The Best Halloween Ever

Today I had my students write journal entries about their best Halloweens ever. I listened to each of my three classes tell me their best stories. A lot of the stories involved shooting people with BB guns or stealing things or scaring little children. I thought, "Hmm. I don't have any good stories like those ones."

Tonight, though, I topped them all. I got my own Best Halloween Ever story.

Tonight I stole a pumpkin. Tonight I drove a getaway car. Tonight I went after Abe Lincoln.



That is the threatening note we wrote to Ex-Keith, the thief of Amy's Abe Lincoln bust. We went through a draft or two before we settled on this text, which we forced Hot Rob to write because he has I'm a Mudering Pedophile penmanship. We adressed the letter to the Abe-holes, and that cracked us up for a good ten minutes. We also found one lonely feather from Abe Lincoln's Mardis Gras Halloween mask, and we taped it to the letter in warning.




Then we got in the car. We'd done our detective work earlier in the day and found the address for Ex-Keith's house. It wasn't a simple task. I have no idea what Big Head's last name is, which makes it impossible to find her in the phone book, and Keith refuses to just tell me their address. We had to rely on other sources. Sneaky sources. Sources that may or may not have gotten married in the last year and have current addresses for each member of their wedding party. She may have ferrets, but Amanda saved the day today.

Armed with the proper address, we drove off to their neighborhood. But we needed to make a stop first. We need a pumpkin on which to skewer our angry note.

"We could go buy one," I suggested.

"Sure," Amy said. "They're probably cheap tonight."

"Or we could steal one," I said.

"I can't be convicted of anything. They won't let me teach ever again," Amy said.

"Me neither," I said.

"I can get convicted," Becky said. "I just make it a rule not to. Let's make Rob."

So we made Rob. We found a discarded-seeming patch of misfit pumpkins near the light pole of a closed business. The next day those pumpkins were going to be thrown out, so we figured we were doing the business a service. Now they would have one less to pick up and loft into a garbage can.

I pulled up to the pumpkins and Rob leaned out, snaked his long arms around one, and pulled it back into the car. "Go! Go! Go!" he yelled.

I was laughing so hard I could barely steer.




There was a terrific wet twhock as Rob thrust the knife we'd brought along into the pumpkin's side.

And then we were pulling into Ex-Keith and Big Head's neighborhood. We had to case the joint—a task that involved us looping several circles around their house and considering where to put the pumpkin as well as who would be in charge of its drop-off.

So there we were: three girls and one boy dressed in all-black, blaring Def Leppard's "Pour Some Sugar on Me" for inspiration, and hoping and praying that this would be a necessary first step in negotiating the return of the cherished bust of Abe Lincoln.

We nominated Becky to be the drop-off girl. She pulled her hood up over her face and tipped the pumpkin into her chest so that the knife would be hidden from the neighbors walking the sidewalk with their children in wagons behind them. I shut off my lights. We all leaned forward. We watched as Becky snuck off toward their house, crept past their shrubs, and lifted the pumpkin up onto the front stoop. Then she came jogging back toward us. Mission complete.




I could continue this story and stretch it on into many more paragraphs—paragraphs that deal with the fact that Keith found the pumpkin almost immediately (as we watched from a concealed drive-by location) then called me and I, because I'm a bit of a giggler and really bad at lying to boys I've seen vomit their body weight in rum and tacos into my apartment's toilet, I sort of caved almost immediately when he grilled me as to the nature of the pumpkin's arrival on his doorstep.

I could continue this story and stretch it on into many more paragraphs—paragraphs that deal with the fact that for the the next hour, we—the people in our camp, and the people in Keith's camp, which I'm assuming to be Keith and Keith alone—took threatening photos with Jason masks or witches hats or Abe Lincoln's bust with ketchup smeared across his snowy white neck and sent them to each other along with text that demanded a neutral rendezvous point for Abe's return.

I could talk about all those things, but it's a long story—possibly the funniest Halloween story I've ever had—and I can't spend too much time here. There are two red suitcases yawned open on my bed, and I'm packing things for my trip to the land of lefse and tater tots.

Updates soon—from or after Minnesota.