If you can remember, as a child, watching Linus (of the Peanuts gang) spend every Halloween waiting in a dark and lonely pumpkin patch for the Great Pumpkin to arrive, than you’re about my age. It’s the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown debuted in 1966. I was four years old that year. What I remember most about Linus’s Great Pumpkin theory, other than the fact that it was a little scary and creepy, is that the GP wasn’t supposed to bring you presents like Santa; instead, the non-gender-specific, magical vegetable was supposed to grant you wishes…. or something like that. For the sake of this article, let’s not dwell on the whole, “precise accuracy,” thing.
As a slightly overweight kid, painfully growing up with both acne and a bad haircut, I’m not ashamed to admit that I did have a Great Pumpkin “wish list.” While I secretly carried my list around, year after year, in my Velcro waterproof wallet, I failed to actually wait in a pumpkin patch on the night of October 31st for the squash’s arrival. That’s right, a pumpkin runs in the cultivars of squash, most commonly those of Cucurbitapepo, but let’s not spread that information around. If the Great Pumpkin had actually made an appearance, m
y absence was duly noted by the non-granting of my wishes.
Wish list items are typically things we would like in our lives, but they aren’t necessarily things we need to make our lives substantially better. As everyone knows, a wish list can be comprised of just one specific wish or several wishes. As a kid, my wishes typically revolved around peer acceptance. My first wish was always weight related. I wish I wasn’t fat, or as I phrased it, “A lean mean Cub Scout machine.” As best as I can recall, that was usually followed by; I wish my pimples would disappear or at the very least they should be accepted as an attractive tween facial feature. Finally, I added, I wish my parents would let me go to Supercuts, instead of making me cut my own hair. I never believed in wishing for things that were completely unrealistic, such as $1,000,000,000,000, having the ability to fly or making a guest spot on the Brady Bunch as Marcia’s super cool boyfriend, Nick.
Today, as an adult and father, my Great Pumpkin wish list is dramatically different from that of my adolescent years. A lot of items on my wishes are either related to my daughters, my age or simple practicality. Please allow me to expand upon this statement.
I wish the kids of today weren’t so addicted to smart phones. Somehow my, “It’s the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown,” peer group managed to survive without mobile satellite technology (pre 1995-96) and we turned out (relatively) okay. I don’t know if anyone has noticed, but our children virtually have their cell phones adhesively attached to their hands every waking hour of the day and sadly the irony is they do more texting than talking. Texting is the younger generation’s aversion to actually talking, but we may find out that we’re raising a society of mute drones! The mute drones will eventually battle their zombie parents because there is no possible way our non-speaking kids will ever be able to live without us, so they’ll have to settle for living with our animated corpses. This would be a great Halloween theme party.
Remember the olden days when we had to use the house phone to call a friend. Remember when we came home to a blinking answering machine? Remember pay phones? Granted, there are inherent conveniences, but have our lives dramatically improved due to instant connectivity? It makes you wonder if Linus would have been so loyal to the Great Pumpkin in the year 2013 or would he just have Snapchatted?
I wish this “twerking”dance thing was perceived as cheap and skanky. Oh wait, it is. See, wishes do come true. Whether it’s Miley, “Lizard-Tongue,” Cyrus in a music video, or some teenage Danville girl at a high school party, twerking is code for “stripper dancing.” While it’s acceptable at certain gentlemen’s clubs in Las Vegas (I hear things and read a lot), I don’t need to see it while watching television with my family or fear that this is the acceptable new dance craze at country club birthday parties. Young girls become exposed to this tawdry behavior and think it’s fun and acceptable. In most cases adults are alarmed and/or disgusted and hormone raging teenage boys get over stimulated. I can make that statement because I was once a hormone-raging boy. As a society, can we all agree to dial it down a bit and discourage this type of behavior? If not, I fear we’ll soon be seeing prepubescent girls, provocatively twerking on the playgrounds across the country. I feel my head pounding and my chest tightening just thinking about it.
I wish I could sing. The truth is, I do often get asked to sing solo, so low that no one can hear me. It’s not like I want to win The Voice or Geriatric American Idol, I just want to carry a tune. My singing voice is so pitchy right now that I make our dogs, Trudy and Molly, howl like wolves. They’re a tougher judge of talent than Simon Cowell. It would be so nice to be a Michael who could belt out a tune like Michael Bublé(crooner), Michael McDonald (soulful) or Michael Bolton (cheezy). Sadly, I’ve spent fifty-one years trying to improve my singing voice, with no luck, so all I have left is to hope my wish is one day granted.
I wish my dogs could talk. I am convinced that Molly, our big dog, and Trudy, our little dog, would have incredibly interesting things to say. Molly, who is two years old, would, in all likelihood, be short, curt and have that snide, teenager attitude, since two dog years is equivalent to 14 people years. Trudy, who is in her mid-60s in doggie years, would probably just go on and on about all her aches and pains. It would be just like living with Grandma. I’m totally convinced Trudy would rat out Molly for all the trouble she causes chewing up everything she finds in a closet, kitchen and yard. Speaking of which, if the dogs could talk, they could let me know what the kids, neighbors, gardeners and house sitters are up to when I’m not home. If the dogs could talk, it would be like having a living, breathing, butt-sniffing undercover security webcam. On the other hand, who’s to say they wouldn’t be tattling to mom for all my indiscretions? All it would take is one tasty Scooby snack and they would sell me out faster than lick their privates. Let me rethink this wish a little.
While I was a big fan of the comic strip, Peanuts, created by Charles Shultz, there were certain elements of the annual Halloween animated television special that troubled me. How old was Linus? Six, maybe seven years old, tops? Who in their right mind lets a second grader go to a pumpkin batch by himself on Halloween night? No one, that’s who! Did I mention that Linus convinced Charlie Brown’s little sister, Sally, to accompany him to a vacant field at night? Young Mr. Linus, and Linus’s parents, for that matter, can thank their lucky stars that I wasn’t Sally’s dad! That’s all I’m saying.
But seriously, wish list items aren’t qualities, skills or possessions that some genie, fairy or Great Pumpkin will be delivering to us in the dead of night on Halloween, Christmas or any other day during the year. (It would be awesome if that actually did happen, but it won’t, so I need to let it go, or so my therapist says). Occasionally, our wishes are granted, just by having patience or implementing hard work.
Eventually my face did clear up, thanks to puberty and Clearasil, and when I started working out and eating better, the excess weight was ultimately converted to muscle. Sadly, I did end up losing all my hair, probably due to my home haircuts and poor follicle maintenance.
Wishes are nothing more than wishfulthinking. I wish Linus van Pelt never learned that, because Mike Copeland sure has figured it out.
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