The Picture the Pumpkin Painted

I’m on a picture theme. This may, or may not be because I only tend to develop photos once or twice a year despite my tendency to drag a camera along nearly everywhere I go, and so when I finally rip open the package in eager anticipation to flip through the colourful chronicle of my life for the past six months, those pictures tend to make me feel a little nostalgic for some of those memories.
In this picture, Steve is standing beside a huge, towering pumpkin The vegetable is so big that its organgeness takes on an ominous feel in the photo. Steve is 52, fast approaching 53, and suffers from an intellectual handicap. When I was in school I took on a part-time job as a facilitator and he was my ‘client.’ I don’t work with Steve anymore, but he has remained a big part of my life, and a gentle, but solid reminder that the things I take for granted, like being able to balance a cheque book or strike up a conversation with a stranger, aren’t so easy for everyone. They aren’t easy for Steve.
On the day the pumpkin picture was taken, Steve and I had gone to pick apples. We do this every year, and even though the entire event takes only about an hour at the most, he looks forward to it with a magnitude of anticipation a young woman would reserve for her wedding day. As we were walking into the farm to pay for our apples, Steve shouted to me about how big the pumpkin standing outside the building was. Glances from blond-haired little girls whose grips tightened on their mother’s hands shot our way, paces were picked up once those same mothers took in his stain-splattered clothing, his wild grey hair sticking up in a hundred directions, each one fighting for dominance. Unaware, Steve made his way over to the pumpkin and I took out my camera and took two pictures of him standing in front of it. I had almost completely forgotten about this day, until, a few weeks ago, in my twice annual ritual, I ripped open the photos (in a box this time, there were so many) and there was Steve, standing beside his pumpkin. No one else is in the photo, the mother daughter duos had scurried away by this point. The sky is grey, and Steve is not smiling. It’s just him, and the pumpkin and as I took in his sad expression and the mud-splattered vegetable, I realized that the things I fit into my day planner in between gym visits and dinners with friends, are the only things in the day planners of people like Steve. That although underneath the photo of Steve were about 200 other pictures of me laughing with my girlfriends, me in Sweden, me in Boston, me in Vancouver. But for some people, a picture with a pumpkin, a really, really big pumpkin, is a highlight. It’s a memory.