• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

His autumn display was anchored by melons, colorful gourds, and enough varieties of pumpkin to fill a seed catalog for specialists. I was particularly enchanted with one he had stacked into pyramids all around his stand. It was unglamorous by conventional standards: dark blue-green, smaller than the average jack-o’-lantern, a bit squat, and covered over 100 percent of its body with bluish warts. He identified it as Zucche de Chioggia. We took photos of it, chatted a bit more, and then moved on, accepting the Italian tourist’s obligation to visit more of the world’s masterpieces than the warty pumpkin-pyramids of Amadeo.

At day’s end we were headed back, after having taken full advantage of an olive oil museum, a farmers’ market, two castles, a Museum of Fishing, and a peace demonstration sponsored by the Italian government. We passed by the same vegetable stand on our return trip and couldn’t resist stopping back in to say hello. Amadeo recognized us as the tourists with no vegetable purchasing power, but was as hospitable as ever. He’d had a fine day, he said, though his pyramids had not exactly been ransacked. I admired that pumpkin, asking its name again (writing it down this time), and whether it was edible. Amadeo sighed patiently. Edible, signora? He gave me to know this wart-covered cucurbit I held in my hand was the most delicious vegetable known to humankind. If I was any kind of cook, any kind of gardener, I needed to grow and eat them myself.

I asked if he had any seeds, glancing around for one of those racks. He leaned toward me indulgently, summoning the disposition that all good people of the world maintain toward the earnest dimwitted: the seeds, he explained, are inside the pumpkin.

Oh. Yes, right. But…I struggled (in the style to which I’d become accustomed) to explain our predicament, gesturing toward our rental car. We were just passing through, in possession of no knives, no kitchen, no means of getting the seeds out of the pumpkin. Amadeo suffered our helplessness patiently. We would be going to a hotel? he asked. A hotel with…a kitchen? They could cook this pumpkin for us any number of ways, baked, sautéed, turned into soup, after setting aside the seeds for us.

I frankly could not imagine sallying into the kitchen of our hotel and asking anyone to carve up a pumpkin, but we were in so deep by now I figured I’d just buy the darn thing and leave it in a ditch somewhere. Or maybe, somehow, figure out how to extract its seeds. But I had to ask one more question. A pumpkin grown in a field with other kinds of winter squash would be cross-pollinated by bees. The seeds would sprout into all sorts of interesting combinations, none of which you’d ever really want. I asked about this in my halting Franco-Spitalian.

The light dawned over his face. He understood perfectly, and began talking a mile a minute. He gestured toward a basket of assorted bright, oddly shaped gourds, and told me those were allowed to cross with each other freely, with the obvious sordid results. He wanted to make sure I understood. “Signora, it would be as if you had not married an Italian. Your children could be anything at all!”

Not married an Italian—Mama mia! I shuddered, to make my sentiments clear. Amadeo then seemed satisfied that he could continue the genetics lesson. On his farm, Zucche de Chioggia was prized above all other pumpkins, and thus was raised in a “seminario” where the seeds would breed true to type.

A seminary? I pondered the word, struggling for cognates, only able to picture a classroom of pious young pumpkins devoting themselves to Bible study. Then I chuckled, realizing there must be a common root somewhere—the defining condition having to do with these chaste fellows all keeping their genes to themselves. How could we not buy such a well-qualified vegetable? Off we drove with our precious cargo, warts and all.

Back in our hotel room, I paced around staring at it, trying to summon the courage to take it down to the dining room. “You take it,” I prodded Steven.

“No way,” was his helpful reply.