A Day No Pumpkins Shall Die

Ah yes, New England in fall. Leaf-covered lawns, brisk mornings, shorter days, crisp apples and firewood to stack. But then you had to show up with an armful of pumpkins and ruin everything. Explain to me your fascination with the Cucurbita maxima. Everywhere I look I see them, grotesque, oblong, inert blobs of orange lassitude, rotting ever so slowly since that creepy kid who works at the farm stand sliced their connection to life, kick-starting their decline towards rot. And I’ve seen you, laughing and cavorting in those roadside pumpkin fields, searching for just the right one to leave on your doorstep while its carcass begins its decline. You act like that pumpkin patch is heaven and those vegetables were fluffy orange clouds of mirth and joy.

Well, one family’s heaven is another man’s gourd-filled hell, and I ain’t having any of it. When I see a pumpkin, I think of getting my ass kicked as a twelve-year old on Halloween. And I’m reminded of my family as a kid – we were that family that always bought a few mega-pumpkins the size of bulldozer tires. We’d display our burnt sienna bounty on the front porch or by the back door, announcing to the world that we too could read a calendar and suspected winter was on its way. Sometimes we’d make jack o’lanterns, each of us trying to make the perfect scalene triangle eyes and gap-toothed smile. We also were too damn lazy, waiting until Flag Day to remove these rotted vessels of pagan misery, needing hazmat suits, a wet-vac and snow shovels to clean up the congealed pools of fetid pumpkin flesh that cascaded down our steps.

And let’s not forget the pumpkin bisque served at a friend’s wedding in 1993. Nothing ruins a belly full of free beer and good music like a steaming hot bowl of pumpkin gruel. The band’s drummer should have banged out a slave galleon beat while we force-fed ourselves the nutmeg-tinged slop. Considering the happy couple is now divorced, I’m convinced if we’d had a nice clam chowder or perhaps skipped the soup and had a simple salad with leafy greens and a soy dressing, those two would still be together.

Combine that edible pumpkin memory with the earnest Starbucks barista trying to foist a few squirts of pumpkin-flavored corn syrup in my $4 cup of steamed milk last week, and I pray for a day when no pumpkins shall die.

Every Halloween, Keene, New Hampshire crows about displaying the largest collection of carved pumpkins on the planet. Let’s remind the proud, misguided and clearly not-busy-enough-at work citizens of Keene that this is because no other country in the world considers it a worthy thing to grow something for five months, drive it to a church parking lot, dragoon a cub scout into marking up the price and extorting you into buying one so you can rip the top open, thrown out all the edible parts, carve a cretinous visage on the front and then cram an open flame in its disemboweled stomach. Most humans on this planet go through that trouble to stop their children’s stomachs from distending any further. But seriously, don’t mind me. Thanks for the pumpkins. It wouldn’t be fall without them.