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

Uncle Ernest, who really was not my uncle, but my mother’s boyfriend for some forty-years, found my secret when I was eleven years old, back in the summer of ’58, 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 grew.

Well, we lived next door—kind of we 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. 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 good, not compared to his. This one day, summer day, l958, I saw him go into those—using the back door, 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, for the most part, but as time went on, and I got older, it seemed she preferred—his, 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, Ernie went into his house, as I often called him back then: 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 I felt, and envy set into me, like white on rice. Thus, 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 and pulled out one big carrot of Ernie’s from the back row by the fence. Then I padded the dirt around it so he’d not expect any dirty deeds.

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 and across from me was grandpa, who was watching as usual, a western, as he liked; his pipe half out, half lit, in the ashtray burning slowly, him in his sofa chair.

“Vhen you e’er stop eating~” he said with his normal mumbling, 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 never stopped complaining. 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 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.

Anyhow, about 9:30 PM, the next day, my bed time 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 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, 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.”

“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, how has any, or all that much. I think they were trying to hold back the humor of the situation, but it was theft, and it had to be dealt with.

“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, than for taking the carrot, but it proved I couldn’t be a thief: in any case, I said, “I never thought of it.

See Dennis' web site: http://dennissiluk.tripod.com