Halloween at your house was the best, Chris. I remember a haunted house with scary noises, and  bowls full of cold wormy things ( spaghetti???) and eyeballs (apparently peeled grapes). And it was sort of a juxtaposition, in my mind, because your house – -like Desiree’s – -always seemed pretty strict. Treats were monitored, TV time was carefully doled out there was always a parent there…… But its funny, now, that this seemed strict. I guess it was strict compared to mine; we never had any parents home, and junk food was a staple.

There was an annual block party on Barry road. The entire neighborhood came. There were steamers, and corn on the cob, and games for all the kids, and the night always ended with some lame-ass fireworks. One year , one of the fireworks sailed over a house, and landed on the roof of your next door neighbors (The Woods????? The name escapes me). It caused a massive fire ( in my kid memory, the house burned to the ground, but I doubt that this is true).

I was over at the Parkers house with my sister Dori, Deb and Laura Parker. We were in the kitchen. Mrs Parker had just bought a set of Corell LivingWare dishes. They were heavily advertised on TV as being unbreakable, so we decided to test it, and smashed  at least half the set on the floor before she walked in.

If you walked down Edgewood Road, then over to Woods Lane, the houses backed up against a stream, a tangle of bushes, and then a wooded hillside. As I remember, Timmy Allen and I would go exploring back there, climbing up into the woods and coming out onto an old delapitated farmhouse. In my memory, the place was creaky and deserted, and once a crazy old farmer appeared out of nowhere and chased us away. But I could have just imagined that.

In Mr. Frantz’s 5th grade class we had a weekly show-and-tell. One time I brought to class a plastic bag filled with the skeleton of a chicken that Tim and I had found up at the farm. For some reason I assumed and anticipated that everyone would be extremely interested in this “find” and the story of how I got it. But the stinky carcass did not go over well, with Mr. Frantz or with my classmates. I had had a crush on Mr. Frantz, so this was quite a let-down. But I was already pretty sure I was on the outs with him, after I got into a fight with Billy Greyson and threw one of those big, hard schoolyard balls at Billy inside the classroom. Billy ducked, the ball smashed an entire table full of test tubes and other science equipment. Unfortunately, at this catastrophic moment, Mr. Frantz walked back into the classroom.

Strangely, Mr. Frantz didn’t get angry. He just sighed and just looked incredibly disappointed at me and told me to clean up the mess. That sense that I had done something irredeemable, and that now my teacher had given up on me, was awful.