After leaving home my greatest Halloween – Trick or Treat, was getting Steven. But I never tell him that. Forty four years later, I still want him to think he got me…

By Benjamin Groff II GroffMedia© | benandsteve.com | ©2026
October 27, 2026

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Forty-Four Years Later, He’s Still Sitting Next to Me

Forty-four years ago, Steve and I sat in a movie theater together for the first time, not knowing that someday we would be sitting next to one another in Phoenix, Arizona, listening to a doctor tell us we needed to balance our A1C.

Back then, we were more concerned about surviving the movie.

It was Halloween III: Season of the Witch, and it was new. So were we, although we weren’t actually a “we” just yet.

Being a bit of a rube, I screamed at things that probably wouldn’t interrupt our hound dog’s nap today. But what the movie lacked in lasting terror, I apparently supplied for the folks sitting in front of us. My sudden outbursts sent them scrambling out of their seats.

They had paid to be frightened by something on the screen. I was providing additional services from behind.

Steve says that was when he fell in love with me.

He didn’t anything about me yet. Apparently, the screaming made an impression. Some people catch someone’s eye across a crowded room. I startled an entire section of a theater. Because of that. And, the laughter it created, Steve and I meandered back to our hotel talking about how I wasn’t prepared for the shows gimmicks.

Then hours later, it was Joan Rivers with The Tonight Show on television. In a full sized single bed at a Holiday Inn off Interstate 40 and Meridian in Oklahoma City. That was where the fellow from the theater became someone, who had come to see if the haunting of the theater was over? And if I needed somone to protect me? I being naturally curious as an investigator. I had to decide, if it is someone I wanted to know better? Which I had already decided it was.

Forty-four years later, I suppose you could say that worked out.

I begin here because this is the story folks ask us about around Halloween. Most couples have a romantic song that takes them back to the beginning. Something tender. Something you could slow dance to without anyone questioning your judgment.

We have the Silver Shamrock jingle from Halloween III: Season of the Witch.

You work with what you’re given.

Somewhere, there are couples celebrating their beginnings with candlelight and a beautiful love song. We hear that little Halloween tune, and I remember frightening strangers while my future husband apparently decided I had possibilities.

It does explain a few things about us.

Which brings us to the Halloween photograph accompanying this story. A pumpkin stretched across the garage door seems appropriate for a household whose love story began with Halloween III. Other folks can put out a tasteful wreath. We have a history to live up to.

Besides, after forty-four years, Halloween has some competition in the frightening department. There are medical appointments, lab results, and conversations about whether something has too much sugar in it.

We have reached the age when the candy comes with a discussion.

Still, there is something wonderful about looking at the person sitting beside you and remembering him when all of this was ahead of you. Before you knew the ordinary routines you would share. Before the moves, the dogs, the laughter, and the difficult days when having someone beside you would matter more than you could have understood in that theater.

I couldn’t have imagined our life in Arizona. I certainly wasn’t thinking about A1C.

I was trying to get through the movie.

And Steve, for reasons he has had forty-four years to reconsider, wanted to meet the fellow doing all that screaming.

I’m glad he did.

Happy Halloween, folks. If you hear a scream coming from our direction, it could be another scary movie.

Or we may have just opened the medical bill.

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