“Trick or Treat?” (A.K.A. The Lollipops! The Fucking Lollipops!)

Not that I really have much experience in these things, but if you want to witness a toddler’s full emotional spectrum, Halloween is a pretty damn good time to do so. I mean, if you’d seen Sasha yesterday—running along the bumpy sidewalks of Brooklyn in her Old Navy bumblebee costume, jazzed on candied sucrose, warbling “trick or treat?” to no one in particular, grabbing the attention of old folks at the Cobble Hill Halloween Parade (“so cute!”)—you’d have thought her the happiest child in America.

But the tides of a toddler’s temper can turn in an instant, and the high-gravity object to blame was the lollipop, Sasha’s all-time favorite treat. I don’t remember when she had her first one, but it’s gotten to the point where we can’t take her out around the neighborhood without her whispering “Lollipop?” every time she passes by a shop where she’s gotten one previously. The butchers behind the counter at Los Paesanos are so sweet when they offer her candy, but I have to say no. She doesn’t need one.

Now, though, on Halloween, lollipops were everywhere. Dum-dums and Tootsie pops and blow pops and nameless swirls of red and green and white. She couldn’t let them rest in her orange plastic pumpkin basket, had to hold them in her hands. And when I kept telling her to wait till after dinner, she started tearing off their wrappers with her teeth. At one house, I glared skeptically at the lollipop the host gave us.

“Oh, doesn’t she like lollipops?” said the host.

“She likes them too much.”

“She can have two, then!”

By the time we got home, she’d eaten two already, and when it came time for dinner, we had to pry a third from her hands. And that’s when the serious crying began. A shriek, a wail, a keening that welled up from unspeakable depths. Snot and saliva flowed. Arms thrashed. This wasn’t even a temper tantrum, where the frustration’s source remains unknown. No, Sasha knew, we all knew why she cried. The fucking lollipops.

What did Jean and I do? We laughed. We couldn’t help ourselves. Sasha sat strapped into her high chair, throwing the worst fit of her short life, and all we could do was chuckle, take pictures, and look forward to next year.