100 bottles of beer on the, er…street

It’s over, done, fini, complete…and any other foreign-sounding words that are meant to provide a sense of accomplishment regarding Halloween and trick or treat. Not that the whole event was bad, but it’s just such a build-up to something—like Christmas—that afterward leaves you feeling a bit like, “Was that it?”  And I think it’s doubly bad when said build-up happens in the middle of the week and you have to turn around go back to work the next day. Blah!

But in any event, last night was fun. We went to my oldest son’s best friend’s house for a party and then they TorTed for a while before making it over to the grandparent’s house who were overly and unusually chatty until finally my son gave us an “out” by exclaiming, “I want to go to my home.” Good boy!

And once again, we had absolutely zero Trick-or-Treators at our house last night. An examination as to why this is yields a couple of possibilities:

1. Parents are too scared to let their little ones wander down our hilly driveway for fear of them getting tangled up in their sheet-costumes and tumbling down the pavement and crashing into my garage door.
2. We are near the end of the neighborhood in a side-street where the housing density is not terribly great. From a parental standpoint, I can understand the desire to maximize one’s TorTing time by hitting the thoroughfare and avoiding the mildly populated side streets.

However, one thing struck me last night that I have been noticing with greater frequency of late, and that is that the life I lead is vastly different from the lives other families (and men in particular) lead. Here are a couple of “for instances.”

At this week’s golf tournament, several men were discussing the “over and under” and “the spread” regarding this weekend’s upcoming NFL games. It occurred to me that I had absolutely NO idea what they were talking about (well, I vaguely know) and that I was in the distinct minority here.

Secondly, last night as we TorTed around my son’s friend’s neighborhood, I noticed that every dad on the street, and some mothers, were carrying around a beer in their hand. And in one case of “oh man, where’s my camera?” we spotted a mother pushing a stroller with one hand and dragging a cooler full of beer behind her with the other. And these aren’t “white trash” people either. These are white-bread, successful white-collar professionals. Even the father of the boy my son was visiting put his son and my son in a wagon to pull them around the neighborhood, and then all around them in the empty wagon space he placed approximately 8 or 9 beers. WTH? I mean, we only planned on being out for 45 minutes. How many beers does a guy need?

And like I said, these activities aren’t limited to the men…nossir, the women were doing it too and both my wife and I realized how far from our peers our lives deviate. When things like this happen it always makes one wonder who is exhibiting the strange behavior? Them, or us?

Sometimes wish I could be “that guy.” I wish I could give up this zeal for fitness and this responsibility I feel to always be clean and sober around my kids and just live life for me as if having children didn’t change anything. But I don’t think I can, and truthfully, I don’t think I could live with myself very long if I did. But they’re still my friends…especially when they have free beer!