Anyway I guess maybe I shouldn't have dragged front-page local issues into Bob's Little Acre; but I had this image of myself as a big damn frog hopping around my vegetable rows menacingly and zapping intruders with my tongue; and where do metaphors work like that but the Acre?
Warts, Worms and Naked Emperors: The Jumping Frog of Bob’s Little Acre
By Robin Ford Wallace
Thwppt. Gotcha!
Yeah, hey, it’s me, down here in the garden, catching insects with my long, sticky tongue. Can I interest you in a fly?
I expect you’re wondering how I came to be insectivorous. You know the real twist? I actually came down here to eat worms.
Self-pity, don’t you know! Somebody objected to my investigative journalism. Well, somebody wrote a minor novel objecting to my investigative journalism, to be exact, and then they copied everybody in town on it, to the point that by now 9000 county officials plus lawyers, busboys, calico housecats and my Uncle Milroy in the spirit world have all heard the word:
ROBIN IS MEAN AND UGLY AND HAS WARTS!
Honestly, I haven’t felt so unpopular since my big sister Laura gave a piñata party for all our little friends with me as the piñata. So, consumed with self-pity, down I slunk to the garden to eat worms.
That’s the metaphor, I mean, but in fact once I’d settled into the mud I couldn’t see the point. Do you know how hard I worked to build up my worm population? I kept the garden under a foot of hay all that first winter, and spent good money at the bait store.
But even if, from a horticultural as well as a gustatory standpoint, I decided against a literal ingestion of invertebrates, I was fully engaged in consuming them figuratively. How had this happened?
Making people mad is not what I ever set out to do! I wanted to write about organic gardening. Tomatoes! Turnips! Pretty flowers! I am a gentle soul, and it was my ambition to play quietly in the dirt, disturbing no one.
But as I brooded darkly, a fly buzzed by, and without looking up from my somber musings –
Thwppt!
– I shot out my tongue and nabbed it.
What had come over me? I wondered as I chewed thoughtfully. It had been rather a while since lunch, certainly, and, as vermin goes, the fly had looked unusually toothsome; but as a rule I am less impulsive.
Then the explanation dawned on me: I had been singing Kermit’s song, “It Isn’t Easy Bein’ Green.” It’s my favorite poor-me song (though I also favor the Avenue Q spoof, “It Sucks To Be Me”). Thus it was only fitting that the Metaphor Fairy had turned me into a frog.
Shocking? Well, sure, at first. I’ve known people who became frogs before but most of them were tadpoles.
Shortly, though, things normalized. A girl gets used to anything! Even eating flies isn’t that funky after the crap they used to serve at my high school. Every Thursday, lunch was this orange-colored chili that made vomiting redundant. And is there really anything weirder than a Fig Newton?
Plus, it wasn’t long before it struck me that froghood is not that bad a metaphor for small-town journalism. In the normal course of things, you paddle around your little pond ribbiting benevolently on about the new Methodist Women’s recipe book, or croaking out accounts of the local government’s latest budgetary crisis, deeply fulfilled when you score a dramatic quote like:
“I am sick and TARD of having to BAIG for every LIGHT BUB.”
But then some hairy horsefly of an issue flits by – say some noisy citizen who rails against government more or less full time, but now wants it to build him an aqueduct; or a business that brags it is boosting your community’s tax base, but hasn’t itself paid taxes since they were more than metaphorically a matter of rendering unto Caesar – and before you know you’re doing it:
Thwppt!
It’s a job hazard! You know perfectly well you’re not the New York Times, you’re just a hinterlands hack leaning on Old Betsy and spitting contemplatively from time to time as you report on this year’s hay crop.
But a backwoods journalist is a journalist just the same, paid – though not much, not much – to keep eyes, ears and notebook open. So should Napoleon Bonaparte prance across your line of vision in an advanced state of nature, what can you do but push your coonskin cap back on your forehead, point at His Imperial Majesty and shout:
LOOKY! YONDER GOES A NEKKID EMPEROR!
Or, as we say in Frog:
Thwppt!
Really, even in a garden column you kill a few flies if you’re halfway paying attention. It’s all very well to talk about playing quietly in the dirt, but then you notice the Freep’s “Five Tips” gardening hints referring to petunias as something you deadhead, or dirt as something they sell at Holcomb’s, and –
Thwppt!
– there you go again. Those who read the Bob blog know that BLA prides itself on being to the extension agent:
“WHAT WOODWARD WAS TO NIXON!”
So. Anyway. I try hard to report truthfully and fairly, and I hate it if in so doing I’ve made anybody mad. I’d add, though, that if you come into a little pond like this and do it any kind of injury you cannot realistically expect big wet kisses from the local frog.
But enough of that! Since I’m down here anyway, I thought I’d hop through the rows, maybe get a little actual garden writing done for a change. It’s hard to grow anything with metaphors this thick on the ground but an extension service article last week said February is the perfect time to plant asparagus.
February is not, of course, the perfect time to do anything, and what the writer probably meant was that he’d be out of a job if he couldn’t find anything that could remotely go into the ground, but –
Oh, my God, I’ve done it again.
Thwppt!
END
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