Thursday, September 12, 2019

Captain Jack Pumpkins, the pumpkin of Watson's eye

With all of the developments in flavor technology, it's really sort of amazing that we have, at this point, only adopted one flavor season. You know it. Some love it. It's PUMPKIN SPICE time!

Vaguely emulating that pie of autumn, the pumpkin pie (and one of the only things most people really do with pumpkins) the pumpkin spice flavor starts to invade any food or drink product that can hold it. Pumpkins, however, were celebrated every September around central Illinois long before pumpkin spice was a thing, as the pumpkins come in from local fields and the Libby's plant in Morton started canning those pumpkins for November pie-makers. And the Pumpkin Festival occurs, as it did this week.

So, with that long intro, it's time to get to the Sherlockian Canon's one known pumpkin lover, Captain Jack Croker of the good ship Bass Rock! (Anyone know any good rock music played with a bass? Insert it here!)

Captain Croker, to Watson's eye, was "as fine a specimen of manhood as ever passed through it." ("It" being the door to the 221B Baker Street sitting room.) "He was a very tall young man, golden-moustached, blue eyed, with a skin which had been burned by tropical suns, and a springy step which showed that huge frame was active as it was strong." Captain Jack felt "overmastering emotion," he lived life so hard. Could we ask for a better spokesman for pumpkins?

And Captain Jack knew pumpkins.

"I went through him as if he had been a rotten pumpkin," Captain Jack says of Sir Eustace Brackenstall of "The Adventure of the Abbey Grange." Captain Jack plainly had a great hatred for a rotten, wasted pumpkin as when he imagines Sir Eustace as that thing, he goes violently through the wife-abusing bastard with some of that "overmastering emotion." Seeing a pumpkin go to rot is plainly a very emotional thing for Captain Jack.

And why not? Pumpkins are a native North American squash that has become the icon of the one American holiday that brings families together with no religious inducement, no birthday cake, no mythological gift or egg bearing sprites. Pumpkins rule, especially for Canadians or Americans.

Captain Jack Croker was surely of one of those nationalities, as why else bring up that rotten, wasted pumpkin with such emotion behind it? And Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson, surely agreed, else why would they so easily go, "Sure you killed a guy, you handsome devil, but just get outa here, ya pumpkin-loving bastard!"*  (*Not their actual words, just the thoughts you can easily hear behind "Vox populi, vox Dei!" because who the hell knows what that means anyway! Don't tell me what you read in a footnote, like you believe footnotes. We're talking about pumpkins here. This is serious.)

Sorry, that last parenthetical got away from me.

Anyway, Captain Jack Croker! The great pumpkin spokesman of the Sherlockian Canon! Grab the pumpkin spice drink of your choosing and toast him as much as the season will let you!

1 comment:

  1. "Vox populi, vox Dei" is German for "Fox likes Popeye? Fox must die."
    Happy to help.