All Hallows’ Eve, and if the past is prologue nobody will show up at our door.
The Grant girls used to, and our bounty was boundless. “Come again next year, and we’ll give you scholarships to Harvard!” I would call after them.
“This neighborhood is really quiet,” Mary observed the other day as we were walking O’en. “So quiet,” I said, “that in a recent column I called it ‘comatose.’ ”
That wasn’t always the case. There was a time when there were a lot of kids around, when the Libaths lived cater-corner from us, and their daughter Cassandra, who was the same age as Georgie and Johnna, came over, knocked on the door, and, when Mary opened it, introduced herself and said she heard there were kids there.
Maybe there still are kids around, but I don’t see much sign of them. Maybe it’s a sign of the times. Everybody’s retreating nowadays, and perhaps with reason, though I wish it weren’t so. Mary talks all the time about playing outside in Port Washington, whatever the season. Her mother would shoo her out the door. Carl Johnson, the former Killer Bees coach, when I asked him what made the Bees so good, said they played basketball with the older guys at the Bridgehampton Child Care Center all day, until just before sundown in the summer — the time of day the younger ones knew they’d better be home or there would be hell to pay.
Hughie King said he and his friends, before Little League took hold, played pickup baseball all day long at the Amagansett School, getting up scores of times, not three, as you might in a Little League game.
I rode my red red balloon-tired bike everywhere when we lived in Pittsburgh, in full cry, heedless, and survived it, though I broke my wrist once riding full tilt into a parked car, and am in debt to a Fifth Avenue trolley conductor who braked a few feet away as I looked up from the tracks where I’d fallen one snowy winter morning.
We used to run around in the dark on Halloween in the suburb to which we later moved, making a lot of noise and vowing vile retributions should treats be denied.
Maybe childhood is just as much fun as it ever was, though I wonder. The witching hour comes early now.