We did not trick or treat on Huasna Road in the 1950s and early 1960s. The problem was that the houses were so far apart that children from the Upper Arroyo Grande Valley, during the Great Depression, desperate for caramel corn, had been found wandering in Pozo with their sad, greasy little paper bags empty except for crushed candy wrappers, rusted “Keep Cool with Coolidge” campaign buttons, or  brown, withered apple cores.

The other problem occurred whenever there was a full moon. If you know the Arroyo Grande area at all, then you know that in moonlight the gnarled, twisted oak trees assume human shapes. Some of them have gaping knotholes in their trunks, just big enough to swallow unwary third-graders. Many children, in the 1930s Branch District, went trick or treating and were never found, not even in Pozo.

So, to avoid the alarming loss of Branch School children and the tax dollars they represented, we had, by the 1950s, a relatively safe Hallowe’en Carnival at Branch, at the two-room schoolhouse–the one with the pink asbestos shingles, which has had no discernible effect (pardon me: hack!) on my personal life as a large person.

The thing was, all the fathers would gather cornstalks for a properly decorative motif at school  (I don’t know where they got them. Branch Dads grew Brussels sprouts and cabbage, neither with strong Hallowe’en associations).  Stiff, dead, dry cornstalks, vaguely resembling skeletons, are very nearly as scary as the carnivorous oak trees that lurked at the edges of Branch Mill Road, menacing, silent, sometimes sibilant in the wind, occasionally belching. Moms would put out carved pumpkins, too, relatively harmless until you, at age seven, got around to watching Disney’s “Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” narrated by Bing Crosby, whom you never trusted again.

I actually went to the carnival as “The Headless Horseman” one Hallowe’en. None of my classmates–not one of the seventy-four–spoke to me until Christmas vacation was over.

Damn you, Bing Crosby.

But we would have “fishing booths” at the carnival, where little kids tossed fishing lines –strings attached to willow branches– over the top of a newsprint-paper enclosed booth (Where did our teachers get the energy to do this stuff? They must have been worn out from the corporal punishment that was as indispensable as the Parts of Speech and State Capitals.) and reel in a small toy or bite-sized Tootsie Rolls, which we imagined to be fish doo, but only momentarily, because it was obvious that they were chocolate, which is the third-grade equivalent of catnip or, for the typical college student, grain alcohol mildly diluted by Hawaiian Punch.

The fishing booths were for Minor Leaguers. The climax of the night, after the Costume Parade–which, we all agreed, was pretty lame–was the eighth grade’s Haunted House. The eighth graders were monstrous and mature people to us. They all seemed to be in their mid-thirties and so with enough life experience to reduce the smaller children to gelatinous puddles of terror in their dark, spooky, cavernous Haunted House, also known as a “classroom.” They laid in enough dry ice, for dramatic vapors, to freeze-dry every airman in the Soviet Air Force–a group we feared, in those Cold War years, only a little less than the eighth-graders.

They had discovered, when third-graders are blindfolded, that cold spaghetti is a splendid facsimile for human brains, and that Jello does a passable job of resembling the Digestive System we had just finished memorizing for Mrs. Kaiser. The third-grade girls loved the Haunted House, which allowed them to emit high-pitched decibel-busting screams, which put most of us off girls altogether until the sixth grade, when they were suddenly taller than us and vastly mysterious.

Those who survived the Haunted House–and there were a few–were allowed to partake of the Hallowe’en Climactic Meal, which consisted of tens of dozens of heavenly cupcakes, in every flavor and color imaginable, except for Brussels Sprout or Cabbage, baked by mothers driven by a still-persistent, albeit rural, late Victorian maternal urge: namely, the more cupcakes you baked, the better the harvest would be for your husband’s farm.

So we ate them.

We ate the chocolate ones, of course, most of all.

We did not sleep for three days. We bounced off the walls of our two-room school, with Mrs. Kaiser using a steel-shod yardstick to herd us (sadly, they did not allow cattle prods, not even in the 1950s) back to our wooden desks with the vestigial inkwells, until we were quiet again, studying our spelling lists, our times tables, and our American history dates. And so we learned: Communism was Evil. Chocolate cupcakes were sublime.

I still  know my American history dates, my times tables, and my state capitals. I am a little weak on my measures–how many pecks in a bushel?–but that might have been a lesson that came the day after Hallowe’en.