SEX, LIES AND POTATOES
By Robin Ford Wallace
My brother Frank once told me a story about potatoes.
He’d been packing up to leave from a camping trip at the Chattooga River one spring, said Frank, when he realized he hadn’t cooked the potatoes he’d brought. On a whim, he cut them up and planted them.
Sure enough, the next time he went to the river, his spuds had grown plants, the plants had produced a crop, and Frank cooked delicious new potatoes at his campfire.
This site on the Chattooga is one where I still go myself whenever I can. So after Frank told me the spud story, every time I camped there I would wonder where he planted his potatoes. Under the trees where we pitch our tents the soil is rich and black, but there are roots and no direct sunlight. How could a potato grow there?
Down by the river there is plenty of sun, but it’s all rock and sand. Besides, whitewater rafters take out there, which makes for a great deal of foot traffic. Could spuds thrive in such an environment?
Ten or fifteen years passed, and I would ponder this charming mystery every time I visited the river and every spring when I planted potatoes at home. Then one day, for no apparent reason, the truth hit me so suddenly I spilled my beer:
My brother Frank is such a terrible liar he should have sold used cars or sought high political office. No potatoes had grown at the Chattooga, and I was a moron to believe him for a moment.
Frank probably developed his easy, pleasant style of lying as a result of his complicated love life, which at any given point includes a minimum, though by no means a maximum, of two female persons who are always called soul mates. He has children on two continents by three different soul mates, and those are the ones I know about.
He was married for about five minutes in the 1980s until his wife found him soul mating with an automobile dealership magnate, whose millions he did not reap because of the soulfulness of the girl who sold him his beeper, and I forget who outsouled her except it was probably plural.
Women apparently find Frank attractive because he’s handsome, enjoys gourmet cooking, and speaks several languages, having gone to college in Europe because, at the time, he was engaged to a Swedish girl.
Who had a sister.
So Frank didn’t marry the Swedish girl; rather, he returned to the States in some haste. In fact I believe there is now an international treaty in effect forbidding my brother to set foot in Europe, where in any case he would be as welcome as Hitler. Philanderers, take heed: Philander with someone other than the sister of the philanderee, or have your passport in order at all times.
Frank is now pushing 50 and still pulling it off. Last time I visited him, little pastel dishes of seashells and potpourri upstairs evidenced the unseen presence of a sensitive and girlish soul mate, while downstairs a horsy, whiskey-drinking soul mate chased him around the house like in a cartoon, shouting things like, “Ah need me some kisses!” And sometimes he talked on his cell phone furtively, in Swedish.
So for someone like Frank, lying to women is a necessary survival skill, and I expect he told me the potato story just to stay in practice.
I’m not really mad. Frank may lie and he may be untrue to his teeming soul mates but as a brother he’s been rather fun; our family always has something to talk about at Thanksgiving. And his example does provide a useful moral nudge toward honesty, which, though it may not generate as much interesting conversation, is infinitely less trouble to keep track of.
But lying about potatoes is particularly perjurious because no crop could be more honest or forthright. Plant them and they will grow. Nurserymen after your buck will recommend that you use their seed potatoes, but for years I have grown much of my crop from elderly food potatoes and have produced baking-size spuds from peelings.
I think the reason I believed my brother’s story so long is that potatoes are such faithful performers. They may not grow untended along scenic rivers but they will grow just about anywhere else with almost no trouble. I plant mine on unprepared ground, under a foot of hay, at or around St. Patrick’s Day, on the principle that that is about the right time of year, and there is generally beer. Schlepping a foot of hay is hot work.
The potato plants come right up through the mulch, and if frost kills them, they come up again. Forget them until they flower, after which you may harvest them at any stage.
If you, too, like to start from food potatoes, now is a good time to stick them in the pantry and forget to eat them. You can get the exotic yellow and blue kinds from Green Life in Chattanooga.
The South Beach Diet has turned some of us away from the noble potato because it is unapologetically that regime’s worst enemy, the carb, but it is a carb that for centuries, thank you, fed entire nations almost single-handedly, and one that faithfully rewards the gardener’s minimal effort with amazing bounty.
Unlike a certain member of my family, I don’t believe in lying, unless it is funny, and I do believe in fidelity, horticultural as well as the other kind. So I say, in the words of Matthew Arnold, more or less:
“Oh spud, let us be true to one another!”
END
Robin Ford Wallace lives in Deerhead Cove, where she plays quietly in the dirt, disturbing no one.
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