“If you can blow this balloon up with one breath you win a brand-new Cadillac,” the doctor told me just before I was to have my tonsils removed.

Considering I would not be old enough to get a driver’s license for another 12 years I would have preferred the promise of a toy Matchbox car. All the same, I accepted the challenge and inhaled the deepest breath of my young life . . .

. . . and woke up in a hospital bed wondering when the operation was going to happen.

“It’s all over,” my mom told me. “Do you want some ice cream to soothe your throat?”

I have since had more surgeries than I care to remember – wisdom teeth, kidney stone, entrapped nerve, deviated septum, cervical disc fusion – and each time I emerged from anesthesia’s fog I could not believe time had passed and the operation had already taken place.

That is sort of how I feel about the past year and half during the COVID-19 pandemic. Like it was spring of 2019 and I took a deep breath of anesthesia and suddenly I have awakened to autumn 2021.

Instead of having my tonsils or a kidney stone removed, I had birthday celebrations and holidays gatherings, concerts and vacations, all removed from the calendar. I bet you feel likewise.

Perhaps the best example I can give is a wedding of some young friends. One day my wife and I were ready to go to the big event and the next thing you know we were attending the reception for their pandemic-altered marriage ceremony that had actually taken place on Zoom over a year ago. And yet at the grand and greatly belated in-person celebration it seemed as if they had just said their vows minutes earlier.

I don’t know about you, but one of the biggest events I missed while being under pandemic-thesia was Halloween. Perhaps more than any holiday, Halloween is a time machine that transports me happily backwards. Hearing little voices sing “trick-or-treat” reminds me of walking my own two kids around the neighborhood.

Halloween also magically transports me to my own youth. Indeed, seeing a tiny Batman makes my mind flash back to when I taped a yellow bat insignia on a black sweatshirt and pinned a bath towel around my neck to go trick-or-treating when I was six. Age seven, too, for I loved Batman.

Trick-or-treaters at my front door pull up memories from a couple years later when my best friend Dan and I finished our rounds and then changed into second costumes before going back to the houses that were giving out full-sized candy bars.

Even my bad Halloween memories have become good ones with the passing of time. Like when Adam stole my pillowcase loaded with sugary bounty. To clarify, Adam wasn’t a boy bully, he was a black Labrador the size of a grizzly who lived in our neighborhood. Even though he was a gentle giant, when he came running at me I dropped my loot instead of taking any chances with his sweet tooth.

Because of coronavirus, not unleashed Adams, no little princesses and superheroes and goblins came knocking on my door last Halloween. Happily, this promises to change Saturday evening because the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has given children the green light to again go trick-or-treating.

I cannot wait. My porch light will be welcomingly on and I’ll have a wheelbarrow’s load of full-sized candy bars ready to hand out, two at a time, to make up for last year.

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Woody Woodburn writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @woodywoodburn. His SIGNED books are available at www.WoodyWoodburn.com.

Personalized Signed copies of WOODEN & ME: Life Lessons from My Two-Decade Friendship with the Legendary Coach and Humanitarian to Help “Make Each Day Your Masterpiece” and  “Strawberries in Wintertime: Essays on Life, Love, and Laughter” are available at WoodyWoodburn.com