Assembling the Environment Wednesday post yesterday got me thinking about a tale from the days when I lived in Oakland. I lived in a strange little neighborhood which basically consisted of a single block of really nice homes in the midst of a pretty sketchy neighborhood, which was definitely interesting. Many people were afraid to visit me. (Although that might have been because of my psychotic landlord, who ended up assaulting me, but that’s a story for another time.)

At any rate, when Halloween rolled around, I got the bright idea of making individual pumpkin tarts. I thought it would be kind of a cool thing to hand out to trick or treaters, and all Halloween themed, with the pumpkin. I labored in the kitchen for hours producing the tart shells and pumpkin filling, and decorating the tarts with various painstaking ornaments, like whipped cream puffs in the shape of ghosts, and I laid the tarts out on big trays.

Our house was down a steep path from the road, and the kitchen windows were the first thing that people encountered when they got to the house. So, we opened the windows in order to hand out treats that way, rather than forcing people to go round to the front door. I thought it was rather clever, myself.

But I had forgotten that I lived in Oakland, not a small, friendly town where one could hand out home made treats to people who were trick or treating. So people would traipse all the way down the path, and I would lean out the window with the tray, and one of two things would happen:

1. The parent would glare at me, say “no, Johnny,” and march back up the path.

2. The parent would glare at me and take a tart off the tray with the clear intention of throwing it out later.

I couldn’t figure it out. I mean I literally could not rationalize why handing out pumpkin tarts to children on Halloween would be a problem. I thought it would be a neat variant on the sugary, processed treats kids usually got, and that most people would be into it.

Later, a few of my friends came over to get ready for a party, and found me slumped at the kitchen table with a huge tray mostly filled with pumpkin tarts. I explained the situation, and one of my friends, in turn, gently explained why you can’t hand out homemade food on Halloween, while the others hoovered up the remaining tarts with evident delight.

It was the first of many crushing lessons in urban life for me.