Smashing pumpkins and trust

The Boston Herald

I look out my office window and see the giant spider's web, which had filled half the front yard, hanging in pieces. He/she/they didn't totally destroy it this time around.

Two weeks ago, on a Sunday morning I opened my front door and the web was gone, just yarn on the ground.

My husband wove it again. He took more white yarn and cut two more stakes and strung the wool as a spider would do, carefully, methodically.

It's the best ever, I told him. My kids agreed and strangers must have, too, because more of them slowed their cars when driving by and a few even stopped to take pictures.

Then Saturday night the web was ripped apart once again.

You shouldn't have shut off the light, I said to my husband. We'd left a spotlight burning, every night, all night, lighting the yard and the living room, too, protecting the web from further destruction.

They would have done it anyway, my children agreed. A light wouldn't have stopped them. The light didn't stop them the last time.

Just as a lock hadn't stopped the people who broke into our house years ago, stealing not just things, not just replaceable items, but trust in the belief that home is a safety zone.

Just as fear of getting caught hadn't stopped whoever walked into our garage and rode off with a bicycle, not once, but twice, in the middle of the day.

Just as lights and locks and alarms and laws don't stop all the people who trespass on the rights of others every day.

Things are destroyed and stolen all the time and yet every time, it's new. It's a surprise. And most regrettably, it's a permanent hurt.

My father tells a story, an old story, that to this day fills him with hurt and anger. He was young and so was my mother, and they were living in a project, working day and night, the both of them, and saving for a house. They didn't own a television, though all around them neighbors did, and my mother wanted one.

One day she got a phone call from someone who said he was with the Griddle Riddle Contest. The someone asked my mother three questions, which she answered correctly.

"Congratulations!" he boomed. "You've just won the grand prize: a new, console TV."

My father distrusted the caller. He said, "Don't get excited, Dot. Someone may be playing a trick on you." But two days later, a letter arrived and there in print was a validation of what she had been told. The television, the letter said, would be delivered a week later, at noon.

My mother switched days off to wait for the TV. She cleared a space in the living room and there neighbors gathered with her to wait for the prize. A little after noon the doorbell rang, and my mother rushed to it and sure enough on the stoop was a television. Only it was fake, made of cheap plastic and small enough to hold in her hand.

My father says she cried for days. It was just a trick, a "harmless prank," but it did irreparable harm.

That's the way it is with all pranks. The big kids who tear down webs and pull the heads off straw men and smash pumpkins and throw eggs at cars and knock over stones in cemeteries and make phone calls in the middle of the night and terrorize younger kids, may think all these are harmless pranks, too. Only they're not. Because for every action there is a reaction. Sometimes it's quiet. Sometimes it's invisible. But it's always there: a diminution of trust. A shrinking of spirit. An awakening sense that all the people who aren't your friends have to be your enemies.

Most young children, despite what their parents tell them, believe that the world will do them no harm. And so they carve their pumpkins and stuff their straw men and set them outside on their steps with total confidence that these things will be safe while they sleep.

And when they awaken and find them destroyed, when they see what they created and loved splattered all over the ground, something in them breaks, too. And the saddest thing is, is that that something can't be easily fixed. For trust once damaged, remains damaged, if not forever for a long, long time.