Coldest robot.

Eleven years ago we had a snowstorm here two days before Halloween, which was also on a Monday that year. Snow on Halloween may be de rigueur in places like North Dakota and Saskatchewan, but not in the southern tier of New York. It was not a blizzard, as I recall, just heavy, slippery snow, and it caught everyone by surprise. Weekend workers, plow guys, schools that had to remain closed Monday, even trees that had not yet dropped their leaves (you didn't want all those limbs, didja, tree?). All the local towns and villages barred trick-or-treating, although I seem to recall roving bands trying their luck the following Friday. Those that did made out well. The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.

A friend had posted pictures of the Great Pumpkin Snowstorm of '11, and it reminded me of another Halloween quite a few years earlier than that. 

I don't remember all the costumes I wore over the years of trick-or-treating; there was the Superman costume I wore to pieces after the fact, the inevitable bindlestiff getup, and probably a vampire or pirate in there. Most are forgotten. But I firmly remember the year I got the much-envied robot costume by Ben Cooper. In addition to being pretty skull-like for some reason, it had a battery pack that lit up a little lightbulb in the forehead. All the high tech of the worst third-grade science project, but I could not wait to go out and impress everyone with my costume.

There was a problem. And this problem is something else that I'm sure is familiar to children of North Dakota and Saskatchewan. That day was the coldest Halloween I'd ever endured -- possibly the coldest I have ever endured -- and there was no way Mom was letting me go schnorring for candy without my parka. 

A robot in a parka? THAT'S CRAZY TALK! Robots are made of steel! They don't wear parkas! I think we can all agree on one thing, and that's that a robot, even one that for some reason was packaged by Ben Cooper as if wearing a spacesuit, can endure common temperatures on Earth. No parkas needed! ROBOTS DO NOT WEAR PARKAS!

Well, you'd better believe this one did. It was that or stay home.

I guess it was not as embarrassing as I probably expected. I'm sure that around the neighborhood we had Supermen wearing parkas, ghosts wearing parkas, skeletons wearing parkas, ballerinas whose long coats covered their entire costume, vampires whose mothers made them wear scarves and woolly hats. It was freaking cold. Any sane person would not have been wandering around, but we were kids looking for free candy without adult supervision, so, yeah. 

That was close to my final real trick-or-treat experience. Those Ben Cooper costumes would last for one night, and little more; even if I had not outgrown it by the following year, or associated it with bitter disappointment, I would not have worn it again. It makes an amusing story now, though.

I laugh at the experience, as I do all those Halloween experiences. You usually forget the candy itself as the years go on, but you remember the things that happened. I hope you have some good memories of Halloween to smile at today. And may your trees be free of snow and TP.