Pumpkin Persecution

Our neighborhood is a very neighborly neighborhood.

Our neighbor, Selena, used to be an event planner. I think this is like being a community organizer, except that you organize people for unserious reasons.

She is probably the reason that a pumpkin basket showed up on our doorstep a couple of weeks before Halloween. It had candies and little toys and other Halloween fun things in it. It had a xeroxed sheet attached, "Here is a Pumpkin Basket for your Children ... Copy This, Put it in your Window so People know you Got a Basket... And Make Two more Pumpkin Baskets With this Note and Give them to Houses with Children Too!"

Doing the math quickly, I realized that due to exponential growth, within a short time the Earth would covered with Pumpkin Baskets (although probably not before Halloween.)

My wife Barbara couldn't get mobilized into making more Pumpkin Baskets. She was shy about trying to find a pumpkin-basket-less house and sneaking up to it and depositing a Pumpkin Basket. Plus, she was a bit lazy about finding miscellaneous Halloween treats - not to say that's her job, of course - why wouldn't it be my job to make 2 Pumpkin Baskets and find two Pumpkin-Basket-less households (with children!) to deposit these Pumpkin Baskets at? And the copying, we don't have the ability to copy things right at our house. All in all, it just seemed too difficult, and after all (due to the built-in exponential growth) the Pumpkin Basket plan obviously had room for a few shirkers in it here and there (as long as not more than half of Pumpkin Basket recipients were shirkers like us.)

So we gave the treats and toys and suchlike Halloween-related novelties to our kid and put the notice in the window (so people would know we had been served) and kind of forgot about it.

A quick scan seemed to indicate most people had gotten a Pumpkin Basket ...

Then a couple days later another Pumpkin Basket showed up at our doorstep.

And then a couple days later another Pumpkin Basket showed up at our doorstep. I guess people sneaking up to your house to deposit a guerrilla hospitality action basket are too preoccupied with being sneaky to look for a fairly clearly posted Pumpkin Basket notice in your window.

I didn't really want to participate in a Pumpkin Basket chain-pumpkin-basketing. But I feel kind of bad that we had the social failure of not propagating a pumpkin basket - not even one - when we got three. This always happens to me. I have gone down in Social Fail again.

I just hope nobody is tracking these pumpkin baskets somehow. I will always be aware, when facing my neighbors now, that there is an outside chance that they know I have committed Pumpkin Basket Ingratitudeness. I hope it doesn't show on my face.

We have received charity (in an unserious way) and given none.

This made me want to perhaps do something fun for other people. Like sending random people Halloween Boo-quets. But this could be a problem with married women on our block: "Who the hell is sending you flowers for Halloween, honey?!?"

In a mistrusting marriage, that could be the end.