So Halloween has come and gone, but on this blog, it’s better to write about it later than never.  For the third year in a row, Polina and I went trick or treating in a nursing home.  It was a different nursing home than the previous two years, but I am grateful for the opportunity.  Start time was 2:30 in the afternoon.  I wasn’t sure P would make it as that is her nap time.  But I really wanted to go.

I’m sure P would have wanted to go (and she did), and I wanted to take her.

Most of the parents of kids that signed up didn’t make it.  No wonder.  Why do people schedule events for preschoolers in the afternoon?  Don’t people realize that some children still nap?

Finding a costume wasn’t difficult.  Polina has been in love with Cinderella for the last six months or so.  In fact, she mentions her several times a day, every day.  She calls fancy dresses “Cinderella dresses” (and people who are dancing are “dancing like Cinderella.”)

She wears a dress every single day and calls herself “Cinderella.”  In fact, she doesn’t want to take her dress or headband off at night.  We try to coax her into a “nighttime Cinderella dress.”  Sometimes we are successful, sometimes we are not.  (At least I’ve convinced her to hold her headband instead of wearing it when she sleeps.)  Her dress and headband is the first thing she puts on in the morning.  We have a 24 hours a day, seven days a week princess on our hands.

So it makes sense that when we picked out her dress, she chose one more ascribed to Snow White, but called herself Cinderella.

Now over the last decade, I’ve gotten to be more emotional.  Emotional in the sense that under the right conditions, typically well-meaning ones, my eyes well up with tears.  I can feel it coming on as one feels a sneeze coming.

And so it was in the nursing home, but not as bad as it was the previous two years.  That’s because there wasn’t a concentrated group of elderly people in a room as we paraded one after another, module to module.  This year, everyone was in one big room.

Nevertheless, I felt the tingling in my body and the heaviness move toward my eye sockets, heaviness that discharged into my eyeballs and blurred my vision.  I held it back because I wasn’t in a Halloween costume.

Somebody told me that old people and young people are made for each other.  And so it was here.  Polina was more than happy to go trick or treating, and the nursing home residents enjoyed the interaction.  I was happy for both of them.  That’s what makes me cry- the moments where something good in the world is made visible.

Here are a few scenes from that day.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On the actual day of Halloween, I worked at my new job at an inpatient facility for mentally ill people.  Peter took Polina trick or treating on “the Ave” in University District.  I’m glad he had the opportunity, but I think we had more fun.

Here’s to next year….