Missing: Family Pumpkin

Here is a picture of our pumpkins, taken only a week ago. Sadly, this photo is all we have left of the little orange guy in the lower right. Yesterday as we were all piling out of our apartment on the way to the park we discovered that someone had pilfered our Family Pumpkin (so named because it's the one that belongs to all of us, as opposed to the little pumpkins each kid has laid claim to). Someone actually walked right up our steps and snatched our pumpkin off of our stoop! Unbelievable. Moments like these make me doubt the brilliance of our "reverse migration" from the 'burbs to the city.

Elizabeth and Megan were not so much upset as they were baffled. "But why did they take it? Why didn't they just go to the pumpkin farm and get their own?" The goodness of children cannot fathom stealing. When does that change for some people? We all start out with the same innocence. I'm genuinely curious to know what occurs in the human mind that distorts that innate sense of right and wrong. I was raised in a very bad neighborhood. Our house was burgled on a regular basis. Every time it happened I felt violated and frustrated, (we had no recourse, being part of a culture that really believed it was futile to report a few worthless trinkets being lost and damage done to a rickety back door to the police) but I never got over the bewilderment. Just like my daughters' reaction to being robbed for the first time, after decades of experiencing petty theft, I'm still marveling that people steal.

Sadly, it seems that many people expect others to be dishonest. The other day I realized that I had inadvertantly walked out of the grocery store with a box of linguine in the stroller basket that I didn't pay for. When I stopped in to pay for it the next day, the cashier was amazed. "Really? Oh. Okay. Wow. Most people wouldn't bother."

The girls were with me when I paid for the linguine, and they understood that of course you couldn't just walk out with free pasta. Maybe it was good for them to see an example of honesty, especially since they now know how it feels to be the victim of dishonesty.

Instead of ranting about how much I dislike living in Hoboken and how I wish we had stayed in our boring not-nearly-as-hip town where at least we could have a pumpkin on the porch for crying out loud, I got a grip. "Let's pray for the person who took our pumpkin," I said to the girls. "They must not realize it makes Jesus sad when we steal." Daddy chimed in with, "Well, now we have an excuse to visit the pumpkin patch again!" That suggestion went over very well.

My three-year-old isn't taking any chances. "Okay," Megan said, "but this time we'll keep our pumpkin inside!"