Corn
I was walking through D & W the other day and they had ears of corn on sale 10 for a dollar, my impressive math skills figured that out to be a dime apiece. So ten ears of corn cost less than a Snickers bar.
I bring this up because there was a time when even that was a bit out of my budget.
Back in college not having any money was my and my roommates full time job. We dealt with this by going to the beach. Well, it wasn’t exactly a “beach” it was a little patch of land by Lake Lansing, a small park with a pond in it, I’m not sure something should be called a “lake” if you can hit a five iron across it.
Anyway, one day we were riding our bikes back from a hard day of tanning when I noticed a gigantic corn field next to the road and it dawned on me that corn was food and would make a nice side dish when paired with Ramen Noodles and generic Macaroni and Cheese. One of my roommates, Peter Duguid, volunteered to go into the field and do a little harvesting.
So Pete disappears into the field, we could hear some rustling around and then an ear of corn came flying out like a punt. Paul “Scrap” Carleson made a nice over-the-shoulder catch and stuffed the corn into his backpack. Seconds later from a completely different spot in the field another ear came flying out and another running catch was made. Apparently Pete didn’t want the “farmer” (the field was actually a Michigan State agricultural farm) to notice that six ears of corn were missing from the approximately eight billion ears out there so he was wandering around scatter picking.
We had no idea where he was in the field and he had no idea where we were in the road and, most importantly, what the traffic flow was at the time, so not only were we running around catching corn like Odell Beckam, we were dodging cars like Frogger.
We got back to our apartment to prepare our feast and noticed that the corn had kind of a pinkish tint to it. Oh well, food is food, so we threw it in a big pot to boil. After an appropriate amount of time a piece was sampled and it was like biting a chunk of concrete, must need a little more time in the pot, minutes passed and I think the corn actually got harder. We boiled that freakin’ corn until it was dark outside and then the girl across the hall who was sort of a farm girl wandered over, looked into the boiling water and said “That’s feed corn, you can’t eat that, it’ll be hard as a rock.”
Hmmm.
One guy, Charles “Sir Chaz” Ford actually ate a piece and it must have been like eating a bowl of Pebbles, not the cereal, but actual pebbles. I can’t even imagine the gastric distress that followed.
In the end we were once again thwarted in our attempt to beat the system, the time and effort put in to pick, toss, catch, and boil the corn resulted in not much more than a lesson in damaged orthodontia. We never returned to any other field in search of a differeånt strand; not only couldn’t you eat it it felt weird running around in the street, it was kinda like we were corn ... stalkers.
Printed by permission of the author. Email him at Lorenzat
large@aol.com.
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