Tom Calen

I got my first real taste of fear when I was four or five years old. It was the early 1980s in Brooklyn, New York, and the night, quite fittingly, was Halloween. My family had joined with three others for the annual door-to-door plea for candy, otherwise known as Trick-or-Treating[*]. All combined, there were eight children in our pack: a quartet of ten year-olds, a trio aged eight, and me--the youngest by four years and the only boy. I don’t remember much about the trick-or-treating itself, which likely means I ended the route with a healthy bag of soon-to-be cavities…