My daddy was a
gardener. No, gardening wasn’t his profession. He was employed by Gas
Incorporated in Fairburn, Georgia up until he retired at 65. His title was
“Installation Mechanic,” which he said was just a fancy term for “all-around
flunky.” Actually, though, Daddy
installed gas appliances and gas tanks and repaired them when they
malfunctioned, so his line of work could be dangerous at times, and I thought
he was brave because I was afraid of gas. Hmm, come to think of it, I’m still
afraid of gas, which is why I have a total-electric house, but why shouldn’t I
be afraid? Heck, the darn stuff can blow you up.
Anyway, as I
said, Daddy was a gardener. He loved growing things. He had a grape arbor. (He
even tried making wine at one time, but that’s another story.) He had peach,
apple, and pear trees, and, naturally, he had a vegetable garden. His garden
was extensive, not simply some little square of earth devoted to vegetables. No
ma’am, my daddy planted almost our entire two acres, except for the front and
back yards, with just about every vegetable imaginable, or at least the ones
that mattered to us Southerners, meaning tomatoes, green beans, crookneck
squash, okra, corn, butter beans, field peas, cucumbers, green onions, and, of
course, potatoes. And that brings me to the point of this story: potato bugs.
Yes, that’s right, potato bugs.
See, growing up
in the country, my siblings and I got to enjoy a lot of pleasures that city
kids were denied, and one was picking potato bugs. And, no, we didn’t pick them
to eat. It’s like this: Daddy didn’t use any pesticides since, for one, he
couldn’t afford to use them because we were poor; and, two, he thought that
pesticides were poisonous and no matter how many times or how hard you scrubbed
the vegetables, there would still be residue left behind to make you sick or
maybe glow in the dark.
As a result of
his distrust of chemicals, Daddy devised “natural” ways to counter garden
pests, so one summer when these little hard-shelled bugs invaded the garden and
proceeded to congregate on the potato plants, Daddy “hired” Vicki, Bud, and me
to pick those little critters off the plants. And what was the going rate for
potato bugs? Well, it was a penny per bug. Keep in mind, however, that back
then a candy bar was a nickel, as was a Coca Cola; a comic book was a dime; and
for a quarter, you could go to the Saturday matinee at Fairburn Theater and see
a double feature, several cartoons, and a boring newsreel. And, yes, I know I’m
giving away my age, but what the heck.
So, with visions
of thousands—possibly even millions—of bright shiny copper pennies dancing in
our collective heads, Vicki, Bud, and I armed ourselves with some of Mama’s Mason
jars and marched out to the area of the garden beside the house, which was
where Daddy had planted row upon row upon row of potato plants. Maybe he was
envisioning a coming potato famine. Who knows, but he’d sure planted one heck
of a lot of potatoes that year.
Anyway, Vicki,
Bud, and I set to work, trying to pluck those little old hard-shelled bugs off
those potato plants and plop them into our jars. I said “trying,” because there
were three problems: one, those bugs wouldn’t cooperate. I guess they didn’t
want to be plucked, so they kept eluding our grasping fingers. Two, it was hot as
blue blazes out there underneath that Georgia sun. Three, being little kids,
Vicki, Bud, and I had the attention span of gnats.
Long story short
(Well, not really), my siblings and I soon decided we would much rather be
playing cowboys and Indians than picking bugs that refused to cooperate. (The
term “cowboys and Indians” wasn’t politically incorrect back then. It was part
of our language). This being the case, we did what other kids would do in our
situation, we proceeded to drop those Mason jars and chase one another up and
down between the rows of potato plants. We then charged into the rows of corn,
which adjoined the section devoted to potatoes, where we learned that ears of
corn made fine Colt 45’s and the tassels made excellent mustaches. Oh, we also
learned two important lessons: One, if you leave potato bugs closed up in a
Mason jar underneath the hot Georgia sun, they turn into crispy critters. Two,
you do not get paid for a job not
done.
I love and miss
you, Daddy. Thank you for the memories.
Photo retrieved from Google Images (2015) farmcenter.com
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