The Pumpkins

When you follow Hennepin Avenue east towards St Paul, it turns into Larpenteur Avenue once it hits Lauderdale.

When I still had the dew behind my ears, our family drove down Larpenteur the Sunday before Halloween each year to pick out pumpkins.

For reasons I cannot explain clearly, this was an outing my dad readily agreed to without any growls or feints. Perhaps he enjoyed the simplicity of driving straight ahead, without worrying overmuch about traffic lights or gridlock. Perhaps he liked the bucolic countryside that was Larpenteur Avenue back in those days -- truck farms, greenhouses, and the U of M's experimental fields. My mother, also, found the trip less trying than most other sojourns in the car; she looked out the window at the mellow fields without offering a single driving tip.

We would pull up to the lot that had the biggest pile of pumpkins to begin our search for the perfect Cucurbita pepo. My sisters were always satisfied with something round and well-behaved; but I would scout around for misfits -- lopsided or oval or bulging in the wrong places. Since my carving skills were practically nil, I found that these misbegotten squashes could be turned into weirdly creepy jack-o-lanterns with just a few inept slashes.

Pumpkins securely deposited in the trunk, dad would walk over to the crude wooden stall and drop three quarters into the tin can. I never once saw anyone manning a stall on these Sunday trips. They were either at church, or inside their homes napping or watching a football game. But every stall lay abandoned on Sundays, relying on the Honor System.

At home the pumpkins were put on the basement steps until after school on Halloween, when we kids would joyfully wield the old steak knives mom gave us (so dull they hardly cut through butter) to disembowel our pumpkins and carve the most hideous features into the orange ribbed skin that we could think of.

An interesting sidelight I recall is that mom would only lay the Pioneer Press down before we began our attacks. She claimed it was more absorbent than the Minneapolis newspapers. She also used the Pioneer Press for cleaning fish and to line the parakeet's cage. The Minneapolis papers were saved for the paper drive.

To this day I associate Halloween not with gaudy costumes or bags bulging with candy -- but with the smell of singed pumpkin from the candle flames inside each one of our creations. There was something archaic and druidic about those flickering specks of light streaming from the hewn grimaces of our pumpkins, and the odor of roasting pumpkin flesh mingled with stale candle wax as the wick burned down gave me a delicious shiver that wasn't quite terror, but wasn't quite comfort either . . .

Today I live in Senior Citizen housing, which is nice and quiet. But on Halloween it's too quiet, and I sure miss messing with the innards of a big fat pumpkin.

Oh well, they don't get the Pioneer Press out here anyways.