Bobbi Katz

October is when night guzzles up the orange sherbet sunset and sends the day to bed before supper and October is when jack-o’-lanterns grin in the darkness and strange company crunches across the rumple of dry leaves to ring a doorbell. October is when you can be ghost, a witch, a creature from outer space… almost anything! And the neighbors, fearing tricks, give you treats.

I wonder what I would have said if my dad asked me, "Son, do you know who cut down my pretty cherry tree?" I think I might have closed my eyes and thought a little bit about the herds of elephants I'd seen attacking it. I would have heard the rat-a-tat of woodpeckers, at least, or the raging roar of a charging boar or some such other beast! Perhaps a hippopotamus with nothing else to do had wandered through our garden and stopped to take a chew. We all know George said, "Father, I cannot tell a lie." Yet I can't help but wonder ... Did he really try?