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| This guy was one hard-to-find item on Halloween Night... |
So one of the rules I learned in Montreal last year was that, if you see something that looks useful in a store but isn't quite in season, buy it anyway. There's a good chance it won't be there anymore the next time around. I learned that last year with Christmas trees. This year, the week before Halloween, that lesson kept ringing in my ears as I bounced all over my neighbourhood in search of a pumpkin. Today, after my run, I made a deliberate effort walking down Mont-Royal to find a pumpkin to carve. No dice at the chain supermarkets -- including the huge Provigo at the corner of St-Urbain. The market at the Mont-Royal Metro stop wasn't open that day. I had already checked the produce markets near my apartment with no luck...
In the window of a small map shop I noticed a beautifully formed round pumpkin. I could tell it was real, and it was the perfect size. I stopped and peered in the store. No one there but a kind-looking older woman. I love gawking at maps anyway. What the hell could it hurt?
Having spent a fair bit of time in Latin America, I've learned that quite a few things are negotiable. Even things that aren't supposed to be negotiable. It often depends largely on the attitude of the participants. And so I put as much candlepower as I could into my smile and asked the shopkeeper, "Je voudrais acheter la citrouille que vous avez dans la fenêtre..."
She didn't know she had a pumpkin in her window, and after I showed it to her, she asked me if I could donate money to a youth cause that had a changebox in the store. I said that I could definitely do that, but I only had my debit card on me.
We hadn't agreed on a price, and I suggested 10 piastres, which struck her as high, but after all, I noted, it was for the children. She could ring that up on my card, and then put 10 loonies in the box for the kids, and I'd get the pumpkin I had been looking for the past week.
Walking down the block with an enormous grin and a fat orange pumpkin in my sweats, I could see I wasn't the only one who didn't have jack. People kept stopping me on the street asking where I got my big round gourde. I don't think I was ever more careful walking down the street than I was walking home today. And I carved it up (albeit with one false tooth this year), put a candle inside and put it outside the door.
We didn't get any trick-or-treaters last year. We probably won't get one this year. But thanks to a kind woman in a map store (and an apparently deserving charity), I still have a beauty of a jack-o-lantern outside my door.
Happy Halloween Everybody
