A Story of Pumpkins

One of my friends father operated a very small fruit and vegetable stand along a rather busy stretch of road in Tampa Florida. My friend and I were in the car and he wanted to show me the business and I agreed. It just happened to be about two weeks until Halloween and I was surprised to see that the stand did not have any pumpkins on sale. I told his father that he had a nice business and if he wanted we could go to the local "farmers market" and get some for him. I had wanted a few to take to school anyway. I was a teacher in a junior high school at the time and thought they would look pretty good in the classroom and I could have some students draw on them.

While we were standing there a large open topped tractor trailer pulled off the road slightly past the stand. The sides and back of the truck were high and blocked any view of what might be in the truck. The driver jumped out and hollered to us to come over to him. He said that he had some pumpkins in the truck and that he just got an urgent call to get his truck to Jacksonville empty and ready for another load by morning. He said he would sell all the pumpkins in the truck for $ .25 each. That was an amazing price and we said fine. I was expecting him to have some way of dumping the pumpkins, but I should have realized it wouldn't be that easy. He said "I'll jump into the truck and toss the pumpkins out to the both of you and you catch them and put them on the ground." I was a bit skeptical of that procedure but was a lot younger and stupid so we agreed.

He jumped in and pumpkins came flying out and at first the pumpkins were relatively small and actually easy to catch. The biggest problem was putting them down a little away from the truck so that we didn't block the area. The driver was incredible, those pumpkins seemed to be flying out of it faster and faster and soon we were barely able to keep up and the pumpkins were getting bigger and bigger. Soon they were so big I was having trouble simply breaking their fall. We were both struggling to catch them and people were now starting to stop to buy them. We had to chase them away from where we were catching them just to keep them from getting hit in the head.

All of a sudden out flies a monster pumpkin and I look at it and quickly at my friend. Neither of us go for it and it hits the ground and splatters all over the place. Fortunately that seemed to be the last one. We were both exhausted and more and more people were stopping. We counted what had been thrown out and got to a count of 128. A few may have been sold before we actually counted them. My friend's father was certainly happy, he was making quite a bit of money and I managed to get a few free but the moral of this story is "Never Try Catching Flying Pumpkins".