252 animal, vegetable, miraclepeople of the world maintain toward the earnest dimwitted: the seeds, he
explained, are inside the pumpkin.
Oh. Yes, right. But... I struggled (in the style to which I’d become ac-
customed) to explain our predicament, gesturing toward our rental car. We
were just passing through, in possession of no knives, no kitchen, no means
of getting the seeds out of the pumpkin. Amadeo suffered our helplessness
patiently. We would be going to a hotel? he asked. A hotel with... a
kitchen? They could cook this pumpkin for us any number of ways, baked,
sautéed, turned into soup, after setting aside the seeds for us.
I frankly could not imagine sallying into the kitchen of our hotel and
asking anyone to carve up a pumpkin, but we were in so deep by now I
fi gured I’d just buy the darn thing and leave it in a ditch somewhere. Or
maybe, somehow, figure out how to extract its seeds. But I had to ask one
more question. A pumpkin grown in a field with other kinds of winter
squash would be cross- pollinated by bees. The seeds would sprout into
all sorts of interesting combinations, none of which you’d ever really want.
I asked about this in my halting Franco- Spitalian.
The light dawned over his face. He understood perfectly, and began
talking a mile a minute. He gestured toward a basket of assorted bright,
oddly shaped gourds, and told me those were allowed to cross with each
other freely, with the obvious sordid results. He wanted to make sure I
understood. “Signora, it would be as if you had not married an Italian.
Your children could be anything at all!”
Not married an Italian—Mama mia! I shuddered, to make my senti-
ments clear. Amadeo then seemed satisfied that he could continue the
genetics lesson. On his farm, Zucche de Chioggia was prized above all
other pumpkins, and thus was raised in a “seminario” where the seeds
would breed true to type.
A seminary? I pondered the word, struggling for cognates, only able
to picture a classroom of pious young pumpkins devoting themselves
to Bible study. Then I chuckled, realizing there must be a common root
somewhere—the defining condition having to do with these chaste fellows
all keeping their genes to themselves. How could we not buy such a well-
qualified vegetable? Off we drove with our precious cargo, warts and all.
Back in our hotel room, I paced around staring at it, trying to summon