The Pumpkin Patch
I had been walking around the pumpkin patch feeling as placid as a newborn God for nearly an hour, admiring all the ways the different pumpkins were connected to the earth, when this old woman, she must have been pushing forty, decided to have a problem with me. She did this even though it was a gray kind of day and she was under a cloudy sky that made everything kind of flat-looking, which is the best kind of day for this time of year, and which everyone knows has special powers that can make strange things happen. She started telling me that she had had to be her own mother and father growing up. Not everyone can be so lucky and have everything handed to them, she told me. Sometimes people have to make their own families out of cloth and wire and their own spit. I had to spend years at the library, she said. While you were out playing around and chasing boys I was studying history, trying to figure out where I could fit my family into it. I didn’t have a choice. They needed to go somewhere, and that’s time I’ll never get back. Do you understand that? Can you imagine what that’s like?, she said. No, I told her, I’ve always felt like I have all the time I could ever want. It’s never something I worry about. Life has always been smooth and easy for me, before you intruded like this. Honestly, meeting you is the first distressful thing that’s ever happened to me. Well, it had to happen sometime, she said. We went back and forth like this for a while, even though it was clear from the outset there was no hope of us resolving anything. All I was learning is that sometimes you meet someone whose eyes are going in completely different directions from your own. Meanwhile, the pumpkins just listened without getting involved in the situation, because they didn’t have faces yet, or even names. I could see my car in the parking lot, but it might as well have been a crater on the moon for how much I could comprehend its relation to my life just then. The old woman’s car was parked right next to it. It had to be hers because there was no one else here, no one else anywhere close to here, and anyway, it looked like the sort of car she would drive. I saw some sort of hulking shadow in a ski mask slip a bent coat hanger into the door and work it open, then climb into the back seat and hide. When I tried to tell her about this, she said I was missing the point.