Frankie's Fall
an excerpt

“Who’s Frankie?”

Even now, two years later, I get that question, and I’m still not sure how to answer it. Some people thought him beautiful. Others called him an abomination. As for me, I like to think of him as a 600-pound avenging angel.

He wasn’t an angel in the traditional sense. No halo. No wings. No well placed lightening bolts at people one finds offensive.

He was more like the noble, self-sacrificing type.

And, more specifically, he was the pumpkin type.

I realize the name may have thrown you off. Pumpkins don’t typically have names. But, at 600 pounds, Frankie wasn’t exactly typical, and he was, quite simply, deserving of a name.

He was dubbed Frankie by his owner, Hollis Granger. Because Hollis, a big fan of Mary Shelly’s work, thought Frankenstein a bit formal for a gourd, and because Hollis has a tendency to want to name everything – his car (Big Red), his front oak tree (Bertha), his electric toothbrush (Tad).

Anyway, it wasn’t really Frankie’s size that made him unique. There are far bigger pumpkins in this world. (Some guy in Rhode Island grew one that weighed over 1,600 pounds this past year.) However, those record-breaking colossus tend to get distorted by gravity and end up looking less like pumpkins and more like enormous blobs, like someone flipped them out of the pumpkin mold too soon – all flat on one side, all bloated on the other.

Frankie was different. He was almost five feet around and perfectly formed. His color was a highly saturated orange and there wasn’t a blemish on him. So, when anyone met him, the initial response after the expletive was to reach out for a quick touch, just to make sure he was real.

He was real, of course, and felt real enough. Cool and solid. And if you were to dig your finger nail into his skin (because you had to), it would make a slight indentation. Although, that was hard to manage with Hollis standing right next to you, which is where he usually was when someone visited with Frankie.

How something like Frankie came to be is a mystery to most, but from what I understand, Granger’s gardener, Ben Greenwood, took a particular interest in the pumpkin, starting with the seed itself. As to where he got that seed to begin with, I’ve never been able to find out. I’ve asked him a couple of times, but he’s good a hedging subjects as well as shrubs.

And so it was, a strange little season, that time of Frankie – when acorns fell like rain and cats ran around in herds. Subtlety just wasn’t in fashion that year. But everything I am going to tell you is fact. I was there and witnessed it first-hand.

Of course, even now, when I sit out on Betty’s front porch (we all still call it Betty’s place) after having enjoyed the best pecan pie of my life, I look down Cumberland Avenue and I wonder myself at how one’s life can change so completely in such a short space of time. In the shortest season of all – in one single fall.