Pumpkin

My sister Gillian Randall has been digitizing old slides that our parents took of us many decades ago and this one reminded me of a short piece I did for Vermont’s Seven Days in 1996 (https://www.sevendaysvt.com/). The editors asked us all to write a little something about Thanksgiving dinner, each of us taking a separate item on the menu. This was mine.

They asked me to write about the pumpkin pie and I said I would because I know all about pumpkins. Pumpkins and I go way back. You can’t trust them. When I was eight years old, I won first prize at the Champlain Valley Fair for a pumpkin I grew in my backyard. It was very beautiful, round and perfect. Everybody said I had a green thumb. But nobody told me about crop rotation, so when I tried it again the next year I only got a pathetic stunted thing that looked more like a gourd with warts. I felt betrayed, yes, violated. I turned my back on pumpkins for many years.

Then one day when I was getting a divorce -- this was also some time ago -- I was depressed and decided I’d make a pumpkin pie from scratch. God knows what I was thinking of. I really needed some TLC. What I hadn’t counted on was the heartlessness of the pumpkin. Pumpkins are very selfish fruits -- they don’t forget. It took me six hours to steam it, peel it, mash it and so forth, and by the time I was done I had drunk three bottles of wine and couldn’t taste the pie at all. I called the woman I was still married to and yelled at her over the phone. She said I was a jerk and hung up.

The moral of this story: It’s just as good out of a can. Pumpkins will let you down.