Thanksgiving Memory

(First published in “Seven Days.”  We were  asked to write about a Thanksgiving dish.)

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 nine years old, I won first prize at the Champlain Valley Fair for a pumpkin I grew in my back yard.  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 got only 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 some time ago — I was depressed and decided I’d make a pumpkin pie from scratch.  God knows what I was thinking.  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.

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