The Paint-Your-Own Pumpkin

There are lots of scary places to take your kids this time of year. Far more creepy than a Kiwanis Haunted House, but just as expensive, is your local paint-your-own pottery store. The one in my town is made extra frightening by the perplexing overuse of personal pronouns in the store's name: Color Me Mine.

Based upon this flagrant abuse of grammatical convention, I decided that I was justified in never stepping foot into the store. My daughter, however, had a different opinion.
"Please?" she asked.
In a moment of weakness, I agreed.



The contents of the store made my spine tingle. Lining three out of the four walls were floor-to-ceiling bookshelves filled with unpainted ceramic figurines, organized by genre. The left wall housed the mammals (represented heavily by sea creatures and house pets), while the back wall held an impressive collection of life-like fruits, vegetables, and desserts. The wall to the right was filled with mammoth-sized coffee mugs, an assortment of decorative plates, and other mock serving ware.

"I want to paint that!" squealed Camber, pointing to a $50 stallion jumping over a rainbow.
"I like this pumpkin," I said, holding up the least expensive item in the store.
"How about this?" said Camber, pointing to a ceramic rope basket holding a large bundle of grapes.
"I like this," I said again, taking the $13 pumpkin ($5.50 pumpkin + 6.00 "paint/glaze fee" + tax) to the cash register.


After paying for the pint-sized pumpkin, I turned to find my daughter sitting at a table with a small dish of orange paint.
"Don't you want to paint your pumpkin a lot of different colors?" I asked, figuring that if I was forced to pay for five colors of paint, then we might as well use them.
Camber looked at me like I had two heads.

Not only was my daughter not interested in my paint color suggestions, she also didn't want me to watch her paint. This was fine by me, as it freed me up to watch other people in the store. Of chief interest was the mother and daughter sitting at the table next to us. The other mom clearly loves her daughter a lot more than I love mine because she bought her little darling a $45 porpoise jumping over a large wave.

After listening in on their conversation, I was relieved to discover that I was not the only mom in the room concerned with using my money's worth of paint supplies.

"I didn't pay 50 bucks for an unpainted whale!" hissed the mom to her daughter, who had just announced that she intended to leave the porpoise "white."

After watching this exchange, I began to feel pretty good about my $13 pumpkin.

"I should have bought that pumpkin," the mom mumbled under her breath as she glanced in our direction.

The nice thing to do would have been to console the poor woman, or at least validate her judgment. I couldn't bring myself to do either. The presence of the $50 unpainted porpoise made such gestures impossible.