"DEAR FERRARI OF NEW ENGLAND..."

Dear Ferrari of New England,

I can't tell you what a thrill it was to receive your invitation for a test drive of the new Ferrari California.  At first, I thought there must be some mistake, but since you've seen fit to send me a reminder, I can only assume you're serious.

It has been my lifelong dream to pilot one of your legendary sports cars, and the California would more than fit the bill.  I yearn to hear the low growl of its 4.3 liter 460 horsepower direct injection V8 engine, to climb through its 7-speed dual clutch gearbox, to accelerate from 0 to 60 in less than 4 seconds, and to cruise the highway at its top speed of 193 mph with the wind whipping through my hair.  Of course, given the traffic on Rte. 1, I'll have to settle for stop-and-go at 15 mph with my hair drooping on my forehead.  No matter.

I feel it's only fair to apprise you of some misgivings.  My eyesight is a tad compromised, and I was only granted my license (daylight restricted) after presenting the Registry with a medical file the size of the Oxford English Dictionary.  Also, the last car I drove with a standard transmission was a 1985 VW Rabbit whose top speed could be seriously challenged by an Amish buggy.  My heart may be a Ferrari, but my driving skills are strictly Ford Pinto and my reaction times best suited for a Schwinn Cruiser.  If you're OK with this, I'm ready to roll.

I don't wish to look the proverbial gift horse in the mouth, but I wonder what I did to deserve this opportunity.  I have never been to your Norwood showroom, nor have I ever made inquiries about purchasing one of your automobiles.  I'm neither wealthy nor the heir to a fortune, and I don't travel in the circles of those who are.  Frankly, I've always thought my chances of owning a Ferrari were about the same as owning a space shuttle.

Not to belabor the point, but I've been unemployed for over a year, and I've read that the California sells for just under $200,000.  Unless it sells for $195,000 under $200,000, it's unlikely I can drum up the cash.  Further, while looking for work, I have survived on the largesse of the Mass. Dept. of Workforce Development.  I can only imagine how the taxpayers of Massachusetts might feel about my wheeling around town in a nicer car than the Governor's.

But obviously you know all this, or you would have never courted me in the first place.  And unless you have a sudden change of heart, I'll be down on the Automile as quickly as my ten-year-old Camry will get me there.

Gratefully yours,

Jeff Brawer.

THE HUNK OF TIN

It was a 1960 Bonneville coupe, robin's-egg blue where it wasn't rusted and only slightly bigger than the QE2.  You could ram it into a telephone pole at sixty and not feel a thing for fifteen minutes.  It had a 389 V8 engine, a Hydra-Matic transmission, and upholstery of the finest Corinthian plastic.  The power steering was so sensitive that the slightest adjustment would send you careening over three lanes of traffic, and the brakes needed only the lightest tap to throw you into the windshield and bring the car to a raucous halt.  There were no seatbelts.  The radio was strictly AM and owed its reception to a bent wire hanger stuck in the hood.

It cost seventy-five dollars and was ugly as sin.  I loved it.

It had no speedometer needle, so I painted one on at sixty-five.  I figured if I were ever pulled over, I could show it to the cop to prove I hadn't been speeding.  It only occurred to me later that once the car stopped, the speedometer should read zero.  This didn't augur well for my future as an engineering student.

I dubbed it the "Hunk of Tin" after a popular car commercial of the late '60s in which two stereotypical Mexicans in serapes and sombreros made fun of a gringo asking directions to Baja.  "You loco?  You goin' to drive thees hunk of teen through de Baja? Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!"  The gringo survived, and I had the perfect name for my car.

In the summer of '67, just before my freshman year of college, I used the Hunk to go back and forth to my job.  I worked at my father's textile plant, something I had done off and on for several years.  In order to show there was no preferential treatment for his children, my father gave my brother and me the lowliest jobs at the lowest possible pay.  My specialty was stripping bobbins, pulling the last bits of tangled thread off the spools that were placed in shuttles on the looms.  When the bobbins were almost empty, they would be dumped into large wood bins where they formed an enormous multicolored Gordian knot.  It was my job to disentangle this mess and remove the empty bobbins for reuse, a process that caused extreme strain on the back and multiple splinters under the fingernails.  My brother had the more glamorous job of crawling under the looms and, with oil dripping in his face, vacuuming lint off the machinery.

But the Hunk's raison d'etre wasn't the daily commute nor its true home the backstreets of Holyoke.  Like its owner, it lived and breathed on the Mass. Turnpike. 

I had a long history with the Pike.  I first traveled the road a month after it opened in 1957 to see an eye doctor in Boston.  During my childhood, I rode the Pike west to summer camp and east to the Cape.  By the time I could drive and long before James Taylor immortalized it, Interstate 90 from Stockbridge to Boston was embedded in my genome.

Every weekend that summer, the Hunk and I would traverse the state in search of knowledge, thrills, and love.  With a death grip on the huge blue steering wheel and shrieking the lyrics to Sgt. Pepper over the noise of the wind, I would be jumping in anticipation of the next adventure or savoring the one I'd just had.

Most of the knowledge came in the form of cultural enlightenment and involved bombing around Boston with my friend, Dave.  Club 47 in Harvard Square was in its final years but still drew top talent.  At that tiny but fabled venue, I heard Patrick Sky, Tom Rush, Spider John Koerner, Mose Allison, Buddy Guy, and other folk, jazz, and blues legends of the day.  At the Brattle Theater, I saw Humphrey Bogart and Marx Brothers movies on the big screen for the first time.  It's one thing to watch Casablanca on a small TV and another to sing the Marseillaise at the top of your lungs with two hundred other film buffs in proud defiance of Major Strasser.  It was as close to fighting the Nazis as a post-WW II kid could get.

For thrills, I took my first baby steps into intoxication and altered consciousness.  One night when my parents were out, Dave and I raided my father's supply of Colt 45 and learned first-hand the joys of oblivion and the price you pay for it, the freedom from inhibition and the enslavement to the toilet.  I also had my first taste of weed that summer, smoking a few bowls with a certain family member who shall remain nameless to protect the not-so-innocent.  As you might expect, the colors were vivid,  the music transcendent, the food incomparably delicious, and the revelations earth-shattering.  And like all novices, I learned two hours later that the colors were ordinary, the food unexceptional, and the revelations nutty.  Only the music remained profound.

As for love, it may be a stretch to call my night at the Berkshire Theatre Festival romantic.  It was more an exercise in teenage hormonal madness, and she was to blame.  "She" was a stunning blond girl who sat next to me in the first row of the balcony during The Skin of our Teeth with Anne Bancroft.  In the middle of the first act, she started pressing her leg against mine - the girl, not Anne Bancroft.  At first, I thought it was an accident, but when I moved my leg slightly, she moved hers right back.  Since the play was in progress and her parents were sitting on her other side, my options were limited to sweating profusely.  This agonizing flirtation went on for three acts and two curtain calls, and I left the theater bent over, clutching my program judiciously.  During the drive home, a friend explained what happened on stage while I was in the silent and unfulfilled throes of passion.

The Hunk survived into the following summer, but it had lost its mystique and only provided transportation in the geographical sense.  I had spent the year in Boston and had acquired that strange combination of arrogant sophistication and disdain which typifies the newly-emancipated college student.  I was a seasoned drinker and smoker and had won and lost my first girlfriend.  And jaded fool that I was, I cared less about new experiences than the pleasurable repetition of the ones I knew.  The Hunk was just a car and a rapidly deteriorating one at that.

It's only in the reveries of my later years that it returns as the magic carpet of my youth.

I WAS A GRAMMAR SCHOOL KLEPTO

It's hard to know why a man turns to a life of crime.  A broken family?  Grinding poverty?  Hanging out with the wrong crowd?  Or maybe he's just a rotten seed, destined from birth to be a blight on humanity.

I have no excuse.  My family was stable and loving, we were solidly middle class, and my friends were harmless dorks.  The biggest hardship of my youth was hay fever.  The mean streets of Arnold Rothstein, Meyer Lansky, and Murder Incorporated were a world away from my idyllic New England home.  So I must have been born bad; nothing else can explain the reign of terror I visited on my second grade class.

It started innocently enough.  In the spring of 1957, my class set up a beautiful miniature farm.  It had a farmhouse, barn, and silo made from construction paper, and a large population of plastic poultry and livestock.  Within a few days, that population started to dwindle.

Why cattle rustling?  Because like most fledgling criminals, I was burdened with a first-class set of model trains.  My layout included a farm which was not nearly as well stocked as the one at school.  I figured that I would borrow a couple of cows and return them the next day.  Even though I forgot to bring them back, nobody seemed to notice.  That afternoon, I lifted three chickens and a goat.  I just lingered a while before heading out to recess, and when the classroom was empty, I stuffed them in my pocket.  As before, there were no repercussions.  Even my parents seemed oblivious to my farm's sudden productivity and my remarkable success at animal husbandry.

I grew headier with each heist.  I soon left the farm behind and started moving small school supplies - rulers, scissors, and the like.  But even the thrill of unlimited paste wasn't enough.  I got greedy.

As part of a science unit on weather, our teacher, Mrs. Pierce, constructed a milk carton anemometer.  We took it outside one windy day, and she timed the blade rotations with a gleaming silver stopwatch.  It was love at first sight.  I had to have it.

I spent that night in feverish preparation, devising a scheme so diabolical that Sherlock Holmes himself would be baffled.  At exactly 2:55 the next afternoon, as school was letting out, I asked Mrs. Pierce if I could see the watch.  When she left the room for a moment, I bolted.

Ingenious, no?

For the next few hours, I went into a timing frenzy.  How far could I run in a minute?  How long could I hold my breath?  What I should have been timing was how long before the jig was up, because soon after, I dropped the watch on the sidewalk and broke the crystal.  I could no longer tell Mrs. Pierce that I simply forgot to give her back the watch before I left school - the linchpin of my scam.  Despite this setback, I was determined not to crack, to play it cool as long as I could.

Which turned out to be not that long.  When my father came home from work, he found me banging my head against the side of our porch.  He asked what I was doing, and I said, "Trying to kill myself."  Keen observer of human nature that he was, he got suspicious.

After a call from the school, he had the facts but decided to sweat it out of me anyway.  When my father got seriously angry, he would speak softly and slowly, but with menacing intensity and volatile sarcasm.  He also possessed an extremely potent version of the hairy eyeball which could extract a confession faster than the Spanish Inquisition.

"I understand you got a stopwatch at school today."

Deny everything.

"A stopwatch?  What stopwatch?"

"How about the broken one we found in your jacket."

Oops.

"Where did you get it?"

"My teacher gave it to me."

That was true.

"Why did she give it to you?"

Uh oh.

"She gave it to me for being a good student."

Even at seven, I knew I was in it deep.

"Really?"

"Yeah."

Deeper and deeper.

"Well, we'll just have to call her up and thank her for giving you such a wonderful gift."

He reached for the phone.  I folded like an origami crane.

"Wait a minute!  Let's talk."

Game.  Set.  Match.

Justice followed swiftly.  I received a thorough spanking, lost a few month's allowance to pay for the watch, and was forced to apologize to Mrs. Pierce.  I'm convinced that only part of the punishment was for the theft; the rest was for the dimwitted way I'd committed it.  My father, who'd led a fairly wild youth on the streets of Paterson, NJ, was likely more embarrassed by my ineptitude than my criminality.

And so with chastened heart and sore behind, my career as an evil mastermind came to an end.

NOW THAT YOU'VE LOST WEIGHT, WHO ARE YOU?

Congratulations!  You've made it!  There is no more glorious moment in life than getting on a scale after months of dieting and seeing your target weight in the window.  It's winning the Nobel Prize and heavyweight crown on the same day the Sox take the Series and Juliette Binoche invites you to bed (assuming you're a prizefighting physicist from Boston who's smitten with Juliette Binoche.)  Now that you've reached the pinnacle, what's next?

Start by soaking up some adoration - you've earned it.  Let words of tribute and laudatory speeches fill your head until it bursts from the pressure.  Glory in the discomfort of naysaying colleagues who once ridiculed your efforts and now betray their hypocrisy with oily praise.  Treat compliments from overweight friends with a shrug and assure them that they could do the same if they wanted to.  It's utter malarkey, but it provides them with a reprieve and earns you a merit badge in humility.

Given your accomplishment, you are allowed to do some bragging without tarnishing your halo.  This can be subtle and non-verbal, such as wearing tight clothes to your final Weight Watchers meeting, or more overt:

"Really, Officer, I was doing forty-five in a school zone?  Because that's how much weight I've lost."

Yes, revel in this moment because it's over in a heartbeat, and once it's gone, it ain't comin' back.

People will quickly accommodate themselves to the new slimmer you.  Their praise will fade, and as long as you stay at your current weight, it will no longer be discussed.  But there will always be an undercurrent of jealousy and a lethal lode of suppressed schadenfreude waiting to erupt the minute your self-discipline shrinks and your waist expands

After all, you're expected to keep the weight off.  All the effort you put into reaching your new size is now required just to keep you there.  The term used by the diet community is "maintenance," which is like referring to Marine boot camp as an invigorating spa treatment.  Maintenance is going to the dentist twice a year and changing the oil in your Camry.  What's demanded of you is a life of constant denial and perpetual vigilance, all without the benefit of friendly encouragement or positive reinforcement.  You're already trim; nobody cares.

Further, you've lost the support of your diet plan, that rigidly defined program that got you here, and you've reawakened those demons who were previously soothed by your overeating.  The temptations of the world didn't disappear because you were losing weight and righteously avoiding them.  Burger King flourishes, potato chips are as popular as ever, and Hostess hasn't gone out of business.  That sound you hear?  It's the footsteps of your old weight hunting you down.  Don't look back.

In short time, the joy of the new you is replaced by the fear of becoming the old you, and it's not idle paranoia.  You should be very afraid; the statistical rate of recidivism among dieters is somewhere near 90%.  And even if you beat the odds and remain steadfast, your anxieties will quickly spread from the physical to the existential.  For once the blush is off the rose, it's not so easy to figure out who the rose is. 

At the same time you were losing part of yourself, you were also losing part of your self.  If you were heavy for an extended period of time, it's likely that your personality and behavior were informed by your shape.  Maybe you were defensive or withdrawn in response to your weight, or you possessed an oversized persona to match your oversized bulk - the Chris Farley Syndrome.  As you became thinner, your need for these character traits also diminished, confusing your emotions and blurring your identity.  By the end of your diet, you might not know who you are anymore.

An old friend who lost over a hundred pounds a few years back, said of his transformation:

"Everything changes along with your shape, how you move, sit, get in and out of a car, and ultimately how you perceive yourself.  You're a different person, but that person is an alien, someone you're not totally comfortable with."

He eventually regained the weight.

If you're unsure of who you are, your friends and family are even more bewildered and often resentful.  You've changed the comforting role you played in their lives and taken away whatever superiority they felt because of your former girth.  If you were boisterous before, they miss your constant antics and bonhomie.  If you were introverted, they now dislike your good humor and optimism.  They've remained the same; who are you to rattle their world by becoming someone else, even if you don't know who that someone is?

Congratulations.  You've made it.

IN HONOR OF MY FATHER-IN-LAW ON VETERANS DAY

It's been just over two years since my father-in-law, Morey Hunter, passed away at the age of ninety.  During the thirty-five years that I knew him, he never once spoke voluntarily about his service during World War II.

For Morey not to speak about a subject was unusual.  He was a garrulous and highly opinionated man, operatic in tone and sentimental by nature.  Where family and close friends were concerned, he didn't just wear his heart on his sleeve, he gave it to you wholesale.  He was a tireless worker, a dapper dresser, a fastidious cleaner, and a rabid Yankees fan which led to some truly hilarious banter with his New England transplant daughter.  He loved to argue, waxing both poetic and crude about politics, movies, sports, and the quality of the fruit at various local markets about which he was more fanatic than he was about the Yankees.  But about the war, he would say almost nothing.

Because of his reticence, the details of his service are sketchy. He was sent overseas in 1944 as a radar specialist with an artillery battalion.  He saw service in North Africa, Italy, France, and Germany where, being a natural if untutored linguist, he became a German translator despite only knowing Yiddish.  He arrived in Dachau the day after the camp was liberated.

If pressed, he would tell us some of the more humorous incidents that befell him in Europe - the time his rifle split during guard duty in a rain storm or the time his precious supply of canned tuna from home was destroyed by German artillery.  But even in these stories, there was always an undercurrent of the fear and brutality he'd experienced, the sense of isolation he'd felt as a young man far from family and home and in constant peril.

Only twice did I fully see the psychological scars the war had left on him.  The first was in the summer of 1999 during a family vacation in Italy.  We were driving from Tuscany down to Naples, the car ringing with laughter over some forgotten travel mishap, when Morey suddenly became quiet and withdrawn.  I asked him if he was okay, and he simply said that he'd been there before.  I looked up at an approaching road sign:  Monte Cassino.  He had been present at one of the bloodiest campaigns of the war.

The second time was in the spring of 2003 when Morey received a cryptic phone call from France to his Florida home.  Given the bad connection and his partial deafness, he couldn't understand much of what was being said but managed to get enough information for me to follow up.  The call was from a French family, the Merciers, who had befriended him and a GI buddy while they were stationed in Épinal after the liberation of France.  The father, Marcel, was a young boy at the time but had very clear recollections of the time he spent with the Americans.  In broken English, he wrote Morey the following:

"The last time I saw [you] was some weeks before Christmas and [you] should have come to dinner but [your] unit moved some days before...and we were very sad."

"Please [know] the friends who are dead for the France are not dead for nothing.  French people love their American friends...I wish to your family a good health and I address you my good and faithful memory."

When we asked Morey what he would write in return, he looked at us sadly and said, "I can't.  You write him back."  We were stunned and pressed the issue.  This family had gone through a tremendous effort to make contact; how could he not reply personally?  He got mad and told us again that he couldn't and wouldn't.  The pain of remembering was clearly much deeper than we imagined.  We never brought up the subject again.

Morey was among the fortunate who returned from the war.  He married, raised a family, prospered in business, and lived a full, rich life.  But it would be thoughtless of me not to remember him today for his service to this country and for the sacrifices he and countless others made for the freedom of the world.

GOOD BYE MR. CHIPS AND GOOD RIDDANCE

At the tender age of fourteen, I abandoned hearth, home, tube, and fridge and went off to boarding school for three years.  When I arrived at Williston Academy in the fall of 1964, I was a chubby lad of 160 lbs., but after three months, I was twenty pounds lighter and three inches taller.  The inches were a consequence of puberty; the pounds were victims of circumstance.

Before I wallow in the Dickensian details, it's only fair to note the benefits I received at Williston.  I was given a solid general education with a strong emphasis on writing and literature.  With no TV available, I discovered that there just might be something to this book-reading thing.  I also developed a keen interest of theater since the Drama Club was one of the few places a sports-challenged dweeb could meet girls.

For Williston, like most New England prep schools of that era, was strictly single gender.  Apart from plays, the only contact we had with women came during the occasional Saturday night dance.  These two-hour affairs were more tightly chaperoned than Sicilian mob trials and afforded all the intimacy of a subway platform at rush hour.  Your escorts were chosen by the sole criterion of height, and more often than not, this was bungled.  Many was the night I found myself dancing cheek-to-sternum with some mortified amazon from our sister school.  Prep school may have sharpened my mental skills, but socially, I was one evolutionary step shy of Neanderthal.  As a result, I spent most of my first semester at college gawking at female classmates like a randy village idiot.

The lack of women was only one of many rigors at Williston.  Boarding schools in the 60's came fully equipped with an exhausting and rigidly maintained schedule of studies, athletics, and vicious hazings.  There were daily room inspections, a mandatory dress code, and a dearth of fellow Jews.  Because the school was founded by a dour Congregationalist minister, attending chapel was mandatory six days a week.  To this day, I'm one of the select few of my tribe who knows the words to "Onward Christian Soldiers."

But those hardships were like a week on the Riviera compared to what passed for food at Williston, and I use the word "food" in the broadest possible sense allowed by the English language.

Meals were taken in a large communal dining hall tastefully decorated in Early American Penitentiary.  It could have easily been mistaken for Leavenworth except that the inmates wore blazers and sported more pimples than tattoos.  The room held fifty long rectangular tables, each seating nine students and one faculty member.  Food and drink were served in bulk from indestructible stainless steel platters and pitchers - clearly a time before Martha Stewart had any influence on "institutional" decor.

Like classes, meals at Williston were for instruction, not pleasure.  Apart from providing basic sustenance (dubious at best), the partaking of food was seen as a means to manners, civility, and restraint.  Since the actual food was merely an adjunct to these lessons, it was treated with the same joyless severity as logarithms and gerunds.

However fresh and savory provisions may have been when they arrived at the Williston kitchen, they were soon taken to task by the school's culinary Marine Corps.  Under the stern leadership of head chef Albert Boudreau, the staff didn't so much prepare food as beat it into submission.  Chicken was shaken down and bullied by these gastronomic goons until nothing remained but grease and bones.  Crisp string beans were strong-armed into limp, colorless straw, and potatoes were clubbed into mush right out of the sack.   Serving this stuff wasn't merely an affront to the palette; it was a violation of the Geneva Convention. 

Our biweekly "treat" of roast beef was cooked so far beyond well done that science has yet to find a name for it.  It's as if the recipe came from The Solar Core Cook Book:  "Place meat in preheated oven at 15,000,000° F and roast until nuclei are sufficiently fused."  The remains were then stored in steam chambers until the texture became indistinguishable from an all-weather radial.  Once it was certain no vestige of flavor remained, the meat was cut into thin grayish-white slices and stacked on cold metal trays.  It was served with a brown sludge-like gravy consisting of equal parts beef drippings, butter, flour, flour, flour, flour, and flour.

Another feature of the Williston dining experience was the requirement to wait tables for a three-meal rotation every nine days.  Apparently, it wasn't enough to be nauseated by the culinary horrors tableside, you had to witness first hand how meat and produce could be cruelly transformed into hardened criminal fare.  You also learned the brutal lessons of natural selection as you and forty-nine other crazed students fought with Darwinian fierceness for the clean dishes and silverware needed to reset the tables before you were late for class.

In such a place at such a time, weight loss wasn't a sign of deprivation, but a blessing.

OF GHOULS AND MR. GOODBARS

Autumn has arrived, and with it, crisp apples, fresh cider, and clogged gutters.  New Englanders are nailing Indian corn to their doors while the sound of metal rakes on sidewalks drives psychopaths to serial murder.  With winter on the way, squirrels scurry about, collecting acorns and storing them in secret caches.  For they know instinctively that in a few short months, these precious morsels can be sold on the black market at predatory prices.

The transformation of summer to fall has been a literary inspiration through the ages.  It is the basis for Aesop's best-known fable, "The Ant and The Grasshopper," which extols the virtues of hard work and decries indolence.  Nowadays, of course, the industrious ant would be laid off his job of thirty years and end up an alcoholic, while the lazy grasshopper would stash the take from his Ponzi scheme in an offshore account and flee the country before the idiots at the SEC catch on.

The joys of the season are many, warming the heart and delighting the eye.  Some revel in the excitement of old college football rivalries.  Others flock to harvest balls or take hayrides on moonlit nights.  For me, it's the sublime weather that puts a smile on my face, the chill, bracing air which prevents people who weigh more than lawn tractors from parading around in sleeveless Celtics jerseys.

But the true highlight of autumn is that time in late October when the wind turns bitter, and gloom settles over the city like a burial shroud.  No, I'm not talking about the Red Sox being eliminated from the playoffs, but Halloween, Christian holy day, commercialized celebration of the spooky, and pagan festival of high blood glucose levels.

Halloween is distinguished by the confluence of two powerful and mysterious forces - the supernatural and candy.  What is this cosmic connection, and why, on this one day of the year, does it cause a heightened awareness of the otherworldly as well as rampant tooth decay?

Few people know this, but the spirit world is crazy about candy.  Parapsychologists now theorize that ghosts are actually the souls of the dead who refuse to leave for higher realms because Junior Mints aren't available.  They wander the earth ceaselessly, craving the sweet tastes and gooey textures they adored in life but can no longer experience in death.  Dickens was wrong.  Ghosts aren't tormented by good deeds not done, but Snickers not eaten.

Once a year on All Hallows Eve, the spirit world attains the power to influence the living.  After invading the minds and bodies of well-meaning homeowners, these pudgy phantoms from beyond ply eager youngsters with enough refined sugar to make a black forest cake the size of the actual Black Forest.  The children then grow up to be candy-addicted adults, and after their passing, new soldiers in this portly legion of darkness.  And what weapons have we mere mortals to combat this evil?  Toilet paper, shaving cream, and eggs.

There are those who believe that jack-o'lanterns provide some protection.  Right, because nothing terrifies disembodied beings who exist beyond time and space like a rotting squash with a goofy smile.  Unless it's made of

chocolate, they couldn't care less.

There are, however, certain precautions which vigilant parents can take to minimize the dangers and insure that the holiday affords their children a bit of carefree fun instead of an eternity of despair.

• Limit the amount of sweets your kid can collect.  Don't let them go trick-or-treating with military issue duffel bags.

• Don't let them eat gummy candy with chocolate candy. Apart from providing a windfall for your dentist, this combination causes a heartburn that can bring down a bull moose.           

• Once they've finished their treats, tether them securely to prevent interference with incoming air traffic.

While I do counsel caution and moderation, I despise those health nuts who drop toothbrushes into treat bags instead of candy.  Back off, killjoys.  This is the one night a year when adults have no say in what children stick in their mouths and regurgitate three hours later.  Happy Halloween, everybody!