Childhood Lessons in Creativity and Foodstuffs

The affinity I have for comparing people to fruits and vegetables started, best I recall,  sometime after midnight when I was spending the night at my friend, Agnes’s house.

Earlier that day we had laughed ourselves into co-asthma attacks while playing grocery store. The game was inspired by our house- rule- breaking usage of her dad’s adding machine. The clunky gadget, which was similar in heft to a cinder block, rang out a delightful, pre- digital age CHING – CHING noise with the press of each digit and decimal. A lever punctuated each purchase, uttering a mechanical ZZHUT-ZZHUT-ZZHUT noise, giving the checkout girl a taste of working girl power, as paper receipt coiled out the back.

But mostly, the role of checkout girl was preferred over that of customer for one big reason. As with everything in this story, it’s food related.

Besides getting to wield the adding machine lever, the checkout girl is the one who got to holler out,

“One Butterball turkey!”.

For reasons I can’t explain, every time one of us said, “One Butterball turkey,” we would fall over in fits of wheeze- assisted laughter. Even now as I think about it, a familiar tightening of lung rises up inside of me that has me leaping for an inhaler. How damned funny it was isn’t coming across now- but I rest easy in knowing that the odds say there are at least a few  other brand name poultry hysterics out there amongst us.

We returned to our lives as normal breathers for most of the night, and were laying in bed talking about nothing.  Even though we couldn’t have articulated it in our pre-adolescent density of mind, I’m pretty sure what we were talking about had something to do with weird words we enjoyed using.  I can’t remember which of us said it first, but one of us said that she believed one of our classmates to have the qualities of a rutabaga.

Like  “Butterball” and “turkey,” the mere mention of the word “rutabega” sent us,   into  unbridled binges of breathing- impaired mirth. I’m not even sure I knew then what a rutabaga looked like. I just knew it was a damned fine and funny word.

That first night we invented our little game,  we went through over half of the people we knew. Undoubtedly we liked the feeling of power that it gave us to associate our unknowing classmates and relatives with various produce. I remember blueberries, carrots, okra, radishes, corn on the cob, sweet potatoes and celery.  There were the requisite bananas and apples. All of it made perfect sense to us at the time.

If you were one of our classmates and want to know what foodstuff we compared you to, you’ll be glad to know I have no memory of any specifics.

Last summer I was spending some time with Agnes in Virginia.  It was after midnight and we were talking about shared childhood lunacies. Of course, the produce game came up.

Granted, this time wine was involved, but I told Agnes that if only we had kept the game up and been more religiously inclined, something big might have come of it. I have no doubt our concept would have eventually morphed into this:

How about you? Have a best friend, laughter or food story you want to share?

I’ve got another food story for you tomorrow. Which reminds me… what’s the weirdest food combination you’ve ever had?

Note: I’m posting a link over at Maternal Spark for Monday’s Muse, even though it’s ?? Wednesday already? In celebration of MomDot’s PR blackout challenge, Heather is keeping her weekly Monday’s Muse open all week. Head over to read creative musings from women from all over blogland.

If you enjoyed this post, be sure to subscribe to my RSS feed!