from 11/1

Lauren and I feel that this talk about our neighborhood “rapidly gentrifying” is a lot of rot. There has certainly been a rampant increase in housing costs, much more so than in less-heralded black neighborhoods in the suburbs. And more people seem to know the name of Wagener Terrace now, which they didn’t when I moved here ten years ago.

Yet any real evidence that the neighborhood has “flipped,” for better or for worse, is hard to find. Of the 16 houses on our block, there are a good 12 people who are very old and have been in their house a long time. If they are able to drive at all, they back the car in so as to more quickly get to the hospital. There are still jobless young men on the corner, looking tough, but they don’t seem to scare away hip white homebuyers.

We are often beset by magazine crews — cult-like operations of kids claiming to be selling subscriptions to earn college scholarships. They prey on the poor and old.

It’s not unheard of for someone to knock on the door asking for money, and last week a young man came by selling meat. He came up on my porch and pulled out a dozen or so shrink-wrapped frozen porterhouse steaks from a box that looked like it had been kicked very hard.

Last year on Halloween we had three trick-or-treaters. You could argue that the 20 or so who came last night instead of (or perhaps after) going South of Broad are a sign of uptown’s “resurgence,” but if so, it’s a small one.

Either way, the real problem is these kids are terrible at trick-or-treating. Towards the end of the night, we were running low on candy and Lauren offered snack-size cans of fruit as an option. It had too much corn syrup in it or something and she wanted to get rid of it anyway. Three kids took the fruit, actually took the candy we’d just handed them out of their bags and traded it back in. For fruit. On Halloween.

Two little four-year-olds in blue sweat suits were apparently told by their mother to say: “We don’t have enough money for costumes.” We’re bleeding heart-liberal in the Sanchez household, and we certainly don’t require costumes for candy, but Lauren was not impressed.

“What is that?” she said. “We don’t have enough money to look silly? What happened to necessity being the mother of invention?” There was more about digging old clothes out of the closet but I won’t bore you.

It’s not like we were handing out nickels. (My mom did this one year.) Our cache of candy was pretty decent, a medley bag of mini M&Ms, Skittles, Starburst and “Fun Size” Snickers (apparently small is a fun size).

At one point, a grown man, a gaunt, mentally disabled guy started talking to us through the screen porch. The porch opens to the side but he was just standing in the middle of the yard, something about him seeing me in the park, kicking a ball. I told Lauren to stay inside.

Once the man said “two candy,” I realized he was harmless.

I met him by the door. In the meantime, two carloads pulled up, ten or so kids, and I put candy in their Food Lion bags, along with the disabled man’s. Well most of them, some of them didn’t even approach, just hung back by the driveway. What is that?

And the worst. The next morning I went to get the paper and someone had dropped a full-sized, fully-intact Hershey bar in the yard.

Come on guys. You never leave the candy behind. That’s day-one stuff.