, we had a dog named Bronson, who we had adopted from a shelter earlier in the year. This was his first Halloween with us, too. He was a Chow mix, weighing in at around 80 lbs. He had the Chow hair and the Chow tongue, but we guessed he was mixed with a Golden Retriever because he stood taller than a Chow and had more of a Golden Retriever snout. He also had a Golden Retriever temperament. Real sweet dog.

He had one bad habit, though. He had a thing about doorbells. If he heard a doorbell--even if it was on TV--he took off, full-bore, toward the front door, barking a ferocious bark and baring teeth. We kind of liked that about him, since burglars and door-to-door salesmen wouldn't know what a good dog he actually was.

We hadn't made the connection yet, though, as to how that would work on Halloween.

So back to the story. Cute little nervous Poodle Skirt Girl, not entirely sure about being about 15 feet away from her mom on the sidewalk, works up all the courage she has in the world to ring our doorbell in hopes of a Tootsie Pop or a little bag of M&M's or something for her cute little purse that was doubling as a candy holder.

DING DONG.

Bronson was in the back bedroom at the time. Simultaneously, as the Mrs. was opening the ceiling-to-floor glass storm door to give Poodle Skirt Girl some candy, Bronson came barreling around the corner, teeth bared, thunderous bark in full force, headed straight for the "intruder" at the front door.

That poor little girl. This is probably all she saw.



I'll give her credit. Poodle Skirt Girl was quick. Her first few steps were in reverse, about as fast as I've ever seen anyone run backwards. A look of absolute terror was plastered on her face, and she was so startled that she jerked her purse up in the air, flinging already-collected candy everywhere. She probably peed herself, but she wasn't sticking around to let anyone see for sure. That little girl's feet probably touched our driveway twice--three times, max--as she set a new world record for the 100-meter dash. Something between a scream and bawling was coming out of her mouth. Her mom flashed us a quick dirty look and then set off to try to catch her daughter.

Bronson, meanwhile, had stopped right at the storm door. He always did. He never shot out the front door. But of course, Poodle Skirt Girl didn't know that. He stopped barking and seemed kind of baffled as to why a potential little playmate was running away so quickly.

The Mrs., feeling awful about what had just happened, scrambled to scoop up some of the girl's lost candy, and then tried to catch up to her about seven houses down the street when the little girl finally stopped running. The Mrs. apologized profusely to the little girl and to her mother, and in an attempt to make amends, dumped our entire supply of candy into a bag for Poodle Skirt Girl to take home.

The Mrs. came home, we shut off our porch light, and pretended we weren't home for the rest of the night.

For each of the following seven years, every Halloween, we'd sit on lawn chairs in the driveway and pass out candy. Bronson stayed inside and watched out the front window, but as long as no one was ringing the doorbell, he didn't really make a fuss. Some years, it was really nice outside, especially for late October in Indiana. Some years, it was really cold. But we bundled up, got under a big thick blanket, and toughed it out. A couple years, it rained on us. Didn't matter. There would be no more little Poodle Skirt Girl incidents.

Bronson went to the big field in the sky this spring. It just recently occurred to me that we can actually stay inside this year and distribute candy like normal people. I don't know if we will, though. I've kind of gotten used to sitting out in the driveway all night.

As for Poodle Skirt Girl, I have no idea what ever became of her. She's probably thousands of dollars into therapy by now. Poor kid. We still feel bad about that night.

Happy Halloween, everyone. Be safe and have fun as you trick-or-treat. But remember as you ring someone's doorbell...they may have a Bronson, too.






Rest in peace, buddy.

A Hair-Raising Turn of Events in the NFL

Seriously?

This guy..............



..........and this guy..............



........might have had a squabble over hairstyles?

And it's news?

Holy crap.

I bet this guy........................



............and this guy...............



.......never had those kinds of arguments.

Maybe the Patriots should have brought this guy in...........



.......as the fashion police to keep the prima donnas separated.

Instead, though, they have this guy..............



.....who isn't all that much different from Bozo, now that I think about it.

So this guy gets traded.........................



.........and now this drama queen is throwing to him (assuming he has a free hand, of course).



Meanwhile, these guys..................



.......will probably be laughing all the way to the playoffs. They kicked Favre out of town a couple years ago, they got Randy Moss out of their division this week, and they just beat the Vikings on Monday Night Football by, of all the delicious fates, picking off a trademark horrible Favre throw when the game was on the line, and running it in for a Jets' TD.

I think I might become a Jets fan now.

This is Why They Play the Games

Our recreational softball team is a true recreational team, made up primarily of 30- and 40-somethings who aren't exactly in their physical prime. We play because we love to play the game. This is our second season together, and we've discovered that only about half the teams in the league are recreational. The others are out to win. That causes us a considerable amount of frustration when those teams have different goals and talent levels than we do, but I suppose that's just part of softball life.

Last year, we finished with a 1-7-1 record, good for seventh place out of seven teams. Our one win was by five runs against another truly recreational team, and then in the rematch, they pounded us by about 20 runs. We put up a spirited fight in the first round of the tournament against our arch-rivals, but we came up a little short.

This year, we had only won one game up until this week. The team we beat was the same team we beat last year. We had just gone through a three-week-long rough patch where we played against (and lost to) the three best teams in the league. We had a game scheduled last week against the worst team in the league, but it was rained out, and it doesn't appear as though it will be made up. So our game this week was against the team that throttled us in the first week of the season, 13-3. They were 4-2, to our 1-5 record. To make matters worse, our opponent had just beaten the last undefeated team in the league. It seemed overwhelmingly likely that we'd finish the season with just one win again, which was particularly frustrating because we are actually a much better team this year. We haven't been getting blown out by 30 runs in 3 innings in every game, as we did on a regular basis last year. We've been losing fairly close games, hanging in there with the best teams until time expired.

So on Wednesday night, we showed up to take our lumps. As usual, our opponents were much younger and more athletic than we are. We joked with them before the game about showing us some mercy and spotting us 20 runs before the game even started, just to keep things interesting for about 10 minutes.

We batted first and put up 4 runs on the scoreboard. Already an improvement over our first game against these guys! But in the bottom of the first inning, they responded with 7 runs. Here we go again, we all thought. The beginning of the end.

I'm not sure what happened next, but I'm pretty sure we were all possessed by aliens or something. We absolutely unloaded on our opponents in the second inning. Several of us batted twice in the inning, and hits and runs piled up faster than losses normally pile up on us. Then we played defense like we've never played defense before. We had none of our trademarked collosally boneheaded errors that normally doom us. We had a handful of minor errors, but none that led to excessive hemmoraging. Everyone kept their spirits up. Everyone played hard. Everything broke our way. Heck, we even had our favorite umpire for this game. Our planets were in alignment.

As a general rule, I don't want to know the score as we play. Obviously, I get a general sense of how a game is going, but I don't like knowing the score because I don't want to get all tensed up if the score is close, nor do I want to slack off if we're up by several runs and let the other team come back. So I knew that we were hanging in there with our opponents, but I didn't know the score. At one point late in the game, Chuck violated my rule and told me the score was 18-11. Not too bad, I thought. We're only down by 7, and we played these guys well.

What I didn't find out until after the game was that we were the ones with 18 runs at that point, not them.

We scored a few more runs in the top of the inning, gave up a couple in the bottom of the inning, and then I saw Chuck talking to the umpire at the end of the inning. I couldn't hear what Chuck was saying, but after their conversation, Chuck threw his glove into the dugout. I figured we must be down by a couple of runs, and the umpire is calling time, thus frustrating Chuck because we didn't get one more chance to win. Then as we approached the other team for the usual post-game sportsmanship-oriented high-fives, I heard Chuck's wife yell from the stands, "Good job, guys! You won!"

WHAT?!

I was stunned, and pretty confused, as we exchanged kind words with the other team. By the time I got back to the dugout, my teammates were jumping up and down with glee. The final score was Us 23, Them 13. The game hadn't been called because time ran out. The game was called because of the mercy rule.

Chuck was roaring with excitement that our two wins this season makes him the "better coach" of the two of us, since I only coached us to one win last season. The jubilation and, to some degree, shock poured out of the dugout as if we had just won Game 7 of the World Series. If we had had a cooler full of Gatorade, it would have been dumped over Chuck's head. I'm sure our opponents thought we were being obnoxious jerks and rubbing it in. Hell, it was just a regular season game.

But to us, it was much much more. We had won a game for only the third time in two seasons. We had beaten a really good team. We had 10-runned them, in fact. Our much improved team had finally put it all together and played up to our potential. As I visited briefly with my parents after the game, I couldn't wipe the ear-to-ear smile off of my face or get the trembling out of my voice. About half of our team went directly to Chuck's house for celebratory beers. The atmosphere was raucous. We gleefully rehashed the entire game in minute detail amongst ourselves for hours. Two days later, I'm still grinning.

We begin tournament play next Wednesday, and we'll be the sixth-seeded team out of eight. We assume we'll be playing against the third-seeded team, so we'll be heavy underdogs again. And depending on how the standings shake out, that third-seeded team could be the same opponent we just beat. If it is, they'll probably want a little revenge. And if they pound us next week, that's okay. Because we turned a corner Wednesday night, and it was oh so sweet. We have hope now. We know we can do it. We're no longer the hapless doormats of the league.

Maybe next year we can win three or four games!