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About honest and honourable turnips

History and Commentary from a Prairie Perspective
turnip

I am a wordsmith. This is a malady which affects a frantic few in the larger human family. It is a dangerous business. If the skills of a writer are so slight as to barely deserve the title of wordsmith, he is often labelled a pretentious fool by those by those who have a larger store of larger words. If he succeeds, however, he rises to an exalted position in which nobody expects him to perform mundane tasks such as tying his own shoelaces and carrying out the garbage. I am still tying my own shoelaces but I make compost of most of the garbage because I am also a gardener.

The adulation of the superior applies to big money earners in sports, entertainment, education, the professions and government. It even extends to the subspecies known as bureaucrat who gain profit and fiendish satisfaction from obscuring any proposal which has the potential of making sense. I am not the object of adulation and have no bulging bank accounts. But I do like to make sense.

I often write poems. After completing one, I let it simmer for a day or two. When I return to it, I pretend somebody else wrote it. I rave rapturously, “What a masterful writer! What philosophical overtones! What subtle nuances! This fellow she be paid a million dollars per stanza!” Then I go and peel a turnip.

I like peeling and dicing turnips. Regrettably, I can’t grow them because of the ravages of nematodes, which I think of as the destructive bureaucrats of the insect world. I purchase a large and handsome turnip. Not knowing where this specimen was grown and not knowing whether it is a corporate turnip or the honest product of a family farm gives me pause. But a turnip dicer must do what a turnip dicer must do. To my little cubes of foreign turnip I add slices of homegrown carrots. Then I sprinkle the aromatic mixture with brown sugar, add water and set it on the stove to boil. After the mixture is fully cooked, I have the indescribable pleasure of mashing it and arranging in swirls of orange, light and dark. Then comes butter, salt, pepper and the first taste of my handiwork. Ahhhhhh! The experience is as rewarding as writing the perfect poem.

I suspect there are more turnip cookers than poets. The turnip cookers, both men and women, are brave and honest souls who contribute to the culinary delights of the multitudes. Poets are arranged in a caste system. They give pleasure only to those who understand them. Too often I have found that the Brahmins of poesy don’t live in the real world. Their slurries of words and terms are beyond the understanding of the faithful artists who create sustenance in the kitchen. They are even beyond the abilities of my own admittedly (I like to admit it) impressive intellect to find reason and purpose. I think the work of these poetic Brahmins might improve if they spent their time peeling turnips.  Instead.