From an old notebook

Rachel, six, trick or treating:

“We went to some really old people last year, but they gave us a lot of candy.”

And: “If you give drugs to kids, you can go to jail.”

And: “They were strangers, but the candy they gave us was really good.”

And when she remarked that there weren’t kids in the cars that we saw and I then said that maybe they were grown-ups out and about doing grown-up things: “Yeah, they’re out of things.”

Ben, at home, wanted “a drink of candy” and then took one Skittle from a package of Skittles.

Also from an old notebook
Alfalfa, Ted Berrigan, Jack Kerouac, metaphors : Alfred Appel Jr. on twentieth-century art and literature : Balloons, poetry, teachers : Barney : Beauty and the Beast and kid talk : Eleanor Roosevelt : John Ashbery and Kenneth Koch : Plato, Shirley Temple, vulgarity, wisdom, Stan Laurel : Snow White, Betty Aberlin, kid talk : Square dancing, poetry, criticism, slang