Opinion: My El Monte Halloweens (via latimesopinion)
When I was a boy, we didn’t celebrate Halloween. I recall trick-or-treating once, the year I was 5, my mother taking my sister and me to our nana’s house in South El Monte, me in a cowboy costume, my caramel-colored corduroy vest and chaps fresh from my mother’s sewing machine, my sister’s ladybug costume too. We approached a few houses to collect whatever candy we could, and aside from a future Halloween party or two and our elementary school’s costume parade, that was it.
Every Halloween, he would disconnect the doorbell’s wires, tape butcher paper over the side window beside the front door, and block the door with his pick-up truck, the bumper so close to the house that to squeeze ourselves outside we’d have to step through my mother’s gardenias. Because our bedroom windows faced the street, they had to stay dark. My mother, a woman who picked her battles carefully, would turn on the kitchen light, the only other light allowed besides the television.
A more current El Monte is represented by the neighbors to our right: an immigrant Chinese couple, a doctor and a civil engineer, busy professionals who live with the doctor’s parents. The lawn has been left to the weeds, its centerpiece an Asian citrus tree that produces curious, bulb-like fruit. Daily, the doctor’s mother catalogs them with taped-on numbers.
It wasn’t until my wife was expecting our son that we actually stayed home and passed out candy. That first time was the night that I came to understand firsthand that to welcome trick-or-treaters is to offer neighborly generosities, one by one, in bite-size form.
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