David asked, “Why is Grandmother putting up all of this scary Halloween stuff.” The quick answer is because I have it: a metal basket with spider handles, toothless witches, orange pumpkins with bells that rattle, skulls, cross bones, owls. I have them. I use them.
“Couldn’t we just put it up in places where I can’t see it?”
I move the witch (who is stylized and not scary at all) from a table, to a chair, and from there to on top of the WII.
Wherever I put it, somehow it is visible in his peripheral vision, he says to me.
“How to desensitize him?”
That is the question that Bonnie asks.
We come up with the idea that buying Halloween candy and showing it to him ahead of time, talking about it, tasting it, passing it from our hands to his and then back, that might work. Bonnie comes out of the store with $20 worth of Halloween candy: Kerr’s Molasses Kisses – the package boasting 47 pieces each of which is 10% molasses. I taste them. This is not the taste I remember. The ones from my childhood were not chewable, nor fresh. This is not really the taste of Halloween.
There is an Anatomy Pop in the package – a large round orange ball of hard candy, a sucker really, on top of the whitened bones of a leg: foot, femur and tibia, now posing as a stick for him to hold.
There is an Halloween (S)Cream Egg in the package; some white, then yellow, then orange Kandy Korn in another package.
I think to myself that I am going to have to go out to the internet and find out why this confection is seen as a Halloween treat.
What looks really good to me is silver foil-wrapped chocolate and caramel balls of candy that look like eye-balls, complete with blood shot veins.
We drive along Lakeshore Drive. David has the candy and Bonnie has told him to scare me with each piece of it. I am cooperating. Then he begins to taste it. We have forgotten that he really doesn’t like sugar.
No to chocolate eye-ball. No to the Kandy Korn, a pass on the orange sucker. Bonnie breaks open the Halloween (S)Cream egg to show him it looks like an egg – yolk and all. But it doesn’t break easily as she had expected it would. It cracks open, the green yolk (now joke to me) sliding all over both of her hands – the ones she wants to have clean to put on the steering wheel to finish our drive home.
At the same time David has tasted the molasses candy kisses and is having an exteme gagging reflex in the back seat and is yelling, “Quick, give me water, anything to take the taste away. Bonnie tries to clean the orange sucker to give to him, but it has fallen on the ground so she washes it off in the can of Coke beside her, him still yelling, “Yes, wash it off on Coke, even if I hate Coke. Coke tastes better than this candy. (Gag. Gag. Gag.) Bonnie is madly washing the sucker in the can of coke so that she can get a different taste to his mouth.
Two days later we are driving along Lakeshore Drive again, just where it enters the Hamlet of Canoe. David says from the back of the car, “I remember this place. This is where I had to stop to throw up over Halloween candy.
Our experiment to desensitise David to Halloween has not worked.
Arta
“Couldn’t we just put it up in places where I can’t see it?”
I move the witch (who is stylized and not scary at all) from a table, to a chair, and from there to on top of the WII.
Wherever I put it, somehow it is visible in his peripheral vision, he says to me.
“How to desensitize him?”
That is the question that Bonnie asks.
We come up with the idea that buying Halloween candy and showing it to him ahead of time, talking about it, tasting it, passing it from our hands to his and then back, that might work. Bonnie comes out of the store with $20 worth of Halloween candy: Kerr’s Molasses Kisses – the package boasting 47 pieces each of which is 10% molasses. I taste them. This is not the taste I remember. The ones from my childhood were not chewable, nor fresh. This is not really the taste of Halloween.
 |
| ... a sucker on a bone ... |
There is an Halloween (S)Cream Egg in the package; some white, then yellow, then orange Kandy Korn in another package.
I think to myself that I am going to have to go out to the internet and find out why this confection is seen as a Halloween treat.
What looks really good to me is silver foil-wrapped chocolate and caramel balls of candy that look like eye-balls, complete with blood shot veins.
We drive along Lakeshore Drive. David has the candy and Bonnie has told him to scare me with each piece of it. I am cooperating. Then he begins to taste it. We have forgotten that he really doesn’t like sugar.
 |
| ... eyeball after being in Grandma's hot pocket for an hour ... |
 |
| ... still disgusting after 50 years of tasting them ... |
Two days later we are driving along Lakeshore Drive again, just where it enters the Hamlet of Canoe. David says from the back of the car, “I remember this place. This is where I had to stop to throw up over Halloween candy.
Our experiment to desensitise David to Halloween has not worked.
Arta
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