I recently found myself up to my elbow in a pumpkin. Scooping out the slimy orange guts from a very large gourd, I was all-but-laughed-at by a sizeable crowd. They took pictures. They offered tips like, "Eeeeeew! That's gross. I'm glad I don't have to do that!" and "Make sure you get all the goop out. Also make the walls nice and thin."
I teach a cooking class at a center for individuals with learning and developmental disabilities. ("Teach" is a questionable verb in the preceding sentence. I do not teach. I bring in recipes and after a few hours of beating and chopping and laughing and whisking and talking and tasting, watch them evolve into, well, not what they look like in the pictures.)
In honor of Halloween we decided on a pumpkin-themed evening. We made -- from scratch -- pumpkin soup, pumpkin ravioli in sage butter, and pumpkin pie with, that's right, pumpkin ice cream. Which explains why I was up to my elbow in many a pumpkin that afternoon. We had the one giant pumpkin that I had gotten elbow-deep intimate with -- Pedro carved its two lopsided eyes, off-kilter nose, and toothless smile, and later pureed its flesh with cream and maple syrup -- and 12 smaller pumpkins that we decorated in the afternoon and dismembered in the kitchen.
Disclaimer: Now, before I get in trouble for picking up men at a center for the developmentally disabled, I would like to point out that I have not interacted with anyone my age in several months. (I'm on an off-term at home.) So when I discovered that the people who taught all the other classes are adorable 20-something men, I was pretty psyched. Especially when they talked to me without my prompting -- which rarely happens. One asked for my number and said we would hang out and another, who lives on a sailboat but doesn't know how to sail, said he would reschedule his tutoring commitments to help at my cooking class. Michelle, the "real" cooking class instructor, laughed hysterically at my interactions with these men because, apparently, I blushed my way through the entire conversations and didn't look either of them in the eye.
The center is filled with people my grandma would call "good folks." As she was whisking egg whites and maple sugar, Marie told me that I sounded exactly like a Disney character, "Minnie, no, not Minnie, Cinderella, no, not Cinderella, Pocahontas!" And when she felt my face she told me that I looked like one, too, "Mickey, no, not Mickey, Minnie, no, not Minnie, Aladdin, no, Aladdin's a boy, Cinderella, no, Pocahontas!" And then she said, "Have you noticed?"
"Noticed what?"
"I'm blind!"
What does one say to that? I mumbled something about her doing a good job with the whisking. She had something to say about every ingredient she smelled and felt -- I asked her to describe a fresh sage leaf and she said, "It feels soft like an animal."
"What kind of animal, Marie?"
"Like a puppy's nose."
"And its smell?"
"Like Thanksgiving."
Mr. Cute Sailor-who-promised-to-help was nowhere to be seen the day of the class, however. And Michelle, standing in for my parents in the "embarrass Jourdan" role, asked David, the center director, where that one boy was. As we all sat down to eat our pumpkin-filled meal at the end of class, David asked if I could help with some personal tutoring. I walked right into his teasing -- I said "Sure!" with nary a suspicious thought in my mind. And he winked. Oh. Tutoring. Right. I turned pink, as I tend to do, especially when mocked by super-attractive men whom I barely know in front of parents and students. The students, quick to pick up on this, started a dinner table ditty: "Personal tutoring! Personal tutoring!" All mockery aside, this class is the most fun I have all week.
And as I was leaving, I turned to the boys who hadn't gone home yet and said, "Ciao!" They replied, "Ciao, Bella!" I was in Italy all over again, but without slimy men leering their "bella" at me. These were the sweet men who cried as they chopped onions with plastic knives, who carefully cracked eggs by tapping once, inspecting the slight fissure, and cracking again and inspecting again until the fissures became too great and the egg opened up with a splat. These were the men who kept asking to taste the pumpkin pie and the sugared walnuts, the men who wanted to stuff their ravioli with cheddar cheese and pumpkin, who cleaned up the room better than I would have without having to be asked.
Cute boys or no, I wouldn't trade these nights for all the crisp-autumn-golden-red-leaves of Hanover.
