It’s Quiet.....too quiet
Dad and the boys are going up and down the street Trick or Treating. Business is less brisk than last year. Maybe it is the raw weather or some parents warned their children away from the house with the ‘raw’ scarecrow.

Eddie looks very dapper as the Phantom of the Opera. He’s just 8 and the antique top hat that I salvaged from my late uncle’s attic fits him perfectly. (Large craniums do run in both sides of the family...........luckily(?) most of the kids have large enough bodies to support them.) Chuck is wearing the ‘monk’s’ robe that my mother-in-law stitched together for my husband for a frat party back in 1973. We’ve certainly gotten somebody’s money’s worth out of that old curtain material. (And you can bundle up underneath without compromising the ‘look’) It’s so chilly tonight, Chuck is going to keep the hood up, too.

I must admit to dreading hauling everyone out of bed for Mass tomorrow morning. It will be a rough night with the gang being all jacked up on sugar.........so morning will be grim. There is a Mass at 7:00 pm, but that almost seems after the fact. Well, at least we’ll all look fairly normal. Last year, Eddie wanted to have a really spiky mohawk. I consented to his growing hair longer than usual on the condition that he would have it cut off after Trick or Treat. His fine hair was so uncooperative that Fran finally resorted to using wood glue (after a quip I made, in jest, of course). The outcome was that he needed the closest possible buzz. So he was one tired, scalped looking parishioner on November 1. No one said anything. I’m sure they were trying to be polite........

Our parish has another morning Holy Day Mass for the children of the parish school and whoever else might show up at 9:00. That’s the one we went to last year. Too many kids in one place.........and my kids said they felt like freaks (Eddie’s bald head notwithstanding) because the other several hundred kids were wearing school uniforms and their homeschooling status was ‘obvious.’ So tomorrow we’ll go at 8:00 with the old folks and other public school escapees.