If I Try that With this Knife

Dad, can we get a pumpkin?  I had intended to pick the younger one up, rush home, bang out a few more emails, before I returned to get the older one and hour later.  “Um.  Well.  Sure.” She’s right.  There are only a few days left.  “Sure.  Let’s go get one.”

The pumpkins in Beijing are odd.  Clearly, the things available for purchase are relatives of the “pumpkin” family I am otherwise familiar with.  They look more like gigantic squash that have been grown in nutrient deficient soil.   The skin: pale. The shape is rarely the classic oval.  Perhaps I’m the one who’s been duped all these years with genetically modified pumpkins, the color and shape of giant tangerines.   

We are scouring the pile at the local expat market, Jenny’s.  The first pumpkin we pick is weighed out.  Just under twenty dollars.  It seems absurd.  It’s been almost ten years since I’ve bought a pumpkin in the States.  I assume people are paying this and more these days, in coastal cities, and laughing at prices like these and less, anywhere else.  I might be able to save a few denarii with farmers who’ve parked their three-wheeled carts with pumpkins across the street.  But their specimens also look anemic.  “How much is that one over there?”   It’s even more than the first one.  “Fine.  I’ll take that first one.”

I asked the girls to draw the face they wanted, later that night.  Once upon a time, this was fairly straightforward:  draw the face you want.  Instead of starting from scratch, they instinctively go to the web.   There are a myriad of high design jack-o’-lantern’s that a humble man with a knife can look over and feel inadequate about.  “This one is awesome!”  “Indeed.  But I think I’d need a set of x-acto knives and considerably more time than I’ve set aside this evening to pull that off.  “This one!"  “If I try that with this knife, the fangs will snap.” 

Menacing tear-drop eyes have been cut.   We agree upon a nose.  The mouth is the defining organ.  Will he be fierce or idiotic?  Trapezoids are sketched.  Buck teeth are contrasted with incisors.  An enormous maw is drawn on the skin.  One piece and then another fall out the left side.  Pausing to consider, Jack looks like a punch-line with his half wrought mouth.  “We should just leave it.”  “Yeah.”  “Totally.” 

And so, Jack o’ half-the-mouth is a joker this year.