P.S.

A little Halloween parable from last night. The doorbell rings, I hurry downstairs to the bag of candy. Open the door: it's a dad and two kids. Little girl, little boy. Boy, about six, in a dog costume I think, gives a lusty yell of "Trick or Treat!" Whereupon I, in my best avuncular, chuckling, front-porch, manner, say to him: "Well! After a Trick or Treat that good, I guess I'd better give you some candy." Which he accepts, but then before he leaves he looks up at me and says seriously: "If someone else comes who doesn't say Trick or Treat as good, you should still give them candy."

He's right.

*

Normally there's no second team behind the Red Sox that captures my heart. But I love San Francisco—I've been going there for years to visit my mom and sister—and I'm glad their lovable baseball team has won the World Series. I remember my disappointment when the Yankees, who won too damn much, beat the Giants in '62. (I was in high school then, in El Paso, Texas, listening on someone's transistor radio.) In '89, they lost four straight to the Oakland A's in the Bay Area series, which featured the earthquake on Oct. 17th, to make it even more ruinous. And then they came so close to beating the Angels in 2002. But not to be. It took this Series, in which they were the prohibitive underdogs, for the long-suffering SF Giants—much cooler and funkier than their New York forebears—to win at last, and they made it look easy against the heavily favored Texas Rangers. So I say the baseball season couldn't have ended better.

*

This blog is due for a change before I start repeating myself as I lap November. I'm not sure exactly how it will change, except that it won't be mostly time pieces henceforth. Enough seasonal, monthly, and holiday musings, I think. An almanac can collect other kinds of things: lore, limericks, happenstances, birds—there have to be birds—daydreams, memories, factual excursions, and sea glass.

And since I won't be trying to keep up with the calendar, unless I want to, these entries will probably be spaced much farther apart. I might have only a few posts in November and December—no advent peek-a-boos this time around—while I look back at what I said here over the past year and maybe try to see if it coheres into some kind of book.

So, to all my readers, present, past, and future, I say "Humpty Dumpty," which you may recall is short for "Have a great fall!"

Yours fondly,

Old Hatch