Haven't I Seen That Face Before?

Another older tradition is diminished somewhat by entrepreneurs who have made a fashion statement that has, on the dark side, taken a little of the heart out of hithertofore very personal preparations for Halloween. In economic terms, one industry suffers because of the gains made by another. Noting this, I must confess that my initial opinion has changed, partly because of these observations and beyond them I've realized how much more is lost.

The first time that I saw a trash-bag pumpkin I did a double take. Honest! There it was up on a suburban lawn, this plump monster, grinning out onto the street at all who passed by. For a moment I thought it to be a huge, real pumpkin. Because it was unique to my observation it tickled my sense of humor. As I drove around that day I saw another and then, another.

As long as trash-bag pumpkins remained an oddity they seemed worth spotting. Haven't I seen that face before? "Ah, there's another one." I might see two, or three grinning bags at one house or maybe a dozen: a troop of painted grins black on orange, their number depending on the leaves that fell from the trees. It's laughter that's dependent on the dead: dead leaves. That's appropriate, I thought. And at the same time it's functional because the leaves get bundled up and collected anyway. Why not do it with a little fun replacing the drab, the boringly unnoticable?

In older times people burned leaves and there was a perfume-like familiarity about autumn when piles were set afire in the afternoon. It's a smell I miss even after so many years have passed since burning was banned because it dirtied the environment. It's a better enforced proscription than any aimed at our masters for what they are doing to the woodlands and the streams and the air we breathe. There's profit to be made, though, and they have priority over our comfort and safety. Thus, the individual who relieves himself in the surf is at greater risk of prosecution than the corporation that dumps a million needles or condoms or toxic sludge in an oceanic dump. When I was a kid, I'd worry,but not too much, about occasional excrement rumored to be out there in the ocean that was dropped by some inconsiderate swine or a desperate soul. But it didn't keep me out of the water. Today I really don't want to go into the surf at all and I'm not too keen about walking near the water's edge.

Those trashbag pumpkins that dot the suburban side have become monotonous. The grins are all the same. The tooth alignment is always the same. The eyes all look out with the same vacancy.

One here, one there; these monsters are all clones of the first one I saw. In their vogue they just simply aren't fun compared to those hollowed out gourds that kids and grown-ups carved into boo-faces.

If a thousand pumpkins, lobotomized, scraped out and given faces, were laid end to end they would have a thousand different expressions. Every one has a distinctive pumpkin face. And if you were given two, or three, or twelve pumpkins, your knife would cut a little different eye and tooth and character. In the afternoons of late October they'd sit on railings and porches and in yards or on windowsills, some laughing, others frowning and all happily grotesque. At night many would become jack-o'lanterns whose internal candles turn smiles to leers and frowns to soundless growls. Boo!

Dullards annoint themselves social directors and have contests to appraise the work of their betters. That's okay. Nothing's wasted when people are having fun at things like this. But we're being cheated by plastic pumpkins, especially on trashbags, whose expressionless, always the same faces, lack the character of creation. The first one I saw, and I thought it to be a three-hundred pound real one, was art. It was boo-worthy. Beyond that, the same face caused it to lose identity.

We might have to consider relief for dispossessed pumpkin farmers. At the unemployment line the inclination of the interviewer would be to find them work stamping eyes and mouths on orange trashbag clones.

But a trashbag is a trashbag, Gertrude Stein would agree. They go to the dump whether orange with stamped-on production faces or just Hefty, Hefty, Hefties. On the other hand, pumpkins are alive. Each one is an individual. Their predators are thirteen year old boys, too old to dress-up, too young to be sure about girls, too civilized to steal bags. They sneak past barking dogs into yards and carry them off to the street where they murder them. Dead pumpkins dot suburb roads every fall, victims to violent ends that trashbags cannot know. It's kind of sad to see these murdered sentinals, but that's the risk for being noticed...and fragile.