tonight is the night we are going to get our pumpkins. we will probably go to the grocery store and pick up a pumpkin along with some toothpaste and some clorox disinfecting counter wipes, but it's a big night nonetheless. once, about a hundred years ago, i went to one of those exciting pumpkin patch places. it was really just a weird streetcorner where they brought in some scarecrows and hard multi-colored corn, but it was supposed to be like an actual pumpkin patch. anyway, i picked out my pumpkin, and another pumpkin--a white one, and i went over to the check-out stand, which was a cash register sort of disguised as a big wheelbarrow. the guy weighed my pumpkins (that is not some kind of euphemism, he really weighed my pumpkins) and then he said, that'll be $32.00. and for some reason, standing there on all the fake hay, i couldn't summon the courage to tell him he was crazy to charge $32.00 for a squash and a half. instead, i gave him 2 twenties and waited for my change while the whole pumpkin patch began to spin in that way that it does when you know you are letting someone completely take you for a ride. i thought: it's halloween. it's fun. i'm paying for the experience of being in this christmas tree lot with hay bales and calico material and kids scraping their hands all over the prickly pumpkin stems and rolling around in the dirt. it's all fun! i went home and carved that hundred million dollar pumpkin and well, i enjoyed it. this wasn't the year that someone ruined my pumpkin. that was a different time. this time, that beautiful expensive old gourd sat on my doorstep until the bottom molded out and the whole thing collapsed on itself in a bubbly mass.
so this year, we will go buy the pumpkins at the grocery store and pay a few cents a pound and get out with our dignity. and our cheap pumpkins.
what i forgot to tell you was that once when i was a tiny squid, i was in my kindergarten class and the teacher was carving a pumpkin. kids were sitting around and some were doing other things and i was sort of walking over to a bookcase, and that smell of the pumpkin or something started to bother me. and i remember looking over at that low 2-shelved bookcase and just sort of starting at it and then i threw up all over the place. i went to the nurse and laid there in the bed, staring up at the acoustic tiles, counting every hole in one of them until my mother came to get me. i always think of that every year when i am carving my pumpkin. i haven't thrown up from the pumpkin smell since that time, so who knows. but that was also the year that we made macaroni necklaces and scott douglas told me that if i smashed the stray rotelle pasta pieces into the carpet with my heel, they were easier to pick up than if we left them whole. so mrs. cohen turned around and saw me smashing the pasta with my heel and i got in trouble. so it was hard times all around.
here's some literature for you. good-night, dear readers.
when the frost is on the punkin
and the fodder's in the shock,
and you hear the kyouck and gobble
of the struttin' turkey-cock,
and the clackin' of the guineys,
and the cluckin' of the hens,
and the rooster's hallylooyer
as he tiptoes on the fence;
o, it's then the time a feller
is a-feelin' at his best,
with the risin' sun to greet him
from a night of peaceful rest,
as he leaves the house, bareheaded,
and goes out to feed the stock,
when the frost is on the punkin
and the fodder's in the shock.
