By David Crow
Getting To Know You
David Crow
It isn’t fall in New England without a few pumpkins. Be it a pumpkin pie, a pumpkin spice latte or a jack-o-lantern, you’re going to have a little pumpkin in your life when the days get shorter and the nights get colder.
Pie and latte I’ve got down pretty good. Jack-o-lanterns, on the other hand, always confounded me. I can honestly say during my many years of pumpkin carving I may have produced only one or two of what I would consider “wins” when it come to jack-o-lanterns.
With three kids in the house I always carved, or aided in the carving, of three pumpkins during October. You’d think that a guy with that much time in carving pumpkins would be good at it, but the sad truth is that over the years what I did to those pumpkins probably would qualify as mayhem under the laws of Connecticut.
Every year the jack-o-lantern project started with such optimism. There was the happy run to the local farm to pick up the required number of pumpkins, followed by a careful selection process to pick pumpkins with the proper shape and volume. After that we’d try to guess the weight of the pumpkins, pay for them and then transport them home. Once they were home, the pumpkins spent a few days on the back porch to ripen enough for carving. Invariably during those designated ripening days, one pumpkin would get gnawed on by a hungry critter, thus requiring procurement of a replacement pumpkin.
Finally, the big carving day would come. We would spread newspapers all over the kitchen table and break out the carving implements.
Over the years I experimented with a lot of carving implements. At first, I did the yearly massacre with a butcher knife. Those poor jack-o-lanterns all had outsized noses and eyes due to the sheer size of the carving implement. I soon switched to a steak knife on the advice of a friend. Allegedly that would give me more fine motor control during the carving process.
Instead of massacring the pumpkin, the steak knives bent on the pumpkin rind, necessitating a return to the butcher knife. So much for that theory.
Someone tried to tell me to use a pen knife and another person swore that a carpet knife was the way to go. I gave those an honest try, but it didn’t take long to break those thin razor blades off in the rind. The Dremel drill did a good job of shredding its way through the rind, but it turns out Dremel drills don’t mix well with shredded pumpkin rind. For a little while things were going well, but then there was the sudden smell of roasting pumpkin. Then the Dremel drill bogged down and had to be discarded. This left us with a one-eyed jack-o-lantern with half a nose and no mouth. I had to finish that massacre with the butcher knife again. The jack-o-lantern that looked like it barely survived a car accident.
The store-bought pumpkin carving kit with a little saw and a what looked like dental picks was another slightly less expensive failure. I went back to the butcher knife again, but in my defense that year I actually produced a jack-o-lantern of some artistic value. The butcher knife made such a mess of the two eyes that they connected together into one big eye. By sheer carving incompetence, I produced a cyclops pumpkin that everyone adored. In art terms I had what the painter Bob Ross would have termed a “happy accident.”
I tried everything. I tried templates, knives, saws, sandpaper, drills. I even once cheated and used a brace and bit that produced beautiful round eyes but left something to be desired in the mouth department. That jack-o-lantern looked pretty surprised. Nothing ever really worked, except for my old friend the butcher knife, which was kind of like using a chain saw to prune rose bushes.
As a jack-o-lantern carver I was hopeless.
What I did to some of those pumpkins would make Jack the Ripper cringe in horror. Over the years, it became a perennial family joke. We can tell which year it is when we look at old Halloween pictures of the jack-o-lanterns I victimized. My kids always got a big kick out of watching my struggles. When viewed from that perspective I’d say that those pumpkins gave their lives to a noble cause. Braced by that thought, I’ll keep trying.
Maybe this is my year.
David Crow lives in Orange with his wife and three children. He practices law and he asks everyone to call him “Dave.” Only his mother and his wife call him “David,” and only when they’re mad at him. You can contact Dave at Sit.a.Spell.and.Visit@gmail.com. He’ll always find a half hour for a good chat.