The Dark Night of the Pumpkin

In an effort to avoid the internet today I’m going to complain, briefly, about the selling of pumpkin decorations in stores long before the joyful harvest is actually being hauled home.

Instead of starting school yesterday—because, well, why start one day when you can start the next, or the one after that—I took my oldest child and trotted off to a bright shiny home goods store to replace our stash of tea cups. It happens every eight months or so. We look in the cupboard and find that all the good cups have had their handles broken off. Sure, there are plenty of cups in there still, but the ones that you can drink tea out of only number three.

The whole tea cup thing is super tetchy. It’s like having the right kind of pen. If the pen is wrong, nothing can be written down. If the tea cup, by which I mean smallish mug, is too think and chunky, there’s no point even making the tea. If you’re really desperate you go wash a cup. If you’re languid and unsure, you just walk by and go do something else. But that doesn’t happen very often. Mostly you find yourself washing the cup over and over.

Anyway, where was I? Oh yes, none of the cups had handles. They’d all be broken off in the usual carelessness of life lived to its outer limit. To get through the day you have to drink sixteen cups of strong caffeine, you have to plug your phone in over and over, you have to jot forty-five things down in your notebook. And so, through abundant use and the tragedy of sin, the cup breaks, the cord frays, the pages fall out of the book, and mourners keep going about the streets complaining that nothing is the way it should be.

We went, of course, hoping to find exactly the same cups that we already had, because we loathe change, and were therefore disappointed because nobody in the world makes the same thing twice. The money making mafia constantly alters everything, without relief. And so we had to buy cups of other designs and shapes, with differently colored flowers, and, in abject desperation, one with a dog and one with some cats. It was humiliating handing them over the counter to the friendly checkout person, trying to draw attention to the weather, averting my own gaze from such an egregious failure of taste. But the shape was right and the feel of the china was right so what were we to do, go to another store? Perish the thought.

As an aside, one of the quiet pleasures of my life is walking through large brightly lit places that sell things, seeing lots of objets (that’s French for junk) I’d like to have, and then finding within myself the fortitude to just walk away, to leave them all there lying on the shelf, unbought, to then take my single item to the counter and stand behind someone with a cart full of stuff—the person, in other words, who did not have the inner resources to resist temptation, and who is laying out actual money for large awkwardly shaped red velvet throw pillows with the word “sparkle” emblazoned across the front—and silently judging her. My own frugal virtue, which I am not able to perceive very often, is right there plain as day and it fills me with a warm glow, a thrill of contented joy.

But this feeling is ruined when the store is cluttered up with a lot of junky ceramic and paper mache pumpkins, with life sized skeletons in tuxedos holding champagne buckets, with little painted decorative boards that say “Fall.”

See, it’s not fall. It won’t be fall technically for seventeen more days. We didn’t rush past winter into spring and then into summer all those months ago. Trust me, we didn’t. We Couldn’t because the weather wouldn’t let us. You can stock every store in town with little tiny shorts and tank tops all you want, but until mid July it’s not summer because I’m still wearing my thick Binghamton sweater, which I will be getting out next week already, as the temperature leaves the glorious exultant 80s and plunges into the depths of mid 60.

So Don’t Rush Me. You—whoever you are who markets stuff to Americans—are just being mean. I need more time. I don’t need to be visually catapulted from one season to the next before the one I’m in is even over. The more you rush me to the next thing, the less time I have to be where I am. And, because I’ve had to look at your wretched pumpkins for three months, when the day of the pumpkin finally dawns I am fed up and don’t even enjoy it. I want to be in the season that is actually going on. I want to finally be wearing my shorts on the one hot day of the year and relish the fact that summer came for a brief bright stormy moment. When it is finally fall, I will enjoy that too. Stop trying to shove me along through time which only leads inexorably to death. Just stop.

And now, sadly, back to the internet. Oh wait, no school. I guess I could start school. Pip pip.