Treading.net

Whilst recounting our Halloween experiences over dinner the other night, I realized what a truly devious little kid DBF was. While I would wear costumes and go door-to-door begging for candy, he had a much smarter solution to collecting sweets. Instead of dressing up and trudging around carrying a bag of candy, as kids from the suburbs—like us—did, DBF simply waited until his mother, a single parent, took his little sister out trick-or-treating, then shut out all of the houselights, and hoarded all of the candy she bought for him to give out to trick-or-treaters. When they came home, he’d tell his mother that tons of trick-or-treaters came by, and they ran out of candy. Because he was often left with a lot of the same candy—if his mother had bought 5 bags of Snickers, for example—he’d threaten his little sister with a beating unless she shared some of her candy with him.

Despicable? Yes. Devious? Certainly. Exceedingly smart for a little kid? Absolutely.

The news that Tower Records is closing makes me so, so sad. Depressed, even. I worked for Tower for seven years; it was my first real job (outside of teaching swimming lessons and babysitting). I started working there when I was 16, at the Broadway store (across the street from the original location), and they even let me transfer to the Santa Monica store when I went to school in L.A., so I worked there throughout college as well. It was only when I moved to New York that I had to cut the cord and find a real job.

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