The Lords of the Gourds

This weekend is the annual “Fling Into Fall” celebration in Searsport. It’s held every year on Columbus Day weekend. We have a parade, craft show, antique car show, pumpkin carving contest, pancake breakfast, scarecrow competition… all sorts of fun stuff. It’s really a painless way to squeeze a few last-minute greenbacks out of the few tourists still roaming around… and it really is a lot of fun. We even decorate the town with pumpkins on hale bales, and scarecrows on every utility pole and signpost.

Six years ago, when I had been here only a couple of years, we had a situation just after “Fling Into Fall” that demonstrates one of the "fun" attributes of living in a small town – everyone knows what’s going on, and they NEVER let you forget about it.

That year, Coastal Coffee was closed, so our usual coffee klatch had to move a mile out of town to the new Dunkin Donuts outlet. We were sitting around talking and my good friend, Charliy (yes, I’m spelling his name correctly), asked me what they did with all the pumpkins sitting on the hale bales in the center of town. I asked why he wanted to know, and he said, “Well, they have a beauty of a pumpkin outside Angela’s Hair Salon that I would love to carve into a jack-o-lantern, and put it on my apartment stoop for Halloween.”

I said I didn’t know what they did with them, but ask Ralph – he was the “Fling Into Fall” Chairperson.

Shortly, Ralph came in for coffee and Charliy asked about the orange gourds. Ralph told him they were just thrown away, so if he wanted one, just take it… but he’d better do it before the upcoming weekend when he would be gathering them up for a trip to the compost pile.

Charliy looked at me with that “no time like the present” look, and we hopped into his car and headed toward town. Our good friend, Kevin, followed, to give moral support, and when we got there I could see why Charliy liked it. It was a beauty… and rather heavy. It took two of us to lift it up and drop it into the front seat of Charliy’s car. As soon as we did so, Angela came out of her salon, with a customer trailing behind, inquiring what in blazes we were doing.

Charliy explained Ralph had given him permission to take one of the pumpkins, but Angela was slightly irate. “That isn’t one of those cheap, little things Ralph got. I bought that one myself so I could have a REAL pumpkin outside my shop.”

Well, Charliy started apologizing forty-ways-to-Sunday, and at the end of the conversation, Angela realized she had a problem similar to Ralph’s – how to get rid of the pumpkin. They soon reached an agreement where Charily would keep the pumpkin, provided he give Angela a picture of the “carved” jack-o-lantern so she could post the picture of it on the mirror in her shop. All was ending well.

Charliy kept his part of the bargain, and a week or so later, as we approached Halloween, we were once again enjoying good coffee and conversation at Dunkin Donuts, when the Chief of Police came in… (after all, it IS a donut shop… LOL).  

After a little light conversation about things in general, someone asked the chief if “business” had been OK in town. “Well”, the chief replied, ”we’ve recently had a spate of gang activity and that doesn’t bode well.” Oh my, someone sighed, we don’t need that drug-related stuff coming to Searsport, The chief chimed in, “Oh, it’s not drug gangs we’ve had a problem with… its pumpkin thieves.”

Well, we all laughed out loud as he looked at Charliy and I…  to which Charliy quipped… “Yes, I know that gang well – The Lords of the Gourds”.

Well, the joke didn’t stop there. It advanced in time.

Fast forward 14 months. It’s over a year later… another great “Fling Into Fall” had come and gone, and the Christmas season was approaching. I am now on the Searsport Planning Board. Around the middle of December I got a call from the Town Clerk asking me to come to the Town Office. She had some unfinished business about my appointment to the Planning Board.

When I got to the Town Hall, I was handed a W-2 form, and I was stymied. “What’s this for?”, I asked. “Well”, she replied, “You get a $100 a year stipend for being on the Planning Board, and we need you to sign a W-2 so we can take out the proper taxes.”

“WOW, what a nice pre-Christmas gift”, I exclaimed…. and here is the part about folks in a small town never letting you forget about something.

“Well”, she answered, “Don’t get your hopes up. By the time we take out money for Uncle Sam and the State of Maine coffers, you won’t have much left… but you WILL have enough so you can at least buy your own pumpkin seeds, and you won’t have to steal pumpkins from the local merchants.”

As they say in tennis… Game – Set – Match!