May 20, 2009

• Just Desserts – with a Twist

  Competing for ribbons in the Alaska State Fair was my favorite pastime during the years I lived off the grid.   Each winter, the annual premium book that listed all the categories and prizes would arrive about the same time the first seed catalog arrived.  My seed orders and garden plans were devised to enable me to enter as many different categories as possible.  I would also enter crafts, wine, preserves, and baked goods, but this story involves garden produce.

  One year, I purchased seed that was described in the catalog as “giant hot Hungarian yellow wax pepper.”  I allowed the plants about half a dozen containers in one corner of my greenhouse.  One pepper matured before all the rest, and I picked it one brilliant morning as I was opening up the greenhouse for the day.  I took a bite.  It was fragrant and tasted sweet, for an instant, before the heat hit.  My mouth was on fire.  I choked, coughed, and spat all the way back to the house, and guzzled milk from the jug to put out the fire.

  I tended those peppers with the same loving care I gave everything, and I nipped off late blossoms to give the developing peppers every advantage.  Vegetable entries all require a certain number of specimens.  I think that for hot peppers it was three or four.  Uniformity is one of the features that are judged, so I entered several peppers as identical in size and color as possible.

  That year, I was operating The Beanery, my natural foods booth, at the fair.  After I dropped off all my entries in the various barns and exhibit halls on the day before the fair opened, I went back to the old school bus and continued with preparations to feed the crowds for the next two weeks.  Early the next morning, when the exhibits opened, I left Charley to serve breakfast to the early risers and made the rounds to see what I’d won.  I was pleased but not particularly surprised to see not one, but two ribbons:  a blue “first” for the hot pepper category, and a big purple “best of show” rosette for the entire greenhouse vegetable division, on the giant hot Hungarian yellow wax peppers.

  A few days later, with some spare time, I made a more leisurely circuit of the exhibits and saw, to my horror, that my purple rosette was gone and there was no ribbon at all on my yellow wax peppers.  The judge, a man named Fox, was seated nearby so I asked him what was going on.  He said the peppers had been entered in the wrong category, that they were actually a sweet pepper, not a hot one.

  With vivid recall of that choking, eye-watering run for the milk jug, I challenged him to taste one of them.  Smugly, he declined, and told me if I wanted to challenge his decision there was a procedure and I’d have to take it up with the staff in the front office.  It was a long walk, and I was running short on time, but the injustice of it all impelled me to rush over to the office.  I presented my case to the clerk there.  She said that the judge’s decision was final, and I asked her which decision:  the original “best of show” decision, or the erroneous reconsideration.  She shrugged and handed me a challenge form, saying that there was a $25 fee for filing a challenge to a judge’s decision.

  That defeated me.  I couldn’t afford $25 (non-refundable, even if I won) for anything as frivolous as a showy purple ribbon and a cash prize that was, I think, $12.00 at the time.  The annual prize check, which usually arrived in mid-winter when we needed the money most, was my main justification for all the time and resources I put into the competition.  I handed back the blank form, told her the whole affair was grossly unfair, left in tears, and went back to work in the Beanery.

  I had put the whole experience behind me by the time the prize check arrived that winter.  I’d won over $300.00 that year, and it would come in handy.  I got a surprise, however, when I read the itemized printout of my prizes.  I got paid for both the first and the best of show on the peppers.  I don’t know if it was a clerical error, if Mr. Fox had re-reconsidered (perhaps after tasting a pepper), or if somebody else had overruled his capricious behavior.  I thought it prudent, at the time, to cut my losses and spend the money without questioning its provenance.

  That was long ago, and I have transcended all my indignation and resentment.  I put the hurt feelings behind me, but I am still left with questions about how things finally fell out the way they did.  Either way, whether (according to the rules “judge’s decision is final,”) I really deserved the prize or not, I hadn’t deserved all that on-again-off-again aggravation, and if the prize was rightfully mine, I didn’t deserve to be deprived of the ribbons to add to my collection, and robbed of the glory of having them displayed to fairgoers in my name.  *sigh*  Oh, well….

  This reminiscence was prompted by the current Featured Grownups challenge:

  UNDESERVED

  If you have a story about something you did not deserve, blog it (keeping it clean and coherent) and post a link to your entry, HERE.
  

   

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