Turnip

(entry for 9/4/2024)

Memories can be funny things. Sometimes you can actually remember something from your early childhood, but memories that can seem to be from ‘back then’ can be tricky. Maybe somebody took a picture of you doing something when you were, say, two years old. Is your memory of doing that thing a real memory, or is it just a memory of having seen the picture?

I remember, for example, seeing a picture that was taken of a group of people sitting on and around a huge Texas-shaped road sign, “Welcome to Texas.” I’m one of the people in the picture, and I remember the picture well, though I can’t find it to post here. What I don’t actually remember is the event. Being there. Doing that. Having the picture taken.

Here’s a later picture of the same sign, or at least one very similar, so you can see what I’m talking about.

I remember the event well, but only from pictures and from people talking about it. But I don’t remember actually doing it.

We were on our way from Denver, Colorado, to Keene, Texas, in the late summer of 1941. We were going to see my paternal grandmother, whom I had never yet met, plus my dad’s three youngest siblings, ditto. I had met my dad’s other two surviving siblings. In fact, one of them, my Aunt Reba, was living with us at the time, and was a member of the traveling group. (She’s in the Texas picture, too, along with my dad and mom.) 

My Granddad had died five years before I was born, one year after losing his second daughter, Ruth, to a combination of diseases. (She was his favorite child, and I thinking losing her had broken his heart, and he simply never recovered from it.) My Grandma had eventually had to sell the hundred-acre farm in Arkansas where they had all been born, because she couldn’t cope with its needs by herself. (My dad had run away from home at age sixteen and wasn’t there to help.) Now she had moved temporarily to Texas, to live with her oldest daughter, Mabel, and Mabel’s new husband, Fred. I say temporarily, because she was planning to move to North Dakota to live with a man who had been a friend of the family while my Granddad Cal was still alive. (And whose name I have forgotten.)

My dad had gone back to Arkansas for his dad’s funeral, but hadn’t seen any of the others since, except for Mabel, who had lived in Denver with ‘us’ for several months before I was born, and Reba, who lived with us now. So since Keene was closer than Arkansas, and since my dad had a yearning to visit the Adventist Junior College there, which he had attended for two years before getting married (the first time) and moving to Colorado, we were on our way down for a sort of Family Reunion.

So, there’s a picture of the sign, with us sitting on it, and then another, a day or two later, of Grandma, and one of Uncles Bill and Bryan, and one of Aunt Alta, only eight years older than me. I'm with her, in the picture, and we look like siblings.  What there isn’t a picture of, in Texas, is . . . The Turnip.

The Turnip was my first pet. That’s right, my first pet was not a dog or kitten or goldfish or canary or parakeet. My first pet was a vegetable. And I don’t mean an animal living in a vegetative state. I mean an actual vegetable. A root vegetable, to be precise. A purple and white turnip. The photo of me and it, at the head of this post, was taken shortly after our return from Texas.

I don’t remember whether we got the turnip in Colorado and took it with us to Texas, and back again, or whether we got it in Texas, or whether it was obtained on the way down or on the way back. What I do remember, very clearly, was how it felt in my hand, as I dragged it with me everywhere I went.

I dragged it by its root, as though that was it’s ‘handle.’ The tops had been removed, and nothing green was left, so the root was the only way to grab it, unless I held the whole thing in my lap, which I did at times, but not in the above picture.

And, no, I’m not just remembering the pictures. I’m remembering the actual thing, the feel of it in my hand. My very first ever memory isn’t visual or aural or olfactory. It’s tactile. I can still feel it: this slightly cool, slightly dry, slightly dusty, smooth-textured thing, encased in the palm of my right hand. I can feel the substantial weight of it, as I drag it around.

I was around eighteen or nineteen months old at the time. We were living at 201 South Decatur, in Denver, the first house my dad ever purchased. (For $3000.00 cash!) That’s its back door, in the picture. We were well off. (He was averaging $800 per month, net, at the time, a literal fortune in those days.) We didn’t need to eat the turnip. We could afford to buy as many (probably smaller) turnips as we wanted. But eat it is what we did.

Well, let me correct that. They ate it. I refused. (You don’t eat your pets.) And to this day I disdain the taste of turnips, though I’m not sure there’s any connection between that fact and the fact that my pet got eaten.

Here’s how it happened:

My mom got tired of me lugging the thing around after a few days. She gave me an ultimatum: throw it away or eat it. She said it was going to get rotten, and that when it did, it would come apart and stink to high heaven and be disgusting. Possibly even nauseating. I looked at it and sniffed it and felt of it and wasn’t quite sure I believed her. Then was no sign of stink yet, and it felt quite solid. I knew from experience that adults sometimes said words that weren’t true to get kids to do things their way. (“If you don’t let me comb your hair right now, it will fall out.”) On the other hand, my mom didn’t lie to me often. Other people did, but she didn’t. I decided to wait and see.

She put up with this for a couple of days, then got adamant. She brought the garbage pail from where it sat out at the street, and held it out to me, lid off. “OK, it’s time. You’re either going to put it in here or I’m going to cook it. One or the other. Your choice.”

“You can’t put in there,” I said, sniffling. “You mustn’t.”

She took the garbage can back out to the street, went into the kitchen, came back out with a large blue kettle, and held it out to me. I put the turnip in, and ran into the house, to my bedroom, and cried.

The odor of cooking turnip spread through the house. I hid my head under the covers so I wouldn't smell it, and cried some more.

That night at supper, I was offered some, and refused.

“Just a taste,” my mom said, holding out a spoon with something that looked rather like mashed potatoes in it. I shook my head ‘no.’ It was years before I tasted turnip. I hated it.

Most of this is a vague blur in my head. I don’t remember the details. I only remember being told, over and over again, through the months and years, into my adulthood, how it all had gone.

All I remember, for sure, is the feel of that root in my hand.

*

copyright © 2024, LegendKeeper LLC

*

To see other posts in this Memory Blog series, please click HERE.

To see posts in my other series, Len’s Music Blog, please click HERE.