Pumpkin Pie Famine

“There is definitely a shortage of pumpkins and it’s really due to a smaller yield this year. The pumpkin yield nationwide was down 70 percent, so that’s a huge reduction in what we’re used to,” said Vivian King of Roundy’s Supermarkets.

This is potentially bad news for pumpkin pie lovers like Pat Moore. Moore said that he just had pumpkin pie at his niece’s birthday and will be disappointed if the shortage prevents him from having more.

“We like pumpkin pie and everyone was commenting on how delicious it was, so it would be missed if there’s a shortage,” Moore said.

– WISN News, Milwaukee, “Bad Pumpkin Harvest Could Affect Thanksgiving Dessert Plans”

Sweet Jesus. Hide your children. Lock the door. Good. Now lock it again. If Pat Moore smells pumpkin anywhere near your family, he will eat them.

I don’t mean to be an alarmist, but I used to work with Pat Moore. He had the cubicle next to mine. Seemed like nice enough guy, into golf and boats, that sort of thing. We used to take smoke breaks together. But one time, I remember, we walked down to Roundy’s to pick up a pack of cigs, and while we’re walking through the store, Pat stops dead in his tracks and just stares at this bin of pumpkins. His eyes go all googly and he starts muttering to himself. Something about ample harvests, sweet round lovelies, and then all of a sudden he raises his arms and screams, “All my crusts shall be filled!”

I didn’t think anything of it at the time. Someone’s always flipping out at Roundy’s. It’s just that kind of place. Besides, Pat seemed totally normal otherwise.

The next year Pat’s wife left him right at the end of October. So we decided to invite him over to our place for Thanksgiving, you know, to cheer him up. We figured if he got a load of my family, then he might not mind being divorced and completely alone.

Now, this was back in ’02, year of the Great Pumpkin Famine. As you well remember, it devastated everyone’s dessert plans. The cans of filling disappeared from store shelves in September. The pumpkin bin at Roundy’s stayed empty through October. Many pumpkin farmers jumped out their windows. Fortunately, most of them lived in ranch-style homes. But their state of desperation was not lost on us. Come the week of Thanksgiving we thought long and hard about how we were going to get by. We had heard reports of people making pie with nettles and shoe leather. My Estonian barber told me he had fought the Soviets for fifteen years in the Baltic forests subsisting solely on salted dog turds, which, he assured me, tasted just like pumpkin pie. But we swallowed our dignity and settled for blueberry filling. Sometimes we must be thankful for very little.

The day of Thanksgiving, my extended family rolled in. I say rolled because my Aunt Blanche, in the years prior to her stomach stapling, had to be wheeled in on a dolly, while cousin Elmer had taken to wearing roller skates to family events ever since his head injury. Uncle Poot arrived true to form, farting the national anthem and in his customary overalls whose baggy depths concealed loaded firearms.

Then Pat Moore showed up. He had a crazed look. He said he had just come from his niece’s birthday. “Guess what? They had pie there. It was pumpkin pie. I ate it. Little girls don’t deserve pumpkin pie. Pat Moore deserves pumpkin pie. We will be very disappointed if something prevents us from having more pie.”

Sure, I was a little unnerved, but I felt sorry for the guy. Everyone was hard hit by the pumpkin famine, I told him. It was only natural to be upset. And here I gently inserted that this Thanksgiving, given such dire circumstances, we would be concluding the meal with blueberry pie.

At that moment I saw the switch flip in Pat Moore.

We tried to proceed with the meal like everything was normal. But Pat just stared at his plate. Not even Uncle Poot’s racist jokes could trigger a reaction. Cousin Elmer, oblivious to the tension, chirped: “Hey, Pat doesn’t eat turkey. Just like Elmer. Elmer only eats ham!” Pat slowly looked up, his eyes swelling as they took in cousin Elmer’s orange protective helmet. “Pumpkin?” Pat intoned, raising his finger to Elmer’s head. “Pumpkin.” And with that, he dove across the table and, with a gruesome efficiency, tore poor cousin Elmer’s head clean from its shoulders and devoured it whole. By the time Uncle Poot had fetched his gun from his overalls, Pat Moore was gone.

In the days following Thanksgiving, brigands could be seen roaming the suburbs. Looting the wilting jack-o-lanterns from their neighbors’ doorsteps, lopping the hands off homeowners clinging to their gourds, plundering autumnal cornucopias in window displays, the pumpkin gangs ravaged the Midwest on their campaign of terror. Their leader: a man named Pat Moore, a savage man, a man like you and me, a lover of pumpkin pie. Give thanks that he doesn’t find you.