Pick Of The Litter

I will be the first to admit that in the last couple of years my family could be accused of being a little too complicated with our pumpkin carving. It never used to be like this. When I was growing up it was the standard triangle eyes and crooked mouth Jack-o-Lanterns you see in front of most houses, but over the last couple of Halloweens we have suddenly become one of those families who says things like, "Has anyone seen my good Dremel bits?" before we start carving. Mostly, I blame the internet for this. If you go online and search for "Halloween pumpkin patterns" you will find a template for almost any design you can imagine and they aren't nearly as hard as you expect them to be. After that it is just a matter of following the directions and having the patience to finish what you start and the compliments you get from Trick-or-Treaters makes the effort totally worth it. Suddenly you look are the standard pumpkin faces as boring. (Also, the nieces have not helped keep us in check because every year my parents let them pick their own design for their pumpkin and they are getting more and more outrageous every year.) They say competition between family members is usually the hardest, so as you can imagine at this point the pressure is high to keep up with the Jones, so to speak.

That means picking the right pumpkin canvas, so when I went to get one this afternoon I was not about to grab the first one I saw. (And if you think I'm buying my pumpkin a couple days too early, my mother got hers at the end of September. I'm amazed the squirrels never got to them.) What I appreciate is that stores have begun to realize that different people expect different things from their pumpkins and have begun to separate them accordingly. The main display at the particular supermarket I was in had several of the small, not-particularly-special-sized pumpkins for sale for $4. These are clearly for the people who are only carving pumpkins because society dictates that is what they should be doing and they will keep their designs as simple as possible. The next size up was the "large, jack-o-lantern" pumpkins for $6. These are much bigger than the last group, but all guaranteed to have at least one messed-up side you will have to work around. Beyond that were the "Cinderella" pumpkins which are not much bigger than the large pumpkins, but perfectly shaped and $10. I assume these pumpkins are the ones which will eventually be carved by experts and end up on TV. Since I am not quite there yet I kept it simple with a standard, large pumpkin that didn't have appear to have any major defects on the one side which will eventually hold my design. But apparently the only thing harder than finding a good pumpkin to carve is buying it.

I went inside the store and found healthy lines at all the registers but miraculously no one in the self-checkout aisle. Figuring this was my lucky day I decided to use that, before quickly remembering that the worst things to buy in the self-checkout aisle are fruits and vegetables. First the machine was angry with me because the pumpkin was too large for the small shelf next to the registers and I had put it down in the bagging area. This convinced the machine I was trying to rob the store and it was only after a couple angry messages about removing my item that I finally got the pumpkin up on the scale that the message finally stopped. I then began hunting down pumpkins on the list of items which don't have a bar code. When I finally found it I discovered that there were actually three categories of pumpkins to choose from. I took a wild guess and went for the middle one since that seemed to coincide with I was buying but, sadly, I choose poorly. The register told me that since my pumpkin weighed 20 lbs, it would cost me $20. In any other circumstance I would think a dollar a pound sounds perfectly fair, except I had just taken this pumpkin out of a bin which clearly told me it was $6. I tried going back and trying the other pumpkin options to see if they rang up correctly, but removing an item after it had been rung up required a manager. This is when it dawned on me I may not be tech savvy enough to handle ringing up my own pumpkin.

Spying an open register I figured this was one of those times where having a human ring me up would come in handy and made my way over to it, leaving the register which had to have its order cancelled to be someone else's problem, which resulted in the 13 year-old manager who was coming over to do just that shooting me an evil eye (which, let's be fair, I totally earned) that was impressive given her age. My trouble was not over once I got to the register, where the woman punching in the buttons not only appeared to be tired of ringing up pumpkins all afternoon she was clearly on the side of the manager because she also gave my the stink-eye as I showed up. Normally I prefer the self check-out because it eliminates the awkward, forced conversation which is usually standard for this kind of situation, but I would have preferred any kind of chatter to the even more awkward silence which happened over the next couple of minutes while the woman kept hitting her keypad, trying to find the correct code in her computer. (She was having a hell of a time finding the code because of course she was.) Even the old lady who came in behind me and offered to break the silence with a "That's a big pumpkin" was met with icy stare from the cashier. I almost wanted to apologize for her guilt by association but figured any further talking would only make things worse. Maybe next year I'll just grow my pumpkin in the yard to save myself the trouble.