I found two poems this week:
1) The original message, on a bathroom mirror in the UC Irvine library, was (or so I’ve extrapolated), “Thefts happen. Please be aware of your personal belongings.” Someone had chipped it to read:
hefts happe
Please ware person longings.
2) From Wikipedia:
Of the seven continents, only Antarctica is unable to produce pumpkins.
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It was just last week that I told Greg, in my usual impetuous manner, “I want to write something about pumpkins!”
At the time, I was imagining it would be a story. Fiction. I already have one (currently being serviced for faulty pacing) where a woman on an alien moon escapes her colony by climbing a native vine into the unknown lands in the clouds. I was thinking I could work pumpkins into that—until I realized it was an awful idea.
This is much better.
The theme of pumpkins was suggested to me, not by a single source, but by a gradually accumulating conspiracy of sources. I’ve not only been offered pumpkin pie, lately: oh no. I’ve tasted pumpkin pancakes, pumpkin coffee, pumpkin bagels, and pumpkin ice cream. I’ve balanced a pumpkin on my head (see last post), and avoided the sad smashed remains of one in the street. I was in Santa Barbara two weekends ago—sweet alma mater—for Halloween festivities, which didn’t just consist of gallivanting down the street in disguise. No, there was also a pumpkin carving contest.
Like any true artist, Greg designs his Jack o’ lanterns to be a conversation between content and medium. This means, of course, that (every year) he picks the sickest, most gnarly-looking pumpkin in the pumpkin patch, and carves it into a vomiting face. The vomit is made of the pumpkin’s own seeds. There’s something macabre about that.
And Greg always wins.
This year, I came in second: I decided to do a tribute to Humphrey Bogart.
Humphrey Pumpkin turned out quite well. Hat tilted rakishly to the side, he looked up at me and said, “I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”
Well, not really. But he definitely had that stoic Bogart grimace, as if he were, at that very moment, having to choose between love and virtue.
I would have offered to help with the choice—if his lips weren’t pressed into such a thin line.
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Pumpkin: genus Cucurbita. The word originates from the Greek pepon, which the French adapted to “pompon”, and the British to “pumpion”. The American colonists changed it to “pumpkin”, and I for one want to say thank you, pilgrims, for giving us one of the cutest words in Webster’s diction.
As orange as a smoggy sunset, grooved and plump, pumpkins strike some kind of chord in my imagination. They make me think of heedless, headless horsemen galloping through dark autumn nights.
Then there’s Peter: Peter Pumpkin Eater, who had a wife but couldn’t keep her.
Isn’t that one of the eeriest sentences in all the nursery rhyme worlds? At least with old women living in shoes, and blackbirds baked in a pie, you have a concrete image of what’s going on. Mr. Pumpkin Eater (not to be confused with his cousin, Peter Piper who ate a peck of pickles) has a story that’s evocative, yet unspecific. I am led to ask, why couldn’t he keep his wife? Was she just jonesing for Old King Cole?
Maybe Mr. Pumpkin Eater made his wife live in a pumpkin. It’s possible: the largest pumpkin ever recorded was 1,810 pounds. But heck, who wants to reside in a vegetable, even if it’s as big as a timeshare? The walls would rot, and all your underwear would smell like cold soup…
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I apologize for writing about the spirit of Halloween (which, by the way, is an excellent name for a boat) at about the time I should be chanting “Remember, remember the fifth of November” and running around town in a Guy Fawkes mask.
I’m a late bloomer, in the pumpkin sphere: I’m just coming into an appreciation of them now, in my mid-twenties. My family didn’t celebrate holidays for much of my childhood, and, even after that, we never made a big fuss over Halloween—so I hadn’t carved a single Jack o’ lantern until three years ago.
Last year, I got so mad at the pumpkin I was carving that I hurled it into the trash.
I’m just not very good at Halloween. Like Ebenezer Scrooge with Yuletide, I’ve never really understood the holiday—candy? Zombies? The existential choice between tricks and treats?
Humbug!
Ebenezer was visited by three ghosts. Logically, if ghosts come on Christmas, they wouldn’t appear on All Hallow’s Eve—they’d be too dang appropriate to make an impact. What will I be visited by, then? Three elves? Three wise men? Three kings?
There’s a fair chance I was visited by a ghost last Halloween, as a matter of fact. I slept on my friends’ futon, and, every night at one o’clock, I heard the sound of a rolling suitcase on the sidewalk outside. Back and forth, back and forth it rolled, the wheels tripping every few seconds on the division between squares.
This wouldn’t be nearly so strange if my friends’ house wasn’t inside a gated community, which, during the course of Halloween weekend, was regularly patrolled by security guards.
I dubbed it the Rolly-Bag Ghost, and I’m waiting for it to strike again.
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Though the university is called UC Santa Barbara, most students live not in the larger city, but in the much smaller Isla Vista, a town adjacent to campus. It’s a quirky place in the calmest of times—rather like a post-apocalyptic world where everyone over twenty five has disappeared, and giddy groups of drunks wander between impersonal gatherings all evening. During Halloween time, Isla Vista’s natural characteristics are, let’s say, enhanced…
It’s a difficult scene to capture in a few decisive strokes. Imagine a sea of costumes, ranging the gamut from the elaborate to the half-assed (I mean that literally). Imagine a “sexy Elmo” being escorted by a man with nothing on but a carefully positioned box of Cap’n Crunch.
Imagine all this nonsense crowded into one street: Del Playa Drive, the avenue by the sea.
Giant neon arches should be put on either end of Del Playa, flashing the words “Liminal Zone” to anyone who walks underneath. A liminal zone is a place where uncharacteristic behavior is the norm. I’ve had this theory for a while that cultures which repress the most (rights, diversity, desires) are usually the ones that produce the best ghost stories. Very little is repressed in an Isla Vista Halloween, except, of course, common courtesy.
When you’re wearing nothing but your person longings, etiquette lessons take backstage.
There is, however, a thorn in this lion’s paw: Imagine a battalion of cops wending through the costumes, some on horseback—reminding us that, however free we may think we are, this is more of an authoritarian state than ever.
But Humphrey Pumpkin wouldn’t be intimidated by that—so neither will I.
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