An American Boyhood in the 1950s

Our neighbor kindly prepares a large garden plot for us on an open piece of land next to where our private road joins the public road. The first year – two years ago – I got a good crop of tomatoes and potatoes. Last year, we had too much rain, and the only crops that did much of anything were Brussels sprouts and sweet green peppers. It was so wet that even the usually reliable apple trees didn’t produce.

I suppose a sensible person would say that the odds aren’t good and wonder if it is worth the trouble. As for me, I am buying plants to set out as soon as it seems sensible, given that we get frosts here sometimes into June.

Some types of produce I wasn’t able to find in plant form, however, and I found myself before a revolving rack of seed packets in the usual size, with a description on one side and a brightly colored photograph of improbably large produce on the other.

A memory overcame me. I was no longer in the local farm store, but standing beside the breakfast-room table in my childhood home with a box of seed packets  from school, whining at my parents to buy the lot instead of forcing me to go door to door, selling individual packets.  This was an annual ritual for years.

“What are we going to do with seed packets?” my father would say, irritably, shaking the cardboard box. (He didn’t like spending money, especially not on something entirely superfluous to his way of life.)

“Now, Bobby,” my mother would say, somewhat more sympathetically, “you know you’ll enjoy seeing the neighbors, and they’ll be glad of the opportunity to buy such nice seeds.”

And I’d trudge all over the neighborhood, and the outcome would be the same as it was every year. Some of the neighbors took pity. Most pleaded that they’d already bought several packets – which was almost certainly true as every other kid in the neighborhood who attended the same school was also out pushing seeds.

I’d go home. My father would say I hadn’t tried hard enough. My mother would say she just couldn’t understand why all the neighbors didn’t buy a packet. She always did. Then they’d look at each other and at me and the partially filled box of packets, and my father would open his wallet.

I wish I’d known enough to recognize then what they’d done. After all, it would have been easier on them just to have handed over the couple of dollars up front and saved all of us the trouble.

I wonder if they’d done that if I’d be planting the garden again, in spite of failures of other years. The truth of it is that  they taught me a valuable lesson, to wit: if you don’t make an effort, even if you aren’t sure of the outcome, you’ll never know what might happen.

They were great parents.

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