Top Ten List and other Halloween nonsense

Since the day I turned 65, three years ago, I continue to receive some little tidbits of wisdom concerning “You Know You Are Old When …” or “You Know You Are Too Old To If …” lists. Maybe it is because I’ve been known to stay up late just to listen to David Letterman simply to hear his “Top Ten List” offering for the evening. One of my daughters sent along a “Top Ten List” concerning the practice of Trick-or-Treating. I’m not sure where she got it from, but I can almost hear Maxine sharing these insightful little tidbits of wisdom.

TOP TEN LIST: You know you are too old to Trick or Treat when:
10. You get winded from knocking on the door.
9. You have to have another kid chew the candy for you.
8. You ask for high fiber candy only.
7. When someone drops a candy bar in your bag, you lose your balance and fall over.
6. People say: "Great Boris Karloff Mask," and you're not wearing a mask.
5. When the door opens you yell, "Trick or …" and can't remember the rest.
4. By the end of the night, you have a bag full of restraining orders.
3. You have to carefully choose a costume that won't dislodge your hairpiece.
2. You're the only Power Ranger in the neighborhood with a walker.
And the number one reason Seniors should not go Trick Or Treating...
1. You keep having to go home to go to the bathroom.

Halloween would always be a time of trying to out trick the next guy … or at least it was true in my neck of the woods. We would go to great lengths to pull-off the “perfect” Halloween Trick. We knew that we would be opening ourselves up to the “standard Halloween lecture” from my dad about respecting other people’s property, etc. This was true until one of his siblings shared one of their hilarious and mischievous deeds that they would pull-off every year against a cantankerous neighbor. Therefore, we were prepared the next year and as he launched into his lecture we began to laugh … which didn’t help the situation any. Finally, dad, now red in the face, stopped and asked what we were laughing at. When we shared the story from his youth and what he and his buddies did with the neighbor’s wagon and outhouse … well, it only made him madder, but it was the last year we got “the lecture”.

The following story was shared in Reader’s Digest some years ago and while it wasn’t a Halloween Trick-or-treat stunt it could have been:

As physics professor at Adelaide University in Australia, Sir Kerr Grant used to illustrate the time of descent of a free-falling body by allowing a heavy ball suspended from the lecture-theater roof trusses to fall some 30 feet and be caught in a sand bucket. Each year the bucket was lined up meticulously to catch the ball -- and each year students secretly moved the bucket to one side, so that the ball crashed thunderously to the floor.

Tiring of this rather stale joke, the professor traced a chalk line around the bucket. The students moved the bucket as usual, traced a chalk mark around the new position, rubbed it out and replaced the bucket in its original spot. "Aha!" the professor explained, seeing the faint outline of the erased chalk mark. He moved the bucket over it and released the ball -- which thundered to the floor as usual.

Quote for today: Proof of our society's decline is that Halloween has become a broad daylight event for many. ~Robert Kirby