No, this isn’t a post about nursery rhymes, although I did learn something new while I was looking for a catchy title. One of the interpretations of this very old rhyme is that Peter’s wife was promiscious so he stuffed her in the pumpkin as a way to keep her from running around. Seems that there’s some debate as to whether she’s dead or alive when this happens. But there’s also something called McFarlane’s Twisted Fairy Tales where Peter is a cannibalistic serial killer who keeps his victim’s body parts in a pumpkin. [source: Villains Wiki at villains.fandom.com]
This post is about an actual pumpkin. Well, a glass pumpkin.
After conversations over the past couple of years about about knickknacks, souvenirs, and all that clutter that many of us seem hardwired to accumulate, I’ve asked myself who is going to want any of these things I’ve collected over the years? Who is going to know where they came from? Or what they meant to me? So I decided to start telling some stories behind my clutter, and hopefully you’ll find them sentimental, or funny, or strange, or least entertaining. Being October, with Halloween on the horizon, I decided to start with this:
While on a family trip to Estes Park, Colorado, for Chris & Savannah’s wedding in August 2008, we visited Glassworks Studio & Gallery for glass blowing demonstrations. I can’t remember if I watched them make this specific pumpkin or if it was already made & sitting on a shelf, but I thought it was pretty.
Not a very exciting story, I know, but the amusing part came a couple days later while I was going through security at Denver International Airport. As my backpack went into the x-ray scanner, not one, not two, but three TSA agents huddled around their display screen, squinting, with confused looks on their faces. And silence. Then, finally, “do you have a pumpkin in your bag?” All I could do was laugh and say yes.
So this knickknack will forever remind me of the day I befuddled airport security.
The Far Places 