Rutabaga-itis

             His name’s Elwin, and I never met him, but my friend Andrea did. She worked on his rutabaga farm in backwoods Maine and isn’t a writer, so I asked what it was like so I could tell about it. I don’t know what makes someone decide to grow rutabaga for a living. Could be it’s that Elwin’s dad did it, and his granddad and grandmom too. So when it’s like that, you don’t become a carpenter or teacher or craftsman who, say, makes Christmas ornaments.

            “When you eat too many rutabaga,” Elwin once told Andrea, “You get Rutabaga-itis. And the only cure for Rutabaga–itis is to eat more rutabaga!”

            Elwin’s in his sixties or seventies or maybe eighties. He’s real thin even though he eats a package of oreos everyday. He has the sort of sparse, dry hair that looks and grows like grass in the desert, which means it doesn’t grow. He hasn’t wanted to marry anybody since the tenth grade. Her name was Mary Sue and she had a dog that died from poisoned meat. He learned in his twenties that love involves too much of the pot calling the kettle black so he quit. He only drinks tap water. In fact, he sometimes drinks his water straight from the hose he uses to water his plants, since he had lead poisoning in 1978 and didn’t die.

            So he’s in a neon yellow jumpsuit watering his crops while Andrea stoops harvesting this plant that's got fleshy, veiny purpling skin like its on steroids. And maybe it is because it grows halfway through November –– to the point where Andrea’s hands are so cold even in gardening gloves that when she’s through each day she can’t unzip her coat for one half hour.  

           “And lady, if anyone knows rutabaga-itis, it’s me and myself,” Elwin continues. “September through Christmas Mom made rutabaga casserole and rutabaga stew and rutabaga you name it.”

But enough about Elwin and rutabaga. The talk with Andrea got us making a list of the oddest jobs we’ve ever had –– her #1 being harvesting rutabaga. In my top three is working on a farm run by this man named Alfred Pease in Cornish, Maine. He chain-smoked Pall Malls, and his wife wore a sheriff’s hat she picked up at a church rummage sale.  On the wall of the hut where I lived alongside the corn rows were small hand prints with the words “children of the corn” scrawled in white paint below them. For light, I used a kerosene lamp. For peeing in the night, I used a jar. I never had to use the axe I found under the bed thank God. I learned from Alfred Pease that people in jail make license plates, which is a shame for the guys who do the New Hampshire ones because those say “Live Free or Die” on them. “Don’t go to New Hampshire,” said Mr. Pease. “The folks there aren’t too cordial.”

In my top three is trimming medical marijuana for three weeks in Colorado. (I didn’t partake; I just needed money while looking for a job that uses my skills). I carpooled with an old black man who drove down from the mountains every morning to trim at the grow house, which was way out in a desert with rattlesnakes. He wore sunglasses inside and out and smoked a joint he held in one hand and a cigarette he held in the other. He held the steering wheel between his knees. Once, he and I drove to Cheyenne on a Sunday and not even the donut store was open so we turned around and came right back. I never saw a rattlesnake in three weeks.

The last of the oddest jobs I’ve done was working at a teensy Christmas–colored country store that sold “only Colorado products” but also seaweed chips. For $8.50/ hour, I put up and took down the American flag that was outside the store and tucked pumpkins into bed. (Outside, the middle-aged Iranian man who owned the place had perched over one hundred pumpkins on mini-haystacks, which he had me cover with white sheets at the end of my shifts). In two months, five people came in. Once, the owner almost fired me when I said no to dancing in the street to draw attention to his store. Also when I forgot to take down the American flag, and it snapped in half in a windstorm overnight. In November, he built a bunch of huts on the lawn outside his store to establish Colorado’s one and only year-round, “art and garden” market. A former sheriff sold hot sauce in the huts for two weeks, then quit. The day the owner cornered me demanding that I kiss him on the head and say I loved him, I quit too. Like me, the “art and garden” market lasted only through December.

As a bonus, I’ll tell you about working as a hostess for one week at the Egg and I.  My first day of training, I got a free pancake meal. In the end, this was the only good part of the job; my food stamps for January had run out and, too ashamed to ask my parents for money, I was hungry. I had lost weight and the pants that had always been tight on me were falling down, which I didn’t realize until pulling them on for the first time in awhile one Sunday morning. Running late for work, I forgot a belt before pedaling off to the Egg and I over ice, crashing my bike, and hurting my arm. In addition to making me even more late, this slowed me down at work. Having to pull up my pants in between handing guests menus didn’t help. The line was out the door and many Americans aren’t happy before (or, for that matter, after) they’ve had their coffee, eggs and bacon. At the end of my disastrous shift, the manager said I wasn’t living up to Egg and I standards; I was a shitty hostess and just plain didn’t seem to have my life together. I said I made my bed every morning and that I was good at writing. Their eggs weren’t cage free anyway . . . 

I finish this post with advice: if you want to get a job, throw up in the middle of the interview. If the employer has a heart, he will grant you the position out of pity . This happened to me once. Three years ago, in the middle of an interview at a Quaker Retreat and Conference Center, I came down with a stomach bug and had to flee the room and vomit.  When the director of the place drove me home, he had to pull over on the highway for me to throw up again. I used his handkerchief to wipe my mouth. Well, at least it was only a stomach bug and not Rutabaga-itis!