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.

Out with the old

"While there may be value in decluttering our lives of material things we no longer need, when it comes to things of eternal importance—our marriages, our families, and our values—a mind-set of replacing the original in favor of the modern can bring profound remorse."

Dieter F. Uchtdorf

Out with the old and in with the new

is tempting for a man to do;

new job, new wife, new car -- yessir!

He changes all in such a blur.

And women are not much exempt

from treating old things with contempt.

New clothes; new shoes; new lifestyle -- wow!

The past is not a sacred cow.

But just imagine our chagrin

if God should want to trade us in! 

And so we'd better mend our ways,

and stick with those from early days! 

Helaman 14:25

 And many graves shall be opened, and shall yield up many of their dead; and many saints shall appear unto many. Helaman 14:25

When the graves were opened and the Saints began to sing,

unbelievers didn't see a single blessed thing.

They said it was hysteria or demons or debauch --

anything, the Gospel truth to permanently scotch. 

But comes the Resurrection, when all the sinners wake,

and those who scoffed will freely own they made a big mistake.

For flesh and bone will once again unite for all to see,

Because the Savior Jesus Christ gave up his life freely.

He bought us with his sacred blood so Satan could not drag

us down to Hell; we each now wear the Lamb of God's price tag! 

My Just Desserts

I have haunted thrift stores. Not antique stores, where they have cute little items to brighten up a room tastefully. But down and dirty thrift stores, where the table lamps are cracked and the tables lean like drunks and the books are cheap and plentiful and dog-eared. 'Antiques Roadshow' would never touch these places with a barge pole.

I moved into Senior Citizen housing last December and have slowly been filling up my apartment with the thrift store detritus from other people's abandoned lives. I thought I was past feeling any sympathetic vibrations from the cheap junk I brought home, but some nights as I gaze at the weary throw rug in the living room or settle into my anemic recliner that groans like a metal viaduct about to collapse I sense the sadness of defeat and demise in these items. It chills me.

So today I decided I would make my last trip to the thrift store, to pick up a glass candy dish for one of the shabby end tables I have next to my swayback couch. Then never go back to one of those places again. I've got enough knick-knacks to last me until I'm pushing up daisies. If I need something else I'll get it on Amazon.com.

As I passed the chipped enamel dishes and glassware I saw my mother's cookie jar. The exact same ceramic jar with different kinds of cookies molded on it, with a walnut knob to lift the top off. But it couldn't be my mother's cookie jar; for it would have to be over sixty years old, plus it was here in Utah and my mother's jar was located in Minnesota. And I had broken hers, and caught hell for it.

As I stared at it, gaping like a carp, the aromas of my mother's cookies winkled my nose . . .  

She, of course, made all her own cookies -- as did everyone else who considered themselves a bona fide housewife. Store bought cookies were for orphans. I never got to taste an Oreo until I was in high school.

Her oatmeal raisin cookies were the texture of velvet. And nothing this side of heaven will ever match the joy of biting into a chocolate chip cookie when the chips were still slightly molten. I dunked them in a glass of milk, and if they started to disintegrate, so what? The sludge in the glass was just about as good as the cookies!

At Christmas she went wild with spritz cookies. She had a dozen vials of sprinkles; a slew of food colors in little teardrop shaped plastic bottles; and several different kinds of icing that would bring a smile to an icicle. And she gave all of them away to the neighbors or kept them hidden for when company came. I fought my cousins like a rabid honey badger just to get a hand full of spritz crumbs!

One winter afternoon, long after the Christmas holidays, when the snow was a sodden lump of gray crystals and cabin fever had made me heedless of peril, I took my mother's cookie jar down from the top of the refrigerator to see if there was anything leftover from the Holidays in it. As I brought it down I fumbled -- it slipped and crashed onto the linoleum floor.

The panic and tears, the recriminations and hairbrush applied to a tender young derriere, need not concern us here. It all happened long years ago, in a time and place that no longer exists -- except in my brittle memory.

The price they wanted for that cookie jar was outrageous. But when I asked, they gave me a Senior Citizen discount so it wasn't so outrageous after all. Now it sits on that shabby end table next to the swayback couch. I don't know what I'll fill it with. Probably store bought cookies.

Helaman 13:4 The Man Upon the Wall

  

And it came to pass that they would not suffer that he should enter into the city; therefore he went and got upon the wall thereof, and stretched forth his hand and cried with a loud voice, and prophesied unto the people whatsoever things the Lord put into his heart.

Helaman 13:4 

Our hectic days and giddy nights hold us in careless thrall,

and so we miss the message of the man upon the wall.

There he stands both day and night, delivering the scoop,

while down below we listen not, but run a fruitless loop.

And when we have to stop because the traffic's at a crawl,

we do not like the things he says way up there on the wall.

He tells us truths so hard and sharp we shudder and refuse

to think the sins that we amass demand such bitter dues.

But when we shout for him to stop and cease his wretched squall,

 we cannot stop his thunderbolts from high upon the wall.

Whether we believe or not, there's something now amiss

with our petty plans as we must gaze down the abyss. 

At last he goes and leaves behind the taste of bitter gall;

yet history will vindicate the man upon the wall . . . 

Helaman 12:3

  And thus we see that except the Lord doth chasten his people with many afflictions, yea, except he doth visit them with death and with terror, and with famine and with all manner of pestilence, they will not remember him.

Helaman 12:3

Chasten me with honey, Lord, to make me bow my head.

Afflict me with abundance of my needful daily bread.

Reproach my money grubbing ways with manageable wealth,

and humble me with eyesight clear and lots of chronic health.

I hardly think a pestilence will help me love Thee more;

or an earthquake move me all Thy ways to much adore. 

I hope I'm not as dense as were those Nephite folk of old,

who needed quite a lot of grief before they would remold.

Killing me with kindness. if I may just recommend,

is how to keep me as Thy servant and devoted friend.

 

Assistant Supervisor at Fingerhut Telemarketing.

My wife became ill carrying our 6th child, and so I left the circus in mid-season to come home to care for her.

But I still needed a job to keep us going. We had just bought a house on Como Avenue, across from Van Cleve Park. There was a big cottonwood in the back yard and squirrels rioted in the attic. That house had real character and I didn't want to lose it.

Happily, just a few blocks away on Hennepin, the Fingerhut Catalogue company had established a telemarketing office. They were desperately trying to find enough warm bodies to fill 120 seats.

So I became a telemarketer. Don't expect me to apologize or start agonizing about the job. It paid well when I went above my weekly sales goals, and I got health insurance -- which was a godsend because that was the year all the kids came down with ear infections and bronchitis.

I enjoyed walking to work each day, past old brick homes with their mansard roofs and weedy gardens full of flaming pumpkins and ruined birdbaths. A lot of those homes were still in the hands of retired blue collar workers from the Pillsbury Mills on the river and machinists from the Ford plant over in St Paul. Their houses were worth a fortune but they hadn't the means to get them fixed up properly, so they sat in their gentle decay like something out of a Southern Gothic novel.

And I prospered at work, becoming an assistant supervisor after only six weeks on the job.

 My boss was Jeff -- a man with no neck and the disposition of an alligator.

My job now was to track the sales of each telemarketer. If they fell below certain well-defined weekly sales goals they were given one warning. Only one. If it happened again it was my job to let them go. That particular part of the job added immeasurably to my vocabulary, after hearing so many colorful descriptions of myself and of Fingerhut from those I gave the old heave-ho to.

That was the year that Fingerhut teamed up with The Swiss Colony to start selling their salami and cheese gift packages over the phone for the Holidays.

If you live in the Upper Midwest you have gotten at least one gift package from The Swiss Colony. They are as ubiquitous as casseroles. Those little pots of mustard; the petit fours; the useless tin cheese knife and plywood cheese board -- it is the stuff that Christmas is made of for the mundane masses from Sioux Falls to Sioux Ste Marie.

And Fingerhut had two million Swiss Colony boxes to sell by phone between October 31 and December 19.

And those gift boxes did sell, like . . . well, like greasy salami and waxy cheddar always sell in a heavily undiscerning Scandinavian and German part of the country. Fantastic.

Our top telemarketer was Shirley. She had been with the company for ages. Her sales statistics were fabulous. Because she cut the sales pitch right to the bone. It never varied:
"Hello this is Shirley I'm from Fingerhut how are you today? We're offering Swiss Colony gift boxes with cheese meat and jelly for only 19-95-plus shipping and handling. How many would you like?"
 Ninety percent of the people she contacted said no. But boy oh boy, that ten percent that said yes made her bonus money up the wazoo.

And she needed the funds. She was a single mother who supported not only her own children but her elderly mother and a host of useless brothers that, she told me once, had put Hamm's Brewery on the map.

Two weeks before Christmas Jeff called me into his sterile white office, which reminded me of an operating room for extra-terrestial probing, to tell me that Shirley was making too much money off of the company and needed to be encouraged to leave.

"She's paid nearly as much as you are" he told me, as if that should cause me to collapse in a dead faint.

I was given my marching orders: She had a performance review coming up that week, and I was to make it a hatchet job; to find fault with everything about her work, her appearance, and her attitude. And to make sure she did not merit another raise!

I did as I was told. I told her she spent too much time in the bathroom; her hair looked unprofessional; her voice was too loud; she was not customer-focused. So it had been decided not to give her a raise this quarter.

She wept and she raged at me. But she stuck it out until New Years, and then walked out the door for the last time with one of the fattest sales bonus checks in the history of Fingerhut . . .  

After bambina # 6 was born that spring, with both mother and child as healthy as a pair of horses, I felt the old restless urge to be out under canvas again, taking pratfalls and selling coloring books. Plus having to do the dirty to Shirley had left a bad taste in my mouth. If that was what management was all about I'd rather risk a blow down from a tornado in Kearney, Nebraska.

So when Clyde Beatty-Cole Brothers Circus called from Florida with an offer, I packed my trunk, kissed the wife and kids goodbye, and got on the Greyhound Bus . . .

Instructions for my funeral

I have no plans on leaving this life any time soon, but Man proposes and God disposes. So I wish to make my wishes known concerning my funeral arrangements.

First, I wish to be cremated. When convenient, I would like one of my children or grand children to scatter my ashes over any fresh river, lake, or stream in Minnesota.

I will probably pass away intestate; that means without a legal will. I see no need to have one, since I own absolutely nothing of value at this time. If that ever changes, I will have a legal will drawn up.

I have made my good friend Nathan Draper my literary executor. He will be in charge of all my writings. He has a document signed by me and witnessed by my daughter Sarah Read to that effect.

I wish my funeral services to be conducted by my Bishop at the time of my demise, and held in the ward chapel.

I prefer that it be a very short service.

I would like the opening hymn to be Nearer My God to Thee.

I would like my children, their spouses, and my grand children to sing, sometime during the service, I Believe In Christ.

I request the closing hymn be Onward Christian Soldiers -- which has always been my favorite hymn.

Please assign speakers to my service who have a firm and coherent testimony of Jesus Christ as the Savior. I wish all talks to center on Jesus Christ and the promise of the resurrection, and not on my life and character. The talks should refer to John 11:25 -- "Jesus said unto her, I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live"

After the service I would be pleased if those attending could retire to the cultural hall or some other convenient community room for a luncheon/dinner, where photographs and other memorabilia of my life can be displayed, and where those attending can reminisce about my life and character. 

My final request is that there be lefse and pickled herring served as part of the luncheon/dinner. 

Helaman 11:6 Famine

  "And this work of destruction did also continue in the seventy and fifth year. For the earth was smitten that it was dry, and did not yield forth grain in the season of grain; and the whole earth was smitten, even among the Lamanites as well as among the Nephites, so that they were smitten that they did perish by thousands in the more wicked parts of the land."

Helaman 11:6

The tendrils of hunger supplied motivation

for dear repentance of that Nephite nation.

But not before thousands in agony died,

all for their wicked and ignorant pride.

Tis better to hunger for righteousness, friend;

and revel in mercy and ev'ry godsend.

For sin lieth at the front doorway of each 

even today, despite all that we preach.

And in a dream we may eat, we may drink;

then waken to find how our bellies do shrink.

My appetite, Lord, please increase to do right,

so that I may feast on thy goodness and light! 

Whenever I see someone blessed

"Why do we feel damaged when someone else is blessed?"  Jeffrey R. Holland.


Whenever I see someone blessed

I start to get very distressed.

Good fortune should be

just mine thoroughly;

all others must choose second-best.