The Big Carrot (reedited, 5-2008)

The Big Carrot
[186 Cayuga St., St. Paul, Minnesota: 1958]



Uncle Ernest, who really was not my uncle but my mother’s boyfriend for some forty-years found out my secret when I was eleven + years old, back in the summer of ’59, in St. Paul, Minnesota. He had about a half archer of land in the city, and a big garden and he gave me a small section of it, of the garden that is, so I could grow carrots.
Well, I was grateful, and so I tried to copy him by planting my seeds in a number of rows: not too close, not too far apart, and picking out the weeds, watering it when needed, and so forth and so on; but my carrots just didn’t grow like his: but my envy did.
Well, we lived next door to him—kind of lived next door, across from an empty lot, a big empty lot—dividing our houses: my brother Mike, my mother and my grandpa, we lived together; but it was grandpa’s house. And Earnest had two children who lived with him. And so it wasn’t a long hike to his garden: with a simple jump over the fence, which he never liked.
So it was that that every so often I’d go and check on my garden to see how my carrots were doing and they were not doing very well, not compared to his anyhow. This one day, summer day, 1958 (the year he traded his old 50-Chevy and bought his Ford Galaxy—500), I saw him go into his house—using the backdoor, my mother had just come down to visit him (he could see her walking from our home to his), and so I knew he’d not be back in the garden for the rest of the evening. They took turns going to each others houses you see, for the most part anyhow, but as time went on, and I got older, it seemed she preferred—his house, because of grandpa: it was his house, and he’d be ornery all the time, and—you know, its better left alone. And so that is how it was.
As I was about to say, Earnest went into his house, as I often called him back then, or Ernie, and I got to looking at his garden, he had many things growing but somehow I was more interested in how his carrots were growing. The top of his carrots were as round as my writs, and mine were as round as my thumb: this was not just, not fair by any means, so I felt, and envy set into me, like white on rice.
Consequently, I looked here and there, mostly at the backdoor that lead out to a wooden platform, an open porch kind of, to see if Ernie was coming, and he wasn’t. Carefully I dug around a carrot, and pulled it out, one big mama carrot of Ernie’s from the back row by the fence, surely I thought, he’d not miss this one. Then I padded the dirt around it so he’d not expect any dirty deeds (but life is never so sweet is it).
So the deed was done, and I went back home to watch T.V. with grandpa—I hid a few apples in the side of the sofa, because across from me was grandpa, who was watching me as usual, and watching TV as usual, and in-between me and the T.V., if it watching a western, as he liked, he’d spot my fruit, and say, “Vhen you e’er stop eating~!” his pipe half out, half lit, in the ashtray burning slowly, him in his sofa chair. Thus I’d hide it, and he’d think I was eating my first apple or orange, and it would be my fifth or sixth, you had to be on the ball.
Then he’d say, after his normal mumbling, and the commercials were on, not looking directly at me, but from the corner of his eye, “…ya, ya, ya, et, eet, eet, and vait tell you got to buy dhe food…” the old Russian Bear, never stopped complaining, especially about me. Anyhow, I had the two other apples in the corner so when he saw me eating the apple, I’d eat the seeds and all (I still do that to this day), and when he looked at me again, he kept seeing the one apple, never knowing I had three. He thought I was really eating slowly, two hours to eat one apple. He never was the wiser. So I had to have plan B, and C. Plan A, was no plan at all, I just ate freely in front of him, if indeed I only wanted a small portion for the evening.

Anyhow, about 9:30 PM, the next day, my bedtime was 10:00 PM, Ernie brought my mother home, walked her home, and they were in the kitchen. My mother asked me to come in the kitchen for a moment, and every time she asked that, I knew I was in trouble. And I did. Ernie was there with a big carrot in his hand, for a moment I thought it was just some vegetables from his garden he was bringing over (he did that quite often, and gave them to my mother or grandfather), and he said:
“Does this look familiar?”
“No,” I said, “Why?”
“I think it does,” said my mother, with an evil eye, or an inner eye looking through me.
“Well,” she said, “Ernie found this in your garden, and for some odd reason it didn’t seem to belong there with all your little carrots.” I had replanted it you see.
“Yup,” I said (I couldn’t talk my way out of it I knew), adding, “I, I didn’t think taking one carrot would matter, I mean you got all the big ones, I got only small ones.”
No logic to my statement, but at eleven years old has any kid got logic, or all that much to say? I think they were trying to hold back the humor of the situation, but it was theft, and it had to be dealt with. Little white sins, or distortions, or deletions, they all add up after a while and become big white sins, and then onto the big time I suppose, but I would never have made a thief, I got caught all the time, that is the few times I tried to get away with something.
“Didn’t it seem obvious that it would stand out?” asked my mother (I think my envy blinded me).
I looked a bit anxious for being caught; I guess I was sorrier for being caught, less sorry for taking the carrot: in any case, I said, “I never thought of it.” And that was the truth.


Written in St. Paul, Minnesota, 9-2005