“Remember when …” There they are-the two most frequently used words inthe lexicon of over-30s. In fact, social scientists (They are the scientists who know a lot of people and are fun at a party. The rest are introverted scientists.) tell us that the frequency of using that phrase is directly proportional to the speaker’s age.
Last year about this time, I was sitting on our back porch with my buddy Barney enjoying a fresh pot of Folgers and a box of discounted day-old Krispy Kremes, engaged in a “remember when” marathon.
Keep in mind, Barney isn’t exactly the sharpest pencil in the box, so his contributions were quite minimal. Even on a good day-which for Barney is dang near every day-he can barely recall what he had for supper the previous night. He is one of those rare and blessed individuals who, through no conscious effort, can block the daily emanations of the effluvia that insidiously blast away at us like some video game.
Now there’s a misnomer for you. “Video game.” It’s not video-just pixelated cartoons. Real videos are real reality. Significant events that we capture on film with our video cameras to swoon over after the actual event has faded into memory. Such as Joanne’s precious videos of Fluffy toying with a ball of yarn or casually dismembering a dinner-plate-sized toad that she drug from under the neighbor’s garage. That’s a video. They are not “games” either. They are mind-numbing excursions into the realm of death, destruction and disintegration that teach our children nothing but aberrant behavior and sociopathic isolation. Canasta-now there’s a game.
As the box of Krispy Kremes capitulated to crumbs, we got around to remembering the most celebrated holiday of our youth. The holiday that captivated the minds and imaginations of kids for weeks, if not months.Youthful anticipation superseded everything from schoolwork to sports. The arrival of the big day was the culmination of all the hopes and dreams, fantasies and expectations of children from Maine to Mississippi.
Of course I’m talking about Halloween.
Our Halloween pumpkin was almost as important as our Halloween costume. We remembered how we would sit on some chilly October afternoon on our back porches, hacking away at Volkswagen-sized orange behemoths that the old man would bring home in the Volkswagen-sized trunk of the family ’53 Buick. Transforming them into happy-faced (always smiling) jack-o’-lanterns.
With stringy pumpkin guts clinging to our hands, arms and hair, we would proudly show them to our mothers who ventured out, not so much to admire our creations, but to reclaim the butcher knives that we had copped for our (usually bloodless) surgery.
We concluded our remembering marathon by deciding that nowadays kids are being deprived of one of the greatest experiences of being a kid. Today’s pumpkins, these imported apple-sized pumpkin wannabes, sold by the big-box behemoths, are an agricultural embarrassment.
We decided right then and there that we would rectify the situation. We would plant a pumpkin patch.
Since Barney’s brief stint of running for public office (city dogcatcher), he has cultivated a lot of stroke down at City Hall. He has a friend whose cousin knows the lady who cleans the mayor’s office. When she threatened to disclose certain photographs that she dug out of his trash one night, he eagerly approved our request for a vacant piece of land next to the city dump. All we had to do was haul off the old cars and plow up the oil and grease-soaked soil.
We searched for a site on the Internet that sold garden seeds. We ordered 30 pounds of pumpkin seeds called Big Hunkin’ Punkin. They showed a picture of some guy who hollowed out one and parked his farm tractor in it. Sort of like those pictures of the redwood trees in California back in the ’30s. We figured it was PhotoShopped. By midsummer our crop looked promising. Vines had completely taken over our entire patch and nearly half of the adjacent city dump. Apparently there is a lot of nutrition left in rotting cans of SpaghettiO’s and pork ’n’ beans.
Last month, our pumpkins were already the size of beach balls, so we felt safe to start advertising Barney’s Halloween Punkin’ Patch. Barney thought of the name. Like I said, he’s not the brightest bulb in the ballroom. Not exactly catchy, but I figured what the heck.
We were about to open for business last week when we noticed one morning that 30 or 40 pumpkins had gone missing. Hoodlums, we figured. Same thing the next night. If this were allowed to continue, we would have been “sold out” before we even opened.
So Barney came up with a brilliant plan. He found a sheet of plywood that someone had thrown in the city dump and painted a sign on it: “DANGER. One punkin’ in this patch has been poisoned. Do Not Pick.”
The next morning we eagerly drove out to Barney’s Halloween Punkin’ Patch, fully expecting to see the remainder of our crop intact. But there it was.
The hoodlums had crossed out the word “one” and crudely painted over it with the word “two.”
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Bill Rausch is a freelance writer from Little Rock. Email him at williamrausch25@yahoo.com.
Editorial, Pages 15 on 10/31/2013