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Originally uploaded by Suzi Foo

Originally uploaded by vickie c

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• RT @TheFatJew: My best halloween costume ever i went as a dial-up modem. People would ask me questions and i’d take a full minute to respond #

My son put on a cap, a pair of sunglasses, hung a clock around his neck, and went trick-or-treating with his friends as Flavor Flav.

I can’t imagine anyone in Irvine is going to be able to figure that one out.

Postscript

“One woman asked me, ‘Are you supposed to be Flavor Flav?’” he says.

“What was her ethnicity?” I ask him.

“White.”

OK, I stand corrected.

I can tell what dogs are thinking by reading their facial expressions.

This dog, for example, belongs to a friend’s sister. As you can see, they bought a pumpkin costume and put it on the dog.

She is thinking, “If I was bigger, I would kill these people.”

The joys of parents are secret, and so are their griefs and fears.

— Francis Bacon, “Of Parents and Children”

Our son turned 12 in July . . .

“I almost cried today,” my wife says. “Every year, I take Casey to the pumpkin patch and I take the best photo, but when we drove by today, he didn’t want to go . . .”

I look forward to taking my son out trick-or-treating every year. I have lots of Halloween memories, mostly happy, some sad . . .

One year — he was in kindergarten or 1st grade, I can’t remember which — I took him out and he was so excited, running from house to house . . .

As he was running back from one house, he slipped and fell right in front of a group of older kids. They were very nice, helped him up, asked if he was okay, which he was, but it really demoralized him.

A couple of houses later, he said he wanted to go home. I asked him if he felt bad about falling down in front of everybody and he said no, he was just tired and wanted to go home.

So I took him home.

He’s 11 now and tonight he and his friends decided they wanted to go trick-or-treating by themselves.

I stayed home and softly closed another door . . .

I got a rock.

— Charlie Brown

In a last minute switcheroo, my wife decided to stay home and hand out candy while I went trick-or-treating with the kids.

I had six kids in my group: four 10-year-old boys — a mummy (my kid), two ninjas, and an evil baseball catcher — plus a hyperactive 6-year-old cheerleader and a 5-year-old Blue’s Clues girl.

The cheerleader was a dynamo — the first kid to every door — and if it wasn’t opened promptly, she’d run around looking in the windows to see what was the holdup.

The evil baseball catcher — wearing a chest protector, shin guards and a skull mask — approached every house by taking a running start and sliding up to the door on his shin guards, scaring women, small children and pretty much everyone else, because no one expected him to do that, and because it looked like he’d fallen and given himself a crippling injury.

“You won’t be laughing when he does that and some old lady has a heart attack,” one mom said to me.

But the highlight of the evening came when one of the ninjas got tired of menacing the other ninja and pointed his sword at the kinetic cheerleader, who swung her candy bag around and knocked the sword halfway across the street.

It was a big hit with the whole group because you rarely get to see a ninja schooled by a cheerleader half his size . . .