A smashed pumpkin no match for a mom's fury

On the Halloween of my fifth year, after I had spent twilight trick or treating down Nathan Street, I was at home handing out candy with mom to the older kids who stayed out later.

Rowdy boys crowded onto our stoop and right before our astonished eyes stomped our shining jack-o’-lantern to smithereens. They ran away laughing.

I was shocked. I had no experience dealing with this kind of cruelty. I didn’t know then that bad things happen in life. I was too young to fathom that this might be some awkward teen’s idea of a Halloween trick.

I remember feeling flabbergasted at first — so surprised and overwhelmed that I simply couldn’t appropriate what had happened. Why would those boys do this dastardly thing? Why would they hurt me on purpose? (That it was not about me was also beyond my comprehension.)

After these pumpkin-squashers fled, I felt safe enough to feel other emotions. I was crushed, anguished, terrorized. These feelings gave way to back and forth flashes of anger and sobbing sadness.

Believe it or not, I can still feel the sharp twang of those long-ago feelings.

Some counselors might call this kind of memory an episode of “remembered evil.” To the degree that we remember traumatic events and they still trigger those old feelings, we are transported immediately back. For a disorienting, flash-second, we are momentarily seized by that scary moment and dark place.

Our heart clunks in our chest.

These are the feelings that overwhelm us when we remember the news of the Martin Luther King Jr. assassination, or when a sound or smell transports us back into that half-flooded combat foxhole, or one of hundreds of other ugly memories that grab our throats and plunge us into darkness.

I got my pumpkin trampled by teenagers when I was 5.

Big deal.

Don’t feel sorry for me.

Babe Ruth candy bars that I had collected earlier that night from our kind neighbors helped me get over it. Nevertheless, that memory sometimes sneaks up on my stoop and clobbers me. I’m not that kid anymore, I tell myself. And things turned out fine. But I still need a second.

This Halloween brought no such ugliness to our home, at least not to me.

We bought plenty of primo chocolate candy to give to trick or treaters. Though we didn’t have a pumpkin on our front stoop for smart-aleck kids to smash, we turned on the porch light and opened the wooden front door.

We were dog-sitting our grand dog, Indy, who was not used to gentle knocking on the glass storm door. Indy tore through the house every time she heard this terrible alarm and barked her fiercest warning.

I’d grab her collar each time and yank her back from the door. In the glass I saw her frothing reflection, teeth barred, lips snarled.

Rachel grabbed the bag of candy and greeted the kids. Partly because Indy seemed so lethal, and partly because Rachel is so generous, my wife doled out generous helpings of Butterfingers, tiny boxes of Milk Duds, and peanut M&Ms. These brave cowboys and ballerinas deserved it.

One ghoul stood erect on our steps when confronted by Indy’s barking. He dropped his bloody, plastic knife. He didn’t run, but when Rachel opened the door and greeted him with her friendly voice, he didn’t speak, either.

Indy barked and barked. I said sit girl, sit.

Rachel held out the bag of candy for this child to take a handful. But this frozen apparition could not lift his or her arms. Rachel took the ghoul’s bag and shook some candy into it.

When she gently returned his weapon, he backed down the steps and scurried into the dark for the safety of parents awaiting him in the street.

Satisfied that she had saved the day (again), Indy trotted back to her repose on the couch to watch the University of Georgia demolish the Florida Gators.

I intimated that things turned out fine on the Halloween night when I was 5.

Besides having a lot of candy bars to count that night, which eased my sorrow, this also happened:

My mom stormed out our front door, flew down the front steps, and chased those pumpkin-stompers down the block. They stopped laughing when my mom put on the speed.

I was in kindergarten.

Senseless violence and cruelty had found us on Halloween.

But I saw my mom run.

I heard my mom roar.