The census taker had to use an adding machine.

My buddy came from a big family.

Nobody ever got an accurate count, but we figured about 14. He said that his father wanted a family large enough that he could become lost in a crowd.

He was my friend. I called him Dipes because of a rumor going around that claimed that his mother, when she wasn’t wearing her glasses, had sometimes diapered the wrong end.

Dipes and I thought we were Ferraris in high gear. In truth, we were Ford Falcons at full throttle. We loved kicking the tires on a new day. Each day involved us in our own personal country music song. We barely knew things. We weren’t old enough to have been tormented by the periodic table of elements, but we had perpetual appetites.

Dipes and I had plowed through Grandma’s rhubarb.

Grandma lived in a small town in Iowa that had failed in an attempt to become a city. There were no fast foods available, and the slow foods were tethered to meals.

School was out. It was summer vacation. We were free-range kids allowed to do almost anything, as long as we did it outside. We wore plain white T-shirts and blue jeans every day except Sunday. That saved us from having to decide what was and what wasn’t color coordinated. Color coordination eluded us. We wanted all colors of all clothes to get along.

We were always up to something. We didn’t relax. No one had told us to. Older kids advised one another to unlax. This was because of something Bugs Bunny had said. Bugs Bunny was the true leader of the generation, a guru who taught us that pretty good was better than perfect.

We were an optimistic bunch. In Iowa, summer optimism was rewarded early with rhubarb and late with sweet corn.

We were often hungry. It wasn’t because of a lack of food, it was because eating three meals wasn’t enough of a commitment for us. We didn’t have a penny between us. That meant we were almost broke. We had to search for free food.

My mother’s response to my pleas of near starvation was to toss me a cold potato while saying, “If you’re really starving, this will save you.”

It took a village to raise enough rhubarb to feed us.

One of Grandma’s neighbors had a big garden. It was the length of a short par three. The neighbor had some rhubarb planted close to Grandma’s property line that looked delicious.

My mother, Dipes’ mother, my aunts and grandmother had headed off to a beauty shop that might have been named Perms of Endearment.

Dipes decided that we should get some of that rhubarb. I wasn’t sure about the whole thing, but I agreed to act as a lookout. He and I took turns being bad influences on one another. We considered freeing some of the rhubarb from the neighbor’s garden on the other side of Grandma’s house, but the rumor was that the homeowners there might have spent time in prison. I pictured them as someone like Ma Joad from “The Grapes of Wrath” who had attacked a tin peddler with a chicken. The suspected convicts seemed nice and they were friendly enough, but I imagined them attacking a Fuller Brush man with a chicken. I had proof. As convicted felons, they wouldn’t have been allowed to have weapons. That was why they didn’t own any chickens.

I wasn’t good at being a lookout. A neighborhood girl, with only one front tooth left, still had a smile pretty enough to distract me. She tattled on us. The couple who lived in the house caught us swiping their pieplant. They made a citizens’ arrest. The only thing that had been arrested before was our intelligence. They took us into their home. At last, they’d have their revenge. We weren’t quite too big to spank. We worried that they would call our parents. This was during the era when we didn’t care what the school did to us if we got in trouble, as long as they didn’t call our fathers.

The woman of the house took the purloined rhubarb from us.

We sat and nervously awaited sentencing.

In an odd form of punishment, she fed us rhubarb crisp.

She tried to teach us a lesson by saying, “Now doesn’t that taste better than stolen rhubarb?”

It did. It had sugar on it.

 

Hartland resident Al Batt’s columns appear every Wednesday and Sunday.