The Wait

On a Halloween night that couldn't have been nicer, with zero wind and 63 degrees, there were absolutely no kids out this year. The worst showing in the thirteen years I've lived here in Elk Grove.

Why? I will ask that question to myself here on my blog over the course of the next year, and wonder if somehow we are changing for the worst. The Great Recession? Pig Flu? Game 3 of the World Series? Were these the causes of such a poor turnout?

I remember when I first moved here with my two eight-year old and 18-month old boys, I remember taking them out on our first Halloween and thinking how utterly dead my new "community" was, how no one bothered to open up their houses to trick or treaters. My very first thought, being a white guy growing up in the white suburbs of Carmichael where Halloween was always very well played out, was that maybe all my new neighbors just didn't give a damn about Halloween because maybe it wasn't in their Asian/Black/Mexican American vernacular. I noted how very diverse my neighbors were -- Filipino's next door, a Chinese man and a Korean woman next to them, a Black man and a white woman across from them, a Mexican couple next to them, Punjabi's next to them, and so on. Was Halloween a white-only event? I kid you not, that was my reaction. I thought Halloween was a whites only affair.

I spent most of this beautiful Sunday morning retiring my Halloween props to the attic for another year-long wait, and all morning long I lamented what our Elk Grovian kids won't ever have that I had...good Halloweens with hundreds of kids and pillowcases full of candy and dozens of scary neighborhood displays and a full night of walking and... Elk Grove has always had a shitty Halloween turnout, but this year was exceptionally bad. I now don't attribute it to any cultural differences due to a highly diverse population...I attribute it to the poor respect Elk Grovians have towards their Elk Grovian neighbors, and I will attribute that to our car dependent, low density, private-only, public-be-damned urban design.

When you build communities that are from the start lifeless, that are chopped in half with brutal NASCAR styled collector roads, that are not fit for walking, that have no respect for the public realm -- then you don't ever get children out on Halloween and you don't ever get parents who will even let their children go out on because of the one-in-three pedophiles among us, because of the razor blades in the gummy bears, because of all those speeding assholes. They button themselves up inside their private realms, turn off all the lights, and vegetate while watching Dancing With The Stars...

I should also offer that perhaps my little community, now some 19-years old, is at the stage in the lifecycle of suburbia where kids are simply non-existent -- perhaps we just don't have as many kids because young parents with children want their own new housal unit which means all the children are now a few miles farther out in the newest fifth-tiered suburban ring of Sacramento. This is an idea I should explore further.