When I was eight years old, my parents and I lived on the second floor of a duplex just off Cicero Avenue in Oak Forest, Illinois. We’d moved there at the end of August in 1963 because my mother had accepted a teaching position in Arbor Part District 145. She taught third grade at the Kimberly Heights Elementary School, and I was in another third-grade classroom directly across the hall. Suburbia was a culture shock for me, coming as I had from a farm downstate and a two-room schoolhouse.

As fortune would have it, the family who lived on the ground floor of the duplex was from a small southeastern Illinois town not far from our farm. The father owned a drug store on Cicero. They had a son in the seventh grade. His name was Bob.

In the country on Halloween, it was the custom to get in a car and drive to the farms of people we knew to trick or treat. I wondered how I’d trick or treat in our new town. The answer came when Bob’s mother said I could go with Bob and a classmate of his. I liked Bob. I was an only child, and he treated me the way I imagined an older brother might, with equal measures of affection and frustration.

My mother agreed that I could go trick or treating with Bob and his friend, and so we went shopping for a costume.

I was a huge fan of The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle, that animated series that kids liked for the antics of Rocket J. Squirrel and Bullwinkle J. I was thrilled when we found a Bullwinkle costume. You remember the kind—hard plastic mask with the string that cut into the sides of your face, and a rayon gown of sorts with arm holes and ties in the back. The mask had antlers. I was set.

On Halloween night, I walked with Bob and his friend to the drugstore where Bob asked his father for some money. On the way out of the store, Bob stole a candy bar. His friend stole one, too. “Go ahead and take one,” Bob said to me, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. “Suit yourself,” he said with a shrug, and then we were out the door—out into the dark and the chill of late October, out with dozens of other kids hiding behind masks.

I remember nothing else from that night. I don’t remember the houses whose doorbells we surely rang. I don’t remember the candy we got. I just remember a feeling of wanting to go home, to be with the people I loved and who loved me instead of these two boys who were so nonchalant about the candy bars they stole from Bob’s father. At the time, it shocked me, not so much because of the act itself, but more from the way it made me feel—small and alone and sad because I’d always looked up to Bob, and now he’d made it more difficult to do that. I was in a land of strangers where good people could do not-so-good things, and I wasn’t sure what to do with knowing that.

From time to time in The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle, Rocky would say, “Bullwinkle, let’s get out of here,” and Bullwinkle would reply, “Right behind you, Rock.” I’ve never been able to get out of that moment when Bob and his friend stole those candy bars. It haunts me still. I’m guessing you have similar moments from your pasts, moments when innocence ran up against reality. This week of Halloween, I invite you to write about them.