Caitriona called at 8 o’clock. She was hiding out from the Trick or Treaters. So was I. Nearly fifteen years into our friendship, we were happy to discover yet another shared neurosis over which to bond. She’d been pulling the pregnancy card to send her American husband to the door all day. He couldn’t understand her reluctance, but I got it immediately: a grumpy, guilty, oh-shit reflex at an unexpected doorbell, a dislike of big celebrations, and the lack of a clue about what kids expected in a new neighborhood.

I wasn’t always such a grump about Hallowe’en. As a child I studied Judy Blume books intently as primers on how Americans lived. The climax of Otherwise Known as Sheila the Great was the Most Original Hallowe’en Costume competition, for which ten-year-old Sheila had prepared for weeks. She went as a flenser, smug in the belief that among the fairy princesses and superheroes no one else would dress up as a person who stripped blubber from whales. She wore rubber boots, a raincoat, a sou’wester, and a sign around her neck that said FLENSER. She had a bucket and some kind of knife, as far as I remember. She thought the prize was hers. But in one of the great tragic reversals in literature, the competition was won by some bozo dressed as a fried egg. A fried egg!

The whole description impressed me deeply, especially the genius of the fried egg. It hadn’t occurred to me you could be anything other than a witch or a ghost. We did have Hallowe’en in Limerick, but like much of early eighties Ireland, it was half-arsed and pinched. There were four choices of masks at the Five Star checkout: a clown, a monster, a witch, or a ghost. The cheap plastic squashed our noses flat and usually cracked by the time we got them home. At school one year we made witches hats out of greyish paper. Some ambitious kids stuck their heads through a bin bag or an old sheet, but most didn’t bother to dress up at all. We didn’t decorate our houses or carve pumpkins (though we did bob for apples).

The biggest thrill was the barm brack ring. Barm brack was the sweet currant bread my father loved and ate year round, spread with butter. We had no interest in it until the Hallowe’en barm brack came on sale in October, containing a gold ring wrapped in greaseproof paper. We wanted it desperately, though I don’t know why. If you got the ring it meant you were going to get married, which wasn’t that exciting. Every year, Dad said that only people who were loyal to barm brack should have a chance at the ring. At the very least, only people who were willing to eat the slice of boring old curranty bread should get the ring. But we were desperate, and eventually he let us paw through slice after slice until one of us got the little ring, which was about as substantial as a Coke ring-pull.

At eleven, through my private brand of Voice of America, I became infected by longing for Judy Blume’s New Jersey Hallowe’en, which seemed so much more…wholehearted.

I was also worried about being cool back then, so I projected this fantasy onto my sisters and her friends, who were small enough to fall in line. I had the idea that real Trick or Treating meant some kind of performance—this being the Trick part, I thought—so that October I spent weeks drilling seven or eight small girls in a large repertoire, including “My Irish Molly”, which held the RTE Radio One playlist hostage at that time. The girls ranged in age from three to seven, so they thought this was terrific fun. They sang “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” and “We’re in the Money” and “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” and “Simon Smith and His Amazing Dancing Bear”. There were dance steps, and actions, and I found a tambourine.

There were no street lights where we lived, so I led my little band from door to door by flashlight. The neighbors stood in the cold as the small girls arranged themselve in height order and launched into their performance with great, unIrish verve. At the end of each song the neighbors would try to drop mini Mars Bars and small apples into the swag bag I’d brought. With a smile I suspected was dazzling I explained that, no, we intended to delight them further. Claire got out her tin whistle. Trapped in the porch light drizzle, our neighbors were resigned and cheerful.
    “Aren’t ye very good. Aren’t ye great girls altogether.”
But the true warmth in their smiles came when we stopped, collected our tribute, and shuffled triumphantly to the next house through the dark puddles.

Dear God, if someone made me stand through a twenty-minute recital by talentless toddlers tonight, I’d put razors in their apples.

It seems unlikely in any case. Brooklyn Trick or Treating is industrialized. I live near—but not in—Park Slope, a stroller-yuppies’ ghetto, and today they thronged the streets and the park with their sprogs. It was a golden fall afternoon; warm enough to be early September but for the lovely autumn leaves. Costumed parents followed their costumed kiddies, cameras clicking.

The real action was on Seventh Avenue, where the stores are. In Park Slope (and maybe everywhere, for all I know) the stores give out candy too. At four o’clock I couldn’t get into Aveda, as kids streamed in with their bags open.
“Trick or Treat. Trick or Treat. Trick or Treat.” After several blocks of collecting they hardly had the energy to drone the request, and their store-bought swag bags already bulged. In front of the lipstick stand, extra staff stood ready to drop in Tootsie Rolls. “Say thank you!” I wanted to bark, but the kids were already on the way to the next store and more had come to take their place. On the side streets, people sat on stoops under fake cobwebs and handed out candy from plastic pumpkins. The kids barely stopped,like marathon runners at a water station. Ungrateful little shits.

The costumes divided sharply by age, gender, and breeding status. Most people aged zero to three were dressed as bugs, fruit, or furry animals. These were my favorites, only because they see nothing funny about their appearance. Dogged ladybugs and serious bumblebees marched with their bags held up, mouthing “Tweat.” The girls aged four to ten are fairy princesses, with the occasional leavening angel. Of this politically retrograde group, I liked to see the shy, plain ones, to whom it means much more to be a princess for the day. At the same age, the boys are superheroes, mostly, with plenty of masks and lycra and sword-like objects. The characters were unrecognizable to me. The teenage boys did the minimal dress-up necessary to demand candy. Mothers dressed mostly as unthreatening witches; sweet Glindas, or smiling Morticias. Fathers were the most inventive, and were willing to look like dorks. My favorite dressed up as a soccer goal, with a large net stretched across his chest and his head in a white bathing cap painted up like a football.

Those still looking to breed took a different tack. On the Bowery at midnight last night, there were angel trollops, nurse trollops, French Maid trollops, Bush Twins trollops, Marilyn Monroe trollops, Morticia trollops, butterfly trollops, and Paris Hilton trollops. As long as they could do knee-high boots and teeny skirts—and preferably fluffy blonde wigs—the costume was a go. They needed them to beat out fierce competition to catch the attention of the bar-hopping guys, who had all borrowed the costumes of the seven-year-old boys in Park Slope.

Superpowers and trollops: on Hallowe’en, we are more upfront than usual about the drives of evolutionary biology.

Amy, my favorite souvenir from my year of travel, is a great New York walker. A few weeks ago she was threading through the necklace of East River parks in DUMBO and Brooklyn Heights. Each of these parks is modest—a scrap of grass, or a short, concrete esplanade—but their backdrops are fit for a movie kiss: the river spanned by bridges, Manhattan’s skyline, and Liberty, stretching.

Three years ago New Yorkers gathered at these parks to watch the towers fall, and for weeks afterwards we came back to the river to look at the fat, evil billows of smoke that marked our new lack. Messy shrines grew up. Candle grease dripped all over the esplanade. Children’s drawings flapped beside posters searching for people lost forever. Cellophane bouquets dried out in an Indian summer that stretched to December. We tied our kitschy grief to the railings.

I don’t know what happened to those shrines in the end. I suppose the rain and snow arrived eventually, and someone took away what was left. We stopped worrying out loud about anthrax powder on our junk mail and went back to getting by.

So Amy was startled, on her walk, to see a new shrine at the park railings under the Brooklyn Bridge. It looked like a grade-school project, she said—a series of ceramic tiles, with drawings of the bridge and sad-faced people, and little messages. They said things like:

Dear Brooklyn Bridge,

I will miss you. I used to ride my bike across you on Sundays with my Dad. Now I am sad that you are gone.

Love Ella
June 2006

She described a few more. I felt slightly sick.
    “What the hell? Was this some kind of art project?”
    “I don’t know! There was no information about it. Nothing. And I didn’t see anything in the papers.”
    “How did you feel when you saw it?”
    “Creeped out. It’s creepy, isn’t it? Just…horrible.”
    “Holy mother of Jesus.”

Sprayed on the floor of Manhattan Bridge that week was a message “Osama Votes Kerry” (and also, confusingly but probably accurately, “Obama Votes Kerry”). I wondered if this were part of that campaign, whipping air into our fears. Or if it were some DUMBO artist’s thought experiment.
    “What did you do? Did you call 311?” 311 is Mayor Bloomberg’s city hotline, where they’ll answer questions from parking ticket information to emergency preparation. You can report broken water mains, giant rats, corruption, or drunk taxi drivers. We like it.
    “I forgot about 311. I called the Borough Council office instead. I just wanted to find out what it was about. They sent me an email saying they were going to investigate. Then I got a giant voicemail from Marty Markowitz, the borough president. Mawdie Mawkovitz. It was the night before Passover, and the message was full of Yiddish and Hebrew expressions that I guess he figured I’d understand because of my last name. He got more and more upset as the call went on. ‘What kind of meshuggenah people would do such mishegaas?’ By the end it felt like he was calling some crisis line himself. Actually, it was pretty funny.”

It was a second-hand story. I didn’t even see the tiles hanging on the railings. And yet it took hold of me, as it had taken hold of our borough president. The dread and uncertainity of three years ago felt fresh again, and I was gripped with the same morbid excitement. I wanted rush to the bridge and stroke a strand of its steel ropes, and I wanted to run as far from it as I could. Amy and I looked at each other.

On the morning of September 11th I’d sat with my co-workers in the cramped Foosball room, watching the only TV station still broadcasting. They were mostly engineers, and so we calculated. Measuring the scope of a problem is what engineers do, and this was like a Microsoft interview question: 100-plus floors by two, and how many people on each floor, and how many people would be in by 8 in the morning, and how many people might get to the elevators, and what was the capacity of the emergency wards…

As the towers dissolved a few miles south we weren’t yet ready to calculate how many wars would be fought, and how many soldiers would die, and how many jobs would be lost, and marriages broken, and fatherless children born. We didn’t know about the War on Tear yet. We didn’t know that some of us would leave New York for good. We didn’t even know we’d end up walking home over the Brooklyn Bridge that day, following the dazed and filthy refugees who crossed it while we watched TV.

And now I was scrambling all over that twisted interview question again: what would happen if the Brooklyn Bridge were blown up? How many cars, how many subway riders, how many bikers, how many camera-clicking tourists? I thought of my neighbors, mangled and drowning and wondered who I would call if the Brooklyn Bridge were blown up. I thought, shamefully, of my stock portfolio. The election. My job. Conscription. My visa. I remembered the peculiar, warped exhilaration of a calamity shared. That September we had joked about terror sex and terror cocktails and terror Prada shoes. Who would I have terror sex with?

Strange that with all the practice, and the Orange Alerts, my thoughts could get no bigger than this.

We went back to Amy’s apartment and she played Marty Markowitz’s endless message. He was so grateful, Amy, that she had brought this to his attention. He personally guaranteed, Amy, that it would be taken care of. By the end he was keening at a world in which people would do such things, and we were laughing.
    “I feel bad. They were only tiles. Nobody’s hurt. Maybe I should call him back and cheer him up,” she said. “But I’m glad he called. Even though I think he used meshuggenah wrongly.”

My company helps strangers who share an interest to find each other in real life. They tell us where they are and what their passion, cause, or passing fancy is, and we tell them where to go to meet a local group. If you never imagined there were fellow Wiccans or Bush Supporters living near you, you might be surprised. More than a million and a half people have already signed up around the world.

There’s a hunger beneath that statistic. Our lives pin us behind glass screens like dead moths. We spend hours staring at computer monitors, windshields, televisions, and X-boxes. We look at our children through camcorders. We are soft, warm primates bred for touch, but these screens are cold and hard. Too much of this and we become miserable, and suspicious of our neighbors. That’s why I’m glad to help smuggle a few brave souls into the world of live bodies and loud opinions, even if only for an hour or two a month.

We used to schedule these monthly get-togethers automatically. It worked well for a few years, but people grew tired of obeying a distant computer. Inevitably, our callous New York algorithm sent the vegans to a steakhouse, chihuahua owners to a biker bars, and shy pagans to stand outside cafés that had been closed for years. So we learned the hardest skill for young managers—delegation. At the start of September, we invited, cajoled, and coerced 40,000 members into volunteering as local organizers. We figured they might know where to go.

As a company, we don’t yet do a good job of telling our members what’s going on, or—more importantly—finding out what they wish we knew. We build stuff in a rush and hope they’ll find it, and forgive the bugs. To atone for these start-up sins, last week we invited our new organizers to join us for beers in Florida, Texas, New York, and California so they could tell us how they were doing.

The Great JetBlue Organizer Listening Tour was flawlessly conceived as an exercise in the Method School of product management. We had to put aside our geeky introversion, leave our comfortable cube farm, and introduce ourselves to large groups of real, live, unpredictable strangers, who expected to be led. I wanted pharmaceutical help just thinking about it.

At a dubious roadhouse outside Orlando, two dozen Floridians turned out to welcome us over chicken wings and three-dollar pitchers. Half their October Meetups had been cancelled due to hurricanes, and outside the palm trees were ratty and wet. In New York we played to a hometown crowd of eighty, who were—well, New Yorkers. I would explain this further, but I have a job to keep.

In balmy Houston, thirty organizers showed up to greet us at a downtown Irish bar. These days we Euroliberals think we can finish any sentence that starts “Texans are…” It’s an expertise based on ancient re-runs of Dallas and on a president who claims his swagger is what Texans call walkin’. I was glad to have my lazy, big-haired notions tipped over by group as broad as America.

They were Kerry supporters, Townhall conservatives, Bush supporters, Democrats, Americans Against Hollywood Lies, Oil Awareness activists, and Americans Against Bush.
They organized Artists’ Trading Card swaps, anime groups, Starquest meets, and Dungeons and Dragons sessions.
They ran playdates for their pugs, beagles, and prairie dogs.
They led an abuse survivors’ network, a makeup artists’ group, a staph infection support group, and a breast augmentation discussion group.
They taught investment education. They ran Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, Catalan, and Hebrew conversation groups.
There were macrobiotics enthusiasts. TV show fans. Poker players. Maxwell fans. Furries.
They were old and young, fat and thin, loud and shy. They were mostly white.

We thought there was a fair chance they might riot.

Instead, they leaned forward over beer and and decent pizza, read nametags, and shared ideas. See here, some of these political folk were bound to own beagles or speak Spanish—could they share member lists? Had anyone else tried calling the local TV stations to promote their events? How did y’all get the members to RSVP? What in the hell was Furtopia, anyways?

The former Christian radio talkshow host debated privacy with the artist trading card organizer. The pug owners showed pictures of their Hallowe’en party, where twenty pugs showed up in costume—bug-eyed pumpkins massing in the dog-run. An Ann Coulter fan wondered if she could help the pugs campaign to repeal the leash laws with city government.

Scott, our founder and CEO, told them how the company got started. It’s not a bad story, as origin myths* go. After September 11th, New York felt close-knit. (A useful tip: when New York people mention September 11th, it hushes even Texans. Briefly.) People talked to strangers. They seemed to care about one another. Soon enough, they went back to their brusque, big-town style, but the experience made him wonder what had happened to American community. American was founded on the right to associate, but how did that fit in a country that no longer lived in small towns, where people worked longer hours than anywhere else and relaxed in front of a TiVo recording? He looked for books to find out more. Robert Putnam had just published Bowling Alone, a scholarly book that mapped the decline of community partipation through the second half of the twentieth century. It made for lonely reading.

Scott is two three days older than me, and we are too young to remember the prime of the PTA, the Rotarians, and the bowling leagues. For our generation, community takes place online. So that’s where he turned to see if he could prod local community back to life.

The four or five guys who crammed into the first shoebox office were modest. They didn’t know who would be interested in this thing, or if anyone would. First came the goths, the witches, and the pagans, thrilled to find the Others in an unfeeling world. Then Slashdot sent a herd of Linux geeks in tradeshow t-shirts. Then Howard Dean had the genius to remind the American people that democracy belonged to them. With his blessing, and Meetup’s website, they packed libraries and cafés and hand-wrote letters to undecided voters. They planned to take back the country, one bake-sale at a time. They fanned out to ask for money, and they got it. If Meetup could just pick a goddamn venue that would hold them, they thought, they could run the world. They made the cover of Time and Newsweek.

It didn’t work out for Dean, but the Deaniac mobilization shifted politics as much as Nixon’s five o’clock shadow.

Our slice of Houston liked being part of something bigger. Here they were, Tocqueville’s citizens: energetic, open, and avidly associating. Before the evening ended they were planning the Houston Meetup Meetup—a meta-group for organizers where they would discuss the art of meeting. They were cheerful about getting t-shirts.

I feel less American every year that I live here, but they are an appealing lot all the same, even the Bush voters. Over a Guinness a funny, spiky woman explained to me how Hilary Clinton had tried to shut down the internet. I liked her. Did she realize that she was talking to a pinko, job-stealing immigrant prone to fantasies about Hilary’s husband? I felt that she likely wouldn’t mind. It was that kind of evening.

Houston itself was a horror. The humans there have evolved mobile metal armor to defend against steel and glass towers and coiled un-freeways. Their preoccupation with traffic and driving distance is as boring as New York’s obsession with rent. “We’re the fourth largest city in the US,” they instructed over and over, in this state where size does count. Back at the hotel I studied television and missed my two-legged, villagey metropolis. But maybe that’s why Houston—and all these other car-and-TV cities—needs these unwieldy, messy, inefficient, human Meetups more than Brooklyn, where meeting strangers comes for free.

I’ll test this grand theory further in Palo Alto on Thursday.

*Scott rightly points out that it’s not a myth because it’s true.

Coming out of retirement to note my blog friend Betsy’s news: her husband, Frank Wilczek, won the Nobel Prize for Physics this morning. Holy cow!

When they cast Blogging: The Movie, Betsy will be played by Dianne Wiest, who has just the right mix of sweet, subversive, silly smarts.