We were learning about vegetables in school: what made a vegetable a vegetable, how we should eat lots of them, how they grew, and whatnot. Vegetables grew in the ground, they were roots; fruits came off trees and had seeds. So when mother sent me to school with a million tomatoes from our garden–not for the class project but to get rid of them, as our freezer was already overflowing with Ziploc bags full of frozen tomato sauce, the pantry filled with jars of homemade ketchup, and dessert every night a slice of creepy mock apple pie made with green tomatoes–I protested. In class we had just learned that tomatoes, though not typically served for dessert, were a fruit, because they had seeds.
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Our teacher, Miss White, had sent home a note earlier in the week asking that parents send to school with their children various types of vegetables to be used in a project, the finale to “Vegetable Week.” The note did not say what we would do with the vegetables, and guessing was part of the fun. Guessing helped build anticipation, which always led to disappointment. When we were told we’d be doing a popcorn project, Jeremy Couch suggested that maybe we were going to pop a whole bunch of popcorn, fill up the classroom, and jump around in it. We did pop corn in class, but there wasn’t nearly enough to jump in. We were each given a Dixie cup to fill and offered various toppings, like Kool-Aid, salt, and cheese powder, to sprinkle on it, then we ate it while we watched Where the Red Fern Grows, choking on it as we sobbed when the dogs died.
I went inside the main building with my tomatoes and said the pledge with the rest of the first grade, then I exited with my class to go to our portable building. The school was growing and had that year acquired two portable buildings, and my class was lucky enough to be in one of them, announcements brought to us on pink slips of paper by “special helpers.” I watched the kids from my class line up outside the portable building, waiting to be let in after our teachers had their morning chat. I was looking at the kids, looking for their vegetables. None of them had any–none that I could see anyway. Their moms probably sent them with a potato or two, packed snugly into the small pocket of their backpacks. I moved toward the back of the line and lingered on the side of the portable building so no one would see my bag of tomatoes and ask me about them. When the line started moving, I took the last place, the most disgraceful of all, and solemnly entered the classroom.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): illustration/Elizabeth Tamny.
