Carrots and Corduroy

 

The following is an excerpt from my fortcoming memoir, Some Things I Did, in which I recount in painstaking detail the most inconsequential and boring moments from a life full of them. It’s not a celebration of success, nor is it a meditation on failure. Rather, it is a simple accounting of some stuff that occurred not too long ago. I will publish more in the future. Something we can all look forward to.

From an early age, Bugs Bunny was a hero of mine. He taught me the value of repetition and the power of a memorable catch phrase (a memorable catch phrase). Initially I wondered if “what’s up doc?” was a commentary on the United States healthcare system, or merely a reflection of his choice in friends. Being a celebrity, he was no doubt on a board or two, nurturing more than one expanding endowment. But even more than that, Bugs taught me how to eat. Long before the raw food craze of the early 21^st century, there he was, an independent rabbit, surrounded by candy, cigarettes, and TV dinners, chomping away on a far healthier choice: wild carrots. This was my example. 

 

Oh, it must’ve been 2014 or so. A crisp March day. The sort of day you need shoes, but not gloves. You want sunglasses, but not ski goggles. Perfect for the seasonally bereft. 

In kindergarten, a classmate told me about the many benefits of carrots, including how it could practically give you X-ray vision. His attempt to demonstrate this began with a maraca. The boy explained how there were beads inside, ones no one else but him could see.

While he showed off his eyes, I must've rolled mine. What would be the first of many in the following three decades.

I’m not one to measure food. Although, I do have a yardstick hanging in my kitchen to swat at pests and pretend to conduct the New York philharmonic. I’ve always thought a conductor’s baton to be rather ineffectual in size and scope. Perhaps my background as a high school fencer of minor acclaim affects my view of other sword-like objects. 

You don’t expect to love corduroy the same way our culture promotes flannel and wool. Despite my distance from a tenure track professorship, I began wearing corduroy blazers. I never wanted to teach a graduate level philosophy course. I just wanted to look like I did. 

So on this early spring morning, staring into a nearly empty fridge, I donned my natty, ratty, tattered blazer, and took out the healthiest thing I could find. In this case it was a medium sized carrot. From my research, I knew I had to peel it first. Though Bugs never did such a thing. He went in fresh and unvarnished, probably ingesting more than his fair share of dirt in the process. But a cartoon character, however iconic, is not a nutritionist. 

There I was, walking down Broadway, one of Astoria’s main throughfares, eating a carrot. That’s until I reached the end of it; not of the street, but of the carrot. Mind you, this was long before city-wide composting. So I had nowhere to deposit this stump, besides the overflowing trashcans and open sewers. I looked everywhere for rabbits, but saw only rats and pigeons. Then I did the most sensible thing I could think of.

I ate it.