I was sports editor of this paper for more than 18 years, and one of the most valuable lessons I learned was that flipping out over weather is useless.
Believe me, it wasn’t an easy lesson. I can’t believe how often my moods were dictated by the weather. Since this is New England, it always seems to rain at the drop of a hat in the spring, and that always wreaked havoc with baseball games. Getting them in proved to be a Herculean effort.
The unpredictability of the weather, along with the stubbornness of its patterns once they take hold, teaches you to make hay while the sun shines. And it also forces you to understand that basing anything on a weather forecast is futile. Not only might the forecast prove wrong, but the makeup date might end up being even more unpleasant.
How many times have we oiled up the snow blower only to have the storm pass out of sea? And how many times have we not oiled up the snow blower and ended up with 20 inches of partly cloudy?
Why should anyone care about any of this? Because community officials in some towns — Swampscott among them — panicked at the mention of the “R” word earlier this week and pulled the plug on Halloween trick-or-treating. In Swampscott’s case, kids were told to trick or treat tonight.
So what happened? It rained Thursday. A little. There might have been a slight drizzle Thursday night, but that was all. And while it was definitely windy, that window between 5 p.m. and 8 p.m., the usual hours for trick-or-treating, were downright balmy. The thermometer in my car actually said 70 a couple of times while I was driving home from work.
Not only was Lynn mobbed (my friend’s house on Woodlawn Street reported a high volume of children and their parents at their hot chocolate/cookie stand), but there were plenty of Swampscott kids out there too, taking advantage of late Indian summer-like weather.
One wonders, now, whether the kids in Swampscott will double dip tonight, or whether kids from houses bordering Swampscott will do the same. After all, there’s no law that I know of that forces you to show your ID when you knock on someone’s door with your Donald Trump mask on.
But that’s beside the point. Has anyone checked tonight’s forecast? It’s not going to rain, but, man, it’s going to be cold. It’s supposed to be in the 40s and windy — exactly the type of weather that would make me run for cover.
Of course, who says the forecasters are accurate this time? They do their fair share of getting them wrong up here, don’t they? They’re right far more often than they aren’t, but they’re wrong often enough so that you can’t go by what you hear two days out.
And that’s the lesson. Just like you can’t call off a baseball game on a Tuesday based on what the weather forecast is for Thursday, you can’t just decide to push Halloween back two days because Harvey says it might rain.
Helicopter parenting has taken over. I know … historic eras and even eons have passed since my childhood, but I never recall Halloween as anything other than a night for children to have fun. It was a politely accepted practice to go around ringing doorbells and begging for candy, but it was never an official civic celebration — something to be postponed because of the threat of rain.
I can remember schlepping my son around Pine Hill the night after the no-name storm in 1991, when its remnants were still in the air. It wasn’t fun, and there were probably a lot of kids who didn’t venture out. But that was their choice.
Nobody suggested that there should be a do-over. Either you chose to participate or you didn’t.
But apparently Halloween has taken that leap from innocent childhood fun to just one more opportunity for adults to swoop in and take over. Houses are festooned in enough lights and decorations to make you forget it’s October and not December; and Jesus, Mary and Joseph have morphed into Gomez, Morticia and Lurch.
Of course, if the weather’s not deemed perfect enough for the sensibilities of hyper-involved adults, then we’re not going to do it. Roma locuta; causa finita est.
Rome may have spoken a little too quickly here. All I know is that if you have the luxury, on Oct. 31, of 70-degree weather with a little drizzle, you take it and run. This is autumn in New England. You’re just as likely to get a frigid night where your costume is swallowed up by layers and layers of jackets too.
Never, ever, jump the gun on a weather forecast in New England. It’s a guaranteed recipe for having ovum in faciem meam.
