Commentary

Tight days dole out more tricks than treats

November 12, 2026   ·   0 Comments

By JAMES MATTHEWS

The bustle in tåhe hedgerow

Old Harold is having a rough time.

Just as a great many of us are.

You remember Harold. He comes up every now and again in this space. I see him pretty much every time I saunter up Broadway. I use the strolls to clear my head of the day’s detritus. The flotsam and the jetsam of a life to this point. Harold is a walker, too, for health of heart and mind.

And who among us doesn’t share this difficult scratch of a life? For many of us, the hardship is all we can share. Not in the sense of giving but sharing in the way of common experience.

It seemed to me there were many more houses this year darkened on Halloween, I said.

Harold didn’t say anything.

He’s an older gentleman and he usually has that at-peace countenance that comes by years of having lived and witnessed and experienced. The time it takes a person to be able to see through what the younger self saw as so important.

It has been said some wounds or scars or whatever aren’t readily seen. And that doesn’t make them less a torment than a physical cut, abrasion, or the blackest bruises. Contusion. Edema. Those words always sounded nice to me. One’s a bruise. The other’s swelling. Among the few fancy words that can be kept when simpler words could substitute.

We’d sat on a Broadway bench. The same bench where we occasionally meet.

I asked Harold if he’d seen many costumed trick-or-treaters at his door. Told him about a lad I’d seen out who was dressed as Scooby-Doo and that the costume brought me back to when I was younger and everything was simpler.

I asked Harold if he’d brought his grandchildren through the neighbourhood, knocking on doors to fill a bag or a pail with goodies. Our conversations usually come to him talking about his daughter Emily and her children.

Harold asked if I’d heard about any reports of tampered candy. He said he read a few things about that but he’d never known anybody who had experienced that. Not his own children or nieces and nephews, and not his grandchildren. But perhaps they’re doing such things now, he said. The world is a different place.

“Definitely not how it was,” I said. “Not even when I was a kid.”

I always thought Harold had about 20 or 25 years on me. Is that a generation?

“The missus, she went to the grocery the last time she did,” Harold said. “Few days before Halloween that was. Just the two of us living in the house and we’ve been pulling the ends together, making them meet, with the same money.”

One of those fixed incomes you read about in the newspaper, he said. The ones you hear the politicians talk about how something needs to be done to make it better for people having to live on limited means, he said. But nothing is ever really done beyond a bit of sound for the TV just long enough for a screen image between commercial breaks. Or it’s a quick quote for a newspaper reporter so the story is written balanced.

“The items in the grocery bags keep getting fewer,” Harold said. “The space grows each trip between the top of the bag and the few apples and the box of tea, milk, or whatever else she can manage at the store. It isn’t as if the bag’s getting bigger.”

I thought about how all incomes are fixed. Most of them are fixed below sufficiency. Employers don’t give monthly wage increases to match the need. Unions gear negotiated contracts to how much more it costs to live since the previous pact was signed. The interim is the struggle. And there are more days in that interim period. Maybe instead of four-year contract terms it should be monthly, given how quickly prices rise and the game changes.

I thought to say to Harold about how finally there’s something shared by generations. Other than The Beatles. It used to be one generation spoke about how it was in their time and the younger crowd spoken to would roll eyes and say, “Whatever, Dad.”

“We turned the lights out,” Harold said.

I didn’t speak.

“Halloween,” he said. “We turned the lights out in the house. The missus sat in the dark while I walked around with Emily and the children.”

Harold wiped his eyes then.

I looked at him beside me on the Broadway bench and put a hand to his shoulder.

“Emily and the kids stayed at the house on Halloween,” Harold said. “Came a point I turned on the living room lamps and the TV for them. A gaggle of kids knocked at the door. Saw the light, I suppose. I opened the door and Emily’s babies used their treats, gave some to the kids at the door.”

I thought of Scooby-Doo and those easier times that seem so long ago for so many people. And I wondered if this time is a trick on most of us while the few collects treats.

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