Turnips

[NW Mailing List]

Oh, now you've done it! Were it not for beets, there would be no pickled
beet hard boiled eggs! One of the best snacks ever.

Mike Rector

On Mon, May 8, 2023, 12:53 PM NW Mailing List <nw-mailing-list at nwhs.org>
wrote:

> This is the best start to a Monday I have had in a long time.  I feel the
> same way about beets.  And Mr. Burnett, I have a turnip story which I would
> be happy to share.  It is not, however, fit for wide dissemination.
>
> Best regards,
> John B. Stroupe
> Memphis, TN
> At the west end of the Memphis - Charleston.
>
> On Monday, May 8, 2023 at 06:22:07 AM CDT, NW Mailing List <
> nw-mailing-list at nwhs.org> wrote:
>
>
> So, Comrade Milosh Shockelevski wants a confession from me on "the Turnip
> thing" ...  Hummmmm.  How much I should own up to ?
>
> Well, I could make up a long-winded cock-and-bull story about how my Great
> Uncle Throckmorton left me a fortune in Turnip Futures at the Bank of
> Transylvania, or some such.  But instead I will just tell you the truth,
> which is less glamorous but much simpler.
>
> When I was a kid, I heard the old folks say that someone was such a
> bumbling rube, he surely must have just fallen on the Turnip Wagon.  Now
> that was a very poignant expression, said I to mah'seff !
>
> At thirst I thought they were talking about me... and would probably have
> been a very apt description.  But then I discerned that this eloquent
> expression quite likely a figure of speech, a metaphor.
>
> Now, I was a city urchin and had no idea what a Turnip was.  But the man
> down the street, Mr. Ramsey, a retired machinist from the N&W's East End
> Shops, had a back yard vegetable garden.  As I was coming home from my
> newspaper route each eveming, he was generally out hoeing weeds in his
> garden.  So one day I stopped and asked Mr. Ramsey if he could tell me what
> a Turnip was.  He reached down, pulled out of the dirt an ugly ball of
> purple and white protoplasm with a noxiuous-looking root on it, handed it
> to me and said, "This, Sonny, is a Turnip.  Take it home and have your
> mother cook it for you."
>
> I did.  And it was absolutely revolting.  Even with butter and sugar on
> it, it was still a no-go.  For a half century I remembered that awful
> taste.
>
> Then one day a few years back, I was in a grocery store I saw Turnips on
> sale.  It occurred to me that the Turnip Experience might be better the
> Second Time Around.  So I took one home and had the wife cook it for me...
> and guess what?  Still just as disgusting as I had found the taste ro be
> sixty years before !
>
> And thus Turnips became my Freudian satirical by-line about the unpleasant
> experiences of a city urchin.
>
> So there you go.  This is my Confession and of you, Father, I ask
> absolution and salutary penance.
>
> But before I go...  You wanna buy some Turnips, Mister ?
>
>   -- abram burnett
> Sovereign Indigenous Tribal Turnip Nation
>
>
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