memory challenge prompts

It’s hard to believe but it has been a year of doing the memory prompt writing challenges. I think I have come to the end, not of mining my childhood memories but of promising myself I would post one each week. My blog/writer self is going through some changes and I want to unfetter myself in a few places in order to root more deeply in others. So today’s memory challenge is for me to try and remember the times I had to say goodbye to something or someone from childhood. Of course the one that stands out most strongly in my mind is saying goodbye to my grandfather. He died when I was 12 and in some ways I feel like my childhood ended then. He was my bestest friend that I followed everywhere. I remember saying goodbye to my great-grandmother after that and not going to her funeral because I had not gone to my grandfather’s funeral. For some reason it seemed disloyal to my grandfather, whom I loved and adored, if I went to great grandma’s funeral (whom I just tolerated and who just tolerated me) and not his. I remember saying goodbye to my Uncle Fred, who was a fireman in Concord. We road in the hearse past the fire station and all the fireman came out to salute as he went by.

I remember not getting to say goodbye to my friend Teresa Randazzo who moved away in what felt like the middle of the night when her parents were divorced.

I remember saying goodbye to Sparky, my first horse, after we were hit by a car and he had an injury that would take him a long long time to recover from so we gave him to riding school near Davis so he could get the rest he needed.

It seems to me there should be more goodbyes from childhood but if so, they are buried too deeply for me to find them at the moment.

You turn, what goodbyes stand out from your childhood?

For this week’s memory challenge I’m trying to remember the various neighbors on my block. Next door on one side, when I was very young, was an old woman named Jenny. Jenny made the best congo bars, a chocolate chip bar cookie, that was so sweet my teeth probably started to rot before I ever took a bite. I wore out a hole in the hedge going back and forth between her house and mine on cookie days. When Jenny was no longer there the Tuey family moved in. They were the ones who had the only Chinese restaurant in town. There was Linda, a few years younger than me but a playmate, a younger brother named Timmy I think and a baby I couldn’t remember. Their grandmother lived with them too and took care of the baby while the parents ran the restaurant. I remember that they grew a lot of the vegetables for the restaurant in the backyard and some of the greens would be washed and actually hung on the clothesline to dry. They had a cool clothesline that came into the kitchen. You could put the clothes (or the salad greens) on the line and then hand over hand bring in empty line and send the stuff out to the sun to dry. When Jenny lived there the house was neat and clean. When the Tueys moved in it was total chaos. Three kids and two working parents probably helped that along.

On the other side of that house was the house that straddled the corner. I don’t remember the adults that lived there but there was twin boys who came to visit and I would play with them. They loved to play up in my attic playroom with my mother’s storybook dolls. Alas the strongest memory I have of them is them throwing the dolls down the stairs and breaking them. They had a basement (well so did we) but their’s had one of those slanted doors that you could climb up and let trucks roll down. For some reason I remember sitting on the basement door and singing the song, “Oh playmate, come out and play with me.”

I don’t remember the neighbor directly next door when I was little. It must have been an unfriendly adult because I remember I wasn’t allowed to trick or treat there. But along about 5th grade the Truitts moved in. A big baseball loving family with a girl named Jan that was my age. Jan and I were friend on and off again. She’s the one who punched me in the mouth when I had braces for no reason that I ever understood and then lied about it.

Across the street was my grandmother’s best friend, Lisa deBenedetti. They had a ground level basement and you had to walk up this steep flight of stairs to get to their front door. The stairs always scared me because there was a space between each step and I thought I would fall through. What I loved best about their house was the basement. It was the collecting point for the yearly rummage sale put on by their Druids group. I used to get to try things on first and buy old handbags and high heels and hats for playing dressup. When the grandchildren came to visit we would play in the tiny backyard. I remember their clothesline…one of those freestanding ones with a center pole. I always thought it looked nicer than ours that was just a bunch of pipes my grandfather put in the ground and ran wire through. Oh, I just remembered they had a hedge of olive bushes around the front yard. Every year I would watch those olives ripen and rot on the bushes. I loved olives so much and wanted to pick them and bring them home to do whatever it was you did to olives but we never did. As far as I know they never did anything with them either.

Next to that house was Grandma Stotts (everyone in the neighborhood called her that) and Gilbert and Hazel Hills. I remember Gilbert as being really really tall and thin. Hazel had white curly hair and used crutches but I don’t remember why. She taught piano lessons.

Next to that was the duplex that, for a short time, my father lived in back when he first met my mom. It must have been a rental because I never remember anyone staying there for very long until junior high and Elivira Dorris moved in. That was about the time we had crushes on Bobby Sherman and Davy Jones and David Cassidy so we spent a lot of time listening to their records and pretending which one was going to fall in love and marry us.

There were more houses on the street but I don’t remember the people who lived there.

Your turn. Who were the people in your neighborhood?

When I was a very little kid, up until the time my grandfather died, summertime meant one thing – going out on the boat. My grandfather’s pride and joy was this Glasper Cabin Cruiser.

After work on Fridays he’d make sure it was ready to go, loaded up on the trailer and in the driveway facing the street so that bright and early Saturday morning we could head out to Antioch to launch for a day of fishing and playing around the water. Once we were in the boat we always stopped by his duck blinds so he could get out and rake the clam bed so we would have a bucket of bait. Once the bucket was full we were off and racing through the sloughs. I remember thinking that all the sloughs looked alike to me but Papa, he always knew right where he was going.

He would get us set up at one of our favorite beaches and then he would go back out on the boat, drifting a bit further from where were were making so much noise on the beach so he could fish. I remember that sometimes my aunt and uncle would come out and meet us at the beach so that I could play with my cousin Diane. (I’m on the right.)

When I look at this picture I can remember that ice chest that said Hires root bear on it. It had a green padded seat and my Nana always sat on it. Sometimes my mom and my grandmother would go off to collect wild berries. Me, I liked to collect rocks and clam shells and driftwood. I would make tunnels and rivers and bring the water up to watch it race around the courses I made. I wasn’t much for building sand castles but I did like to dig holes. We would roast hot dogs on the beach and drink Coca Cola and stay out until the sun was going down then race back through the sloughs to hit the dock before dark.

Papa almost always caught a bucket of catfish to bring home so once we were all back at our house he would gut and clean them and my grandmother would pack them in milk cartons that she would fill with water to freeze so that we could have mostly fresh catifsh to eat the rest of the summer. Nana’s fried catfish was one of my favorite meals of all times. Summers on the beach in the Antioch sloughs are some of my most favorite summer time memories.

Your turn. What is one of your favorite summer memories?

My current WIP has the main character doing a lot of self-reflection. Okay, it has a few characters doing a lot of self-reflection. And since I try to connect part of me to each of my important characters it means I am doing a lot of self-reflection lately. Which isn’t always easy. So I decided to start with simple things and try to remember times I had done things in childhood that ending up in embarrassment for me and how I coped with them. There are four that stand out in my mind.

#1 In the 5th grade we were having a talent show. At the time I was totally hooked on the song Do You Know the Way to San Jose? made popular back then by singer Dionne Warwick. I do not have a Dionne Warwick voice. I do not have a voice at all. One ex used to beg me to not sing in the car with him. Another, a musician, told me if I worked at it really hard I could have a voice like Melissa Etheridge, well at least like the part when she mostly screams. So me, a singer? Not.

But I wanted to be. So I went to the audition and and turned on the background tape and proceeded to sing my little heart out. You know those contestants on idol where you cringe and wonder what in the world made them even think they could win such a thing? That was me. It was horrible. Before I even got finished the kids waiting for their turn were booing me and yelling at me to shut up. Finally some boy ran up on the stage and stood in front of me and told me to just SHUT UP. I went home in tears and never tried out for another talent show again.

#2 The summer between 6th and 7th grade I went camping with a friend to Crazy Horse Campgrounds. It was my first exposure to square dancing and I loved it. It was so much fun and everyone helped everyone else learn the steps and just have a good time. Later that summer but before school started I saw a flyer for square dancing class. It was a ways from home, too far to walk, so I had to beg my mom to drop me off. She did and I walked into the auditorium of the school and everyone was all dressed up in matching square dancing outfits. I had no idea that this was a long-established club that had been meeting for years and years. I was a kid. I had just had a good time square dancing and wanted to do more of it. They asked if I had ever done square-dancing before and I said yes. The caller gave me a funny look and pointed me to a square with a missing person. Then they started up without a single word to me. He switched out, faster and faster and faster and of course I had no idea what to do. He kept changing things and speeding up and I finally realized he was trying to get me to quit. It worked. I left in tears (again) and waited outside for 2 hours until my mom came to pick me up.

#3 In my sophomore year I moved from Mt. Diablo High School to Ygnacio Valley. I didn’t have any friends there, except for Kevin, and so I decided to join a club to try and meet people. I saw sign-ups for a play and decided to try out for drama. I don’t remember the play at all but I do remember that when I tried out people laughed (and it was supposed to be serious) and the adviser told me that I would be better off if I went and found something else to do with my spare time because there was no way I could be an actress.

#4 Also in my sophomore year… I started off the year with one boyfriend, Kevin, that I went to my first prom with but by the end of the year when there was another formal dance I was dating someone else named Matt. Matt asked me to the end of the year dance and I remember this time getting a dress that was blue dotted swiss with a bit of a petticoat underneath. I remember my mom posing us for lots of pictures in our tiny apt and how Matt had to sit down for most of them because he was way over 6′ tall and I was barely 5′ tall. My mom couldn’t get us both in the picture. I remember the dance was at some golf course and we drove a long way up a hill to get to it. I remember walking in the door and then Matt saying, "see ya!." And walked away. We had only gone out a few times and it turned out that he never wanted to take me to the dance after all. It was more of a dare to get me there and dump me, which he did. I walked all the way down that hill myself, in my fancy dress and white heels, and waited for my mom to pick me up. Not quite a Stephen King/Carrie moment but close. I never did figure out what I had done to him to make him do that to me.

I guess in addition to embarrassing moments these are also be moments of intense disappointment. Mostly what I remember, as a kid, is that I just wasn’t good enough. Never mind that I hadn’t had lessons or practiced or experience, the message I got was that I wasn’t good enough. Now to figure out how to attach some of the emotions this drudged up to my characters.

Your turn. What moments of embarrassment and/or disappointment do you remember from childhood?

When I was looking through the pictures that were already scanned to show Melodye one of my frilly dresses, I couldn’t find any. Well, I found some from the back when I did a series on my mother taking pictures of how long my hair was all the time…so Melodye, I’ll have to find the box of pics and scan them in. But what I did find, were pictures of me with dolls. Ilove love loved my baby dolls as a child. One or two of them were always with me, especially for picture taking time.

The front porch was a popular posing spot. Here I am with two of my very favorites, a Bye Bye Baby made my Ideal and a Gerber baby. Someday, when I can afford it, I’m going to buy myself a couple of those. I wish I still had them, or any of my dolls, but when I was about 10 or 11 I got the idea to donate them to the local children’s home. I wish I had saved at least one.

At Christmas there was always a picture taken of me in front of the tree at the car dealership where my mom worked. This is me with Chatty Cathy, another favorite.

My cousin Diane and I on my grandmother’s cedar chest which is sitting in my library now.

Patty Play Pal was tons of fun because she could wear my old clothes.

When it was time to pose, even my grandfather got into the act with Patty Play Pal.

And even when my cousin Jimmy was born and I had a real life baby to play with, I still brought my baby doll with me.

Debra McElroy, Leanne Ciconne, me and Linda Tuey. And of course if I had a bunch of dolls, I had to have a tea party for them, right? I had Barbie dolls, one of the old ones with no moving parts and I remember going to Rhodes Department store and standing in line to trade it in for one of the new ones with bendable legs and long blonde hair and an orange bathing suit with some kind of netting over the top of it. Less than a month after turning it in I wanted my old one back again.

Your turn, what was one of your favorite toys from childhood?

Since we just had Easter dinner at our house I thought I would try to remember what Easter was like as a child. Easter baskets, of course, filled with jelly beans and a big hollow chocolate bunny. We dyed eggs but mom wouldn’t hide them. They just sat in their cardboard container for me to take to school every day.

But Easter dinner, as long as my grandmother was alive, that was a big deal. Everyone would come to our house (I lived with my grandmother) for a giant feast. The meat was always a canned ham with a brown sugar glaze. Always. Scalloped potatoes. Peas and corn. Those flakey dinner rolls, heat and serve. And pie of some kind, whatever fruit was in season at the time. Those were the absolutes. As the relatives came there would be additions to the table. Some kind of jello salad. Maybe another dessert. More veggies. I can’t remember if candied yams were served here but I think so. Black olives in a little bowl that I would sneak from in advance of dinner.

When everyone was still alive and still speaking to one another, it was a great crowd of aunts and uncles and great aunts and great uncles and cousins. We kids had to sit at the card table in the living room because there wasn’t enough room for us at the big table (and because we might break something.)

What I remember most of all is the joy I felt at being surrounded by family. My family. My home. It always seemed a little too quiet after everyone left.

What do you remember about Easter as a child?
 

This week’s memory challenge is inspired by the thought of money and how we got it as a child.

When I was really young I thought money came from the dirt. No, really.

Every few days we would walk to town, me and my grandmother, and we always took the same route. We crossed the street to get back to our side in front of the same house every time. I don’t know who lived there but I know that the edge of driveway, the lip that led from the street to their driveway, was always filled with dirt. By the time we got to that corner house someone or another would be outside and want to chat with my grandmother. I would get bored in about 3 seconds and then I would do what many other kids would do, look around for some dirt to play in. And there it was in the gutter.

I must have seen a penny in the dirt there once and then decided to always check there for money whenever I could. I’d find a stick and poke at the dirt while my grandmother chatted with a neighbor about the sales downtown or who was sick or how the roof needing fixing. And almost every time I found a coin or two. I used to wonder if my grandmother went over and seeded the dirt for me but that wasn’t her style. She didn’t believe in whimsy like that.

I tried to imagine how the money got there…did the owner of the house stop his car halfway in the driveway and empty his pockets? It didn’t seem likely but I never did figure it out.

Your turn. Did you get an allowance as a child? Did you earn money any other ways before you were old enough to get a job?

Teachers: You can use this as a writing prompt. Have students write a story about the money that keep appearing in the dirt.

This week’s memory challenge is inspired by a topic I have been thinking about  a lot – friends. As a child I didn’t have a lot of very close friends….no matter what age. But I did have an imaginary friend I called Tommy. He was a little mouse who lived behind the electrical outlets in our old house and climbed along the wires to get from one room to the next. He always beat me downstairs to breakfast. We had a lot of long conversations in my room about how disagreeable vegetables were and how much we loved chocolate ice cream. He was better at math than I was but I knew how to read.

One day he just got on a bus and went away and I never saw him again.

What about you? Did you have an imaginary friend as a child?

I have absolutely no idea where this idea came from but I have been thinking about ice cream today. So let’s use that for the memory prompt.

As a child my favorite ice cream flavor was chocolate mint. Actually it still is. As I child I also hated going to the dentist but right near the dentist office was an ice cream parlor. Knowing there was a good chance to get an ice cream after a visit to the dentist (which was always filled with equal parts pain and humiliation) was about the only way I could make myself get into the car. The entire time I was sitting in that odd-smelling office looking out the wavy glass windows at Concord Elementary school across the street, all I could do was think about the possibility of ice cream. After I survived all that pain and suffering my order was always the same. Mint chocolate chip. On a sugar cone.

At home we usually only had vanilla ice cream but we had all sorts of goodies to put on top. Bosco chocolate syrup was a staple. As was a selection of fresh walnuts or almonds from our trees. We had a little metal hand grinder for the nuts and I loved to grind them into a really fine powder to pour over the chocolate sauce. Sometime we had the marshmallow creme or butterscotch topping and whipped cream. But my favorite was always just the vanilla ice cream and chocolate syrup that I would stir until it was soup and then drink it like a milkshake.

After skating lessons we would go to Berkeley Farms restaurant in Walnut Creek and I would often get a hot fudge sundae. Sometimes a chocolate milk shake where they actually brought you the big silver container they made it in to the table so you got every last drop of the shake to yourself.

Your turn. Do you have any childhood memories about ice cream?

Tuesday memory challenge

Since last week was about remembering our childhood bedrooms I thought it only right to move to another important room in the house – the kitchen.

The majority of my childhood was spent at my grandmother’s house and that’s the kitchen that I remember most of all. There was a sliding pocket door that separated it from the dining room and another door to separate it from the inside back porch where we had the washer and dryer. I’m remembering the floor as being blue, white and black flecked linoleum.

Nope. I just found this picture and it was actually blue and white alternating squares.

There was a big walk in pantry with all kinds of food in it. Later my grandmother put the built-in refrigerator there and I always missed that pantry.

There was a small little closet, maybe it was a broom closet, no, it was for the ironing board I think. I remember that my grandfather kept some kinds of tools in there and whenever I had to take a Band-aid off he would go into that little closet and get the Energine to help remove the leftover sticky stuff.

There was a breakfast nook just big enough for the table and chairs. A window that looked out into the backyard and little corner shelves up high near the ceiling. One one of them was a set of chickens and a rooster, three of them brightly colored. I have them now and think of my grandmother’s kitchen every time I look at them.

The phone was in the kitchen nook and I would sit on a chair there to talk (this was back when the phones had cords attached to them.) I remember the telephone number was 685-7880. I think it used to  be MU something but I can’t remember the rest.

The stove was big, with two ovens, black and white. It had a big over and a small narrow one. It’s the small one I remember because my grandmother had perfected the timing of making her yellow cake from scratch. She’d get it all ready and pop it into the over while we ate and it would come out of the oven all hot in time for dessert. No icing, just some butter on the top. Yum, yum.

I can’t remember where the refrigerator was at all. Maybe it is was on the back porch?

Before she had the kitchen remodeled my grandmother got a portable dishwasher that she would wheel out from the back porch and hook up to the kitchen sink.

The countertop had little white hexagon tiles. I remember my grandmother rinsing out paper milk cartons so she could stuff fish or duck or pheasant into them, fill them with water, and then put them in the freezer in the basement. There was a window over the sink that looked out at the Tuey’s house. There was an open space under the sink and I remember having a bird, a baby perhaps, in a cardboard box. Maybe we put the black rabbit we found there too.

I remember someone, either my grandmother or my grandfather or maybe both, brushing their teeth at the kitchen sink with Pepsodent tooth powder.

I remember the cabinet to the left of the sink, up high, was where we had the little grater jar and we would grate our walnuts for putting on our ice cream sundaes. Vanilla ice cream, Bosco syrup, and fresh walnuts.

That’s all I can remember about a kitchen from my childhood.

Your turn.

The idea for this memory challenge was prompted by a recent experience on LinkedIn. This is a long intro but I have to write it out because it has been festering in me.

I have, of late, been trying to track down some people from my life that I have lost touch with. I have found some of them, a few on Facebook, a couple on Myspace, and some on Classmates. I went to LinkedIn to look for one of the best friends I had when I was living in Louisiana, the person that made it possible for me to survive living there. My college study buddy, my racquet ball partner, my confidant about all the craziness in my life, Donna Allard. I knew her husband had a business in the Virginia Beach area and I was hoping that he would be on LinkedIn and I could get back in touch with Donna via Dennis. While I was there (on LinkedIn) I decided to see if I could find a few other people I had lost track of, way back to my before I ever left California days and when I was spending a lot of time at the local horse ranch, the Lazy R. (Incidentally, I found Dennis but no response from Donna.)

Anyway, I remembered one family that we had spent time with both at the ranch and away from it. I typed in the name of the wife. Nothing. I typed in the name of the husband, bingo, there he was. I knew it was him because of the location and the things in the profile. So I clicked on “let’s connect” and added a short note. There had been only good times with this family. Lots of laughter. They were good people, mom, dad, three kids.

I got a notice back from LinkedIn that this person said he didn’t know me.

He. Didn’t. Know. Me?

These people were guests in my home many times. His oldest daughter was my son’s first girlfriend. When I found a turtle in our garage we gave it to their son who wanted a pet but couldn’t yet have a dog. When I had to get rid of my little dog before I left California, she found a home with Dougie too.

And yet.

And yet he says he didn’t know me?

He lied.

So I started to think about lies in childhood. There are three that standout for me.

I cheated at playing cards with my grandfather once. He wasn’t sure, not totally, so I lied. Flat out, bald-faced lie. He knew better. It was days before he even spoke to me and months before he would play cards with me again.

In the 6th grade I had braces. I also had a best friend (or so I thought) named Jan. Walking home from school one day (we lived next door to each other) she hauled off and socked me in the mouth. I don’t remember what exactly we were talking about but it wasn’t one of those conversations where a punch to the face was an appropriate response. My inside lip caught on my braces and ripped open. I ran home with blood streaming out of my mouth. That night my grandmother, my mother and I walked next door and reported what Jan had done. All we wanted was an apology. Jan looked her mother straight in the eye and said, “I didn’t do it.”

Everyone believed her. No one believed me.

The third lie hurts most of all. It was in the 4th grade and we were required to memorize the preamble to the constitution. Then we went to the 6th grade class to “show off” what we had memorized.

I trotted up to the front of the class and recited the words. The teacher thanked me and then asked me my name.

I said, “Susan Webb.”

Her face crinkled in concentration then she smiled. “Are you any relation to Tommy Webb?”

For just a moment, my heart raced with joy. Tommy Webb? Tommy Webb was my father. The father I had never met. The father everyone at home pretended didn’t exist. The father I felt sure held the very answer to who I was or who I was supposed to be.

But I had been trained at home to pretend there was no such person as Tommy Webb. He had been nothing more than a person passing through on his way to somewhere that didn’t include me.

I looked up at the teacher, stomach quavering and said, “No. No relation at all.”

I lied.

Your turn. What do you remember of lies from your childhood?

I’m way overdue for posting and I know I missed last week’s memory challenge. I’m still in adjustment mode. But there’s still a bit of Tuesday left so let’s see what we can come up with for stepping inside the way back machine of our childhoods. I’m still working on the yard and I’m still dealing with one person in the neighborhood who is less than thrilled with what we are doing in the yard. So that makes me think about people in my neighborhoods growing up.

For the first ten years or so I lived in my grandmother’s house. Ginny was an old lady, older than my grandmother, who lived next door. She made these amazing rot-your-teeth Congo bar cookies that were sort of like a chocolate chip cookie bar. I wore out a hole in the privet hedge between our houses running over to see her after school. After she died or moved the Tuey family moved in. They owned the local Chinese restaurant. Mr. and Mrs Tuey were busy all the time. Grandma took care of baby Timmy. Linda was a few year younger than I was but we played together a lot.The grandmother used to wash vegetables for the restaurant and hang them on the clothesline, sheets of cabbage and kale and who knows what else right in-between baby Timmy’s diapers.

On the other side, I only remember the Truitt family. The house had a mother-in-law house behind it but we were never supposed to go into the backyard and bother the person living there. The Truitt’s had a lot of kids. Two older boys who were crazy about baseball. Jan, my age, and at least one little brother. Jan and I were sorta best friends for a while until she punched me in the face for no reason I ever understood and then lied about it. Mrs. Truitt used to make American Beauty Cake for our birthdays. She used to put a penny, a nickle, a dime, and a quarter into the batter. I suppose we should have worried about breaking a tooth but we were always just anxious to see who got what money.

Across the street was Grandma Stotts and Gilbert and Hazel Hills. Hazel had some disability and used crutches all the time. She gave piano lessons. Next to them was the deBenedetti family. Lisa deBenedetti was one of my grandmother’s best friends. They had a hedge of olives around their front yard and the steepest stairs ever to get up to the front door.

There was a house directly across the street from my grandmother. A duplex with close to the front and another one at the end of the long driveway. The house was white. There wasn’t much lawn but there was tree in center of the dirt. I remember Elvira Dorris living there about the time I was in Junior High and we had crushes on Bobby Sherman and David Cassidy.

But that’s not what I remember most about that house.

I remember my mother telling me that  for a few months my birth father lived in that house. That house across the street from my grandmother.

Every time I went into Elvira’s bedroom to play dress-up and let’s get married I would wonder, was this my dad’s old room?

Your turn. Who were the people in your neighborhood?

This week’s memory challenge is inspried by the fact that this week is Halloween. So I thought I’d try to see how many Halloween memories I could bring up to the surface. This one surprised me as I have very few memories about Halloween as a child.

I rememer that I couldn’t wait until the costumes showed up in the stores. They were all made by the same company and came with those one piece costumes and a hard plasic mask that made me sweat. The only costume I actually remember is one of Casper the Friendly Ghost.

I can’t remember any other single costume. Okay, wait, I remember being a clown in a costume that my grandmother made for me with a tall, cone cap.

I can’t remember going trick or treating.

I remember that my mom had a large paper skeleton that she would hang on the front door. And we had this foam like pumpkin that had a single light bulb in the center to make it light up. We’d put it in the front window.

Wow, that’s all I remember about Halloween as a child. Your turn. What memories do you have of Halloween?