Tibetan Peach Pie: A True Account of an Imaginative Life

2. grub & girls

While my early passion was for beverages of every description, I also exhibited no small fondness for food and for female companionship, lasting appetites whose satisfaction proved only slightly less fraught with danger.

One sunny autumn afternoon in my third year, Mother heard a commotion outside. She opened a window to see me sauntering down the street, blissfully gnawing on a raw cabbage, its head the size of my own. Several yards behind and gaining on me came a vocally irate housewife.

It seems I had appropriated the vegetable from its resting place on the neighbor’s screened-in back porch. The volume of the woman’s displeasure can be attributed to the fact that in an Appalachian village in 1935, a nice fresh green cabbage was more prized than a kilo of beluga caviar. I was apprehended, of course, and duly punished, though not before I had at least partially pacified my belly lust.

It was not long after the great cabbage heist that the men who worked in my grandfather’s nearby cabinet shop (on Sundays Papa rode a mule into the “hollers” to preach the Gospel to tiny congregations of hill folk; during the week he fashioned exquisite pieces of handmade furniture) began complaining that food items were missing from the lunch pails that they customarily left on a bench outside the shop.

The mystery continued for a week or more before one morning the thief was discovered in a clump of wild rhododendron bushes, chowing down on a bologna sandwich he obviously had not made himself. It’s said that “stolen honey is sweetest.” I can attest that larceny improves the taste of bologna, as well.

Gastronomic adventures persisted, I suppose, although I was nearly five when one next precipitated public scandal.

It was a summer day, so warm and slow that neither my favorite toys nor the sartorial splendor of my brand-new sun suit (that’s what the one-piece, short-legged, sleeveless outfits were called) could enliven the torpor. Eventually, the faint jingling anthem of a distant ice cream cart drifted into my notice, provoking me to slip from our yard and hurry the block and a half to the relatively bustling commercial street (it was high season in a resort town) where I quickly located the source of the entrancing tinkle.

A Popsicle cost a mere five cents, but I possessed not a single coin of the realm. Undeterred, I approached a group of tourists loitering nearby and offered to sell my sun suit. They must have thought it a cute idea because one of them tossed me a nickel.

Instantly, without ceremony, I shed my outfit, handed it over, placed an order with the incredulous pushcart vendor, and strolled home stark buck naked, licking an orange Popsicle with particular satisfaction.

Surely there were familial repercussions — new sun suits didn’t exactly grow on trees — but any memory of discipline has been successfully suppressed.

My lifelong taste for the company of the opposite sex may first have been demonstrated at age two, when I was spotted in the middle of the main highway leading out of town, hand in hand with my cousin Martha, age one and wearing only a diaper. We were blowing that provincial pop stand, baby! We were on the road! And never mind that Martha could barely put one chubby little foot in front of the other.

Our escape thwarted by meddlesome busybodies, we were driven home in a police car, much to the astonishment of our respective moms.

Cousin Martha grew up to be crowned, in her early twenties, Miss America School Teacher, the most beautiful secondary educator in the land. Me, well, it was hardly the last time I was to leave a town with a pretty young thing in tow, often with only marginally better results.