Smashing Pumpkins

When I was about 11, my pumpkins suffered a fate shared by many of their gourd brethren -- an untimely end on the asphalt of Maple Street. We had grown these pumpkins ourselves in our little garden, and like other things in which eleven-year old girls invest human attributes (horses, unicorns, fairies), these round-faced smiling vegetables felt like friends. Not knowing how to console, my mom suggested I write a note telling the offenders how insensitive it was to smash our pumpkins. I wrote it with a Sharpie pen in bold bubble letters and taped it to the fence. Boy, did I tell them!

Over the decades my heart went the hard way of adulthood, accepting the essential vegetative nature of a pumpkin. Yet my depravity has gone further - I admit a secret pleasure, envy perhaps, for the expression of destructive impulses, at least when contained to pumpkins. (My mother used to name her misbehaving students before hurling glass bottles at the recycling center.) Maybe over the years I've gotten in touch with my inner anarchist. Pumpkin parts smeared among fallen leaves expressed an honest impulse.

But I am also now a parent to young children who renew a bit of that old pumpkin magic for me. So a few weeks ago when we visited New Hampshire for the weekend, my father and step-mother took us to their pumpkin patch at Hilltop Farm. For the big boys we selected two perfect pumpkins as big as Reeve. For Tucker we chose one barely bigger than a grapefruit. Reeve and his grandfather hoisted their harvest into my dad's tractor front-loader and drove them back to the waiting station wagon with New York plates.

You might think - what kind of idiot leaves precious homegrown Hilltop pumpkins out on the front stoop in NEW YORK CITY? As a child of the country I believed all cities were thick with thieves in every shadow. After moving to Brooklyn it took us a while to leave strollers on the front porch; now we have to remind ourselves not to leave laptops, or small children. The neighbors all put their pumpkins out, even those who remember twenty years ago when a pumpkin wouldn't last an hour out there. It's the post-Giuliani New York, a softer city, safe even for a gourd.

So at first I thought maybe we had misplaced it. It was Saturday morning and I was getting my bike out to go to my painting class at the Botanic Garden (talk about a softer New York, geesh) when I noticed one of the pumpkins was gone. It was the one with the dimple near the bottom, which made it roll back too easily, so I looked down the basement stairs shaft to make sure it hadn't rolled to an untimely demise. No. Then I called to Jordy to ask if he'd moved it. No. My eyes darted to the street in search of pumpkin guts. I would enjoy the fantasy that a teenaged Banksy had made protest art from our raw material. Nothing. This was insult to injury -- had someone stolen our pumpkin to put on their own front stoop, passing off their petty thievery as legitimate Halloween decor?

Three small boys in pajamas awaited explanation on the porch. "Someone took our pumpkin, guys," I said. They took it like little men, lots of unanswerable questions (who? why? what did they do with it? but it's ours), sad but no tears (and no impulse to write moralizing notes to the perpetrators). We agreed that we would move the remaining pumpkin onto the porch itself, far enough from the stoop, we hoped, to dissuade another theft but asserting our determination not to let these marauders intimidate us into hiding our pumpkins behind glass. Duncan and Reeve honorably agreed to share the remaining big pumpkin, and we voted to table the decision whether or not to tell GrampaDicken and GrammaGhee of their pumpkin's uncertain end.

The decision was made for us Sunday morning. It was barely seven o'clock. The big boys and their dad were running out the door to meet a boat for an off-shore fishing trip. I was running alongside them, holding Tucker on one hip while zipping jackets, when the whole moving Green Bean train ground to a sudden stop and nearly derailed.

At the foot of our steps sat our stolen pumpkin. I knew it was the one from the dimple near the bottom. From our vantage point it looked intact save for a circular incision around the stem.

There was a note on the pumpkin itself. It was written in black Sharpie ink.

"Sorry for taking your pumpkin.
We just wanted the seeds. So we carved it and
brought it back to you.

Happy Halloween!

P.S. Look for me on Halloween. I'll be dressed
as a Vampire."

We spun it around to find our pumpkin laughing, eyes spinning wildly as if from some thrilling, dizzying ride.