Three days after Halloween and around town the windows don't look any cleaner than they did the last day of October. I guess kids really don't soap windows anymore.

As the owner of more windows than Gayle can get me to regularly wash, I guess I should be grateful that this is one Halloween tradition that's gone the way of the stolen outhouse and free candy X-rays at the local ER.

Somehow though, I'm not.

I recall that being a kid wasn't always easy - especially when grownups were involved. Back in those pre-South Park days, we were brought up to hold pretty much anyone older and taller than we were in a certain awe, backed by the reality that if a parent learned we'd had the temerity to mouth off to anybody who wouldn't warrant getting carded at the municipal liquor store, supper would be eating standing up, if indeed it was to be eating at all.

That's not to say we of tender years were satisfied there was justice in this arrangement - but we were outweighed and that was all there was to it. Still, we remembered ...

Now we'd all been to Sunday school and learned well that "vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord," but we had it on relatively good authority that the good Lord pretty much took Halloween off - at least as far as the small stuff was concerned.

So all year we kept a mental tally of every scowl, sour comment and implied threat to report some infraction of the village mores - real or imagined - to Mom, Dad or the local constabulary. In short, we remembered, and on Halloween - with a little help from Proctor & Gamble - we would have our revenge.

Looking back, it seems fitting that in a world of small-potatoes slights, payback would be on an equally innocuous scale. At the time, though, we didn't see it that way. We squirreled away our nickels and well in advance of All-Hallows Eve we nonchalantly added one or two double-sized bars of Ivory soap to the collection of Snickers, Juicy Fruit and Nut Goodies shoved across Graf's checkout counter.

The soap had to be Ivory. Softer than Dial or Lifebuoy, when dragged across plate glass, even on a chill autumn evening, it left a nice, thick, legible white line with no crumbling. No question, if you were going to go window soaping, the soap of the pros was Ivory.

And in our minds we were all pros - out to scrawl the perfect put-down for every slight dealt us over the long year past. Unfortunately, in the heat of the moment - silhouetted by old lady Mietroit's dining room lamp - those clever phrases abandoned us, replaced by those short, pungent words we dared not spell out - to be caught soaping a word we were forbidden to say meant that without doubt we'd be eating what we were writing with. So mostly, we just scribbled, leaving the simple necessity for cleanup to carry what message it could.

Of course, some of our company - the more talented, daring or foolhardy - did manage to send 'em a message. All Saint's morn invariably dawned on school windows replete with a gallery of stick-figure crones each tagged with a teacher's name, usually misspelled. And there was the memorable year when someone took time and effort to write out a description of a cheerleader's alleged indiscretion in some intimate detail across most of the bank window, a civic embarrassment that remained legible for several days since the chronicler chose to use paraffin wax.

Paraffin - the crack cocaine, the illicit Uzi, the ultimate contraband on Halloween night. To a householder, soap was an annoyance, but a few minutes with a sponge mop and a bucket of hot water reduced the most offensive graffiti to foam and sparkling clean glass. Paraffin, on the other hand, demanded hours of scraping with a single-edge razor blade and even then "yer dum" could be discerned in the frost and fog until it was finally vaporized by the July sunshine.

Wiser than we usually credited them, grown ups took steps to defend themselves and their windows against the annual assault by canning wax.

Downtown, store owners slopped their windows with a rich soap solution that kept wax from sticking and washed off in a jiffy before the start of business the next day.

Throughout October, Milton Graf simply wouldn't sell wax to kids - at least not to me. With a particular target fixed in my mind, I did once attempt the never fail "Mom sent me" end run ... What worked for cigarettes didn't make the grade when the grocer sensed his display window might be at risk. What kind of jam was she making, he wanted to know, just four months after the last strawberry had been picked? He took my money, put the Parowax back on the shelf and got me a double-size bar of Ivory with the suggestion I give it to my mother to wash my mouth out for telling fibs.

I left with the soap, but he was on my list.