It is Halloween, and our neighborhood usually goes all out for trick-or-treating. I am lucky enough to live in a relatively wealthy area, and all the houses are quite large, with impressive decoration budgets.
I work at the convenience store as a way to make money during my senior year of high school. (My parents might have money, but they make sure I know an honest day’s work.) There have been streams of kids coming through in their costumes, some more elaborate than others, with most well-behaved. We’ve got bowls of candy out for all of them, and it’s generally been an amazing night.
Later in the evening, I see a mother and her son come in. The boy looks no older than four or five, and he looks a bit familiar. Suddenly, I look at the mother and it hits me. She’s one of the Latin American cleaners from one of the bigger houses on the street. She often comes into the store, and while her English is simple, she’s always been polite and makes an effort to have pleasant conversations with me.
Her son is wearing what can best be described as a white trash bag with a head hole cut into it. It also looks like the mother has applied some of her lipstick to his face to make it seem like he’s bleeding from his mouth and eyes — scarily effective!
This is what it looks like when a mother has very little income but wants to make sure her little man has as good a night of trick-or-treating as any other kid on the block.
His huge yet little eyes look up at me, and he does a playful growl.
Me: “Oh! Wow! What a scary… uh… ghost?”
Boy: “I’m a bleeding ghost!”
Me: “Of course! I was just so scared I couldn’t say it!”
Boy: “Mama couldn’t finish work early, but I still got some candy! Look!”
I look into his little plastic container, and this boy is ecstatic with a haul that other kids on the street wouldn’t even sniff at. It’s obvious that the combination of the lateness — it’s 9:00 pm, and most of the trick-or-treating takes place between 6:00 and 8:00 — plus the sadly well-known snobbery of the street — lots of WASPs not expecting to see a dark-skinned boy in a trash bag at their door — has resulted in his meager offerings.
The fact that he’s still all smiles both hugs and melts my heart.
Me: “Well, do bleeding ghosts like… candy?”
Boy: *Eyes go wide* “Yeaaaaah!”
I pass the trick-or-treat bowl to him, and he very gently and politely takes one piece of candy; noticeably under the watchful eye of his mother, he takes the smallest and cheapest piece.
I can only assume his mother has noticed what I have noticed, as she says to me in broken English:
Mother: “He needs to save… for the other niños. Not be greedy.”
Well, that just does it. After a night of seeing kids who have everything grabbing at everything, I see this kid who has almost nothing take almost nothing. Almost out of reflex, I tip the whole bowl into his container.
Mother: “Oh, no! Sorry! We’ll give that back!”
Me: “Candy portion size is in proportion to the child’s heart size. He’s got the biggest heart on the block; he gets all the rest of the candy.”
I don’t know if I’ve overstepped, as this was an impulse reaction and not one I would have made if I had stopped to think — parental permission, after all! — but the almost reverent face the boy is giving his now quadrupled-in-size candy haul and the small but deep smile on the mother’s face means I might not have totally screwed up.
Mother: *Tears in her eyes* “Gracias. Gracias.”
And off the mother went with her glorious bleeding ghost.
That was a while ago now, and I have seen the little boy around the neighborhood, always smiling and waving when he sees me and always doing his schoolwork while his mama works hard doing whatever she does.
Thanksgiving dinner neighborhood gossip this year just revealed to me that the little boy just got a scholarship to MIT.
