Obsessed

When I was a lad, I remember being caught up in the flurry of what costume I would wear starting sometime just after the first day of school. At some point, just a little after the school supply aisle had been cleared out and the orange and black crepe paper had been draped in the Ben Franklin store about a mile from my house, the boxes of Collegeville Costumes appeared. Initial surveys of the stock were taken on bike trips with my friends as we looked at the ends of those boxes to see what characters had made the grade that year. Always a lot of Casper, the Friendly Ghost and a great many generic witches and ghouls. When we found something that caught our interest, a GI Joe or a Hot Wheels race car driver, we slid the box out of the stack and peered through that cellophane porthole. There we could see the black eye holes staring back at us.
That was when the serious coveting began.
The next step was to engineer a trip with mom back to Ben Franklin. She knew it was coming. With three boys all angling to have the best and brightest rayon bib of a costume, it was going to happen and it was going to coincide with a trip to the grocery store, just a few doors down from that five and dime. After we had loaded up the back of  the  station wagon with bags of sustenance, we dragged our mother down those narrow aisles to find that one box that would be worth all that patience and pushing the cart and carrying bags of frozen food.
Unless when we got there, the costume we had obsessed on had been picked up by someone before we had a chance to make it our own. Or the one that we had been certain would lead to massive candy collection turned out to be the wrong size. Maybe your little brother could -
No! No! No!
Depression set in. How could any trick or treat experience be successful without that lace up smock and cover your face with the back of your head bare save that thin band of elastic? As it turns out, it never really mattered. I could have shown up on our neighbor's front porch with a sheet over my head, holes cut to see where I was going. I was going on a walk with my friends in the chilly autumn night, begging for candy. I can remember a couple of occasions asking my mom if I could sleep in my costume. The next morning, it wasn't about the costume anymore. It was about the Snickers  bars. It  would  be another  year before the drama would  begin again.