Counting Cantaloupes

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This afternoon I fed the meat birds out in the chicken tractor on the pasture and then watered the sweet potato slips that I planted in the garden.  By the way, I'll show you more of that in a couple days.  Things are looking good in our heirloom sweet potato experiment.  There are times when things work out.  There are times when things don't.

As I passed by the raised beds by the sweet corn, I checked on the cantaloupes that I have planted there.  They look sickly.  Although full of blooms, they are a sickly yellow color.  It looks like a soil issue to me.  I need to make time to take soil samples this weekend of the pasture, garden area and raised beds in the side yard. I'll be sad if we don't make any cantaloupes.  I was really looking forward to some cantaloupes soon.  As a variation to the old adage, "Don't count your cantaloupes before they're ripe", I guess.

I stood there by the spindly yellow cantaloupe vines and began to think about memories of the fragrant, sweet melons.  As a child we'd go to my grandmother's house (Bumby, we called her) and she would always have slices of ripe, sweet cantaloupe in a bowl on the Sunday lunch table that were picked out at the Supermarket.  That cantaloupe probably had a soft spot in it and it wouldn't sell, so Bumby would bring it home, cut out the bad parts, and put the remainder on the table.  Nothing went to waste!  I still live by that motto.  My grandfather (Poppy) owned that store. The Kinder Supermarket was established in 1947 and he had cantaloupes that were arranged in a prominent place right by the bananas in the produce department.

It's funny how my mind will run off and recall things from the past.  In 1993 we moved to Kinder and I managed the Kinder Supermarket.  There was an old fellow, I'll just call "Mr. Jo" for reasons you'll soon understand.  Mr. Jo sold cantaloupes for a living.  Each summer, we'd see him turn off of Highway 190 and drive into the parking lot, parking his truck in the shade underneath a big old oak tree.  He would then shuffle across the parking lot with a slow, almost painful, uncomfortable gait. He would step on the automatic door mat, opening the door and would make his way around the checkout counters and up to the office.

"Hey, I got some cantaloupes for sale.  Wanna come take a look at 'em?" he'd say. Mr. Jo talked in a voice that sounded like he had a mouth full of gravel.  "Yeah, I'll go look at them," I'd say.  "Oh, they're super sweet, Mr. Kyle," he would brag, "You'll never taste anything like 'em in your life."  I'd follow him out to his pickup truck. The sweltering summer heat would beat down from the sky, radiating up from the asphalt parking lot and into the soles of my shoes as I felt drops of sweat run down the small of my back.  Mr. Jo drove an old white truck with a camper shell on the back.  He had a crudely hand painted sign on the side of his truck that said, CANTALOPES.  (Spell check wasn't invented in 1993 yet, I don't think).

He would lift the back pexiglass door to the camper shell and ask me to hold it open since the little hydraulic arms on the door didn't work to hold it up.  He had an old broom stick that he had cut off at the perfect length to prop the door open when wedged against the bed of the truck.  He then dropped the tailgate.  The overwhelmingly sweet aroma of cantaloupes would overtake me.  It is a smell that I still associate with summer.  He would slide a wax-coated cardboard box of cantaloupes onto the tailgate and open it, pulling out a ripe melon and thrusting it to me.  "Smell that," he'd say.  I would put the broken-off stem end of the ripe cantaloupe to my nose and slowly inhale deeply.

"How much?" I'd ask.  You see, I wanted to be able to sell them at $0.99 a piece and still make money. Old Mr. Jo would tell me, "$10 for a case of 12 cantaloupes."  That math worked.  "Sold," I'd say, "Gimme 15 cases"  At that point in time I would go inside and Mr. Jo would get a cart, load it up with 15 cases and bring the boxes of cantaloupes inside as I'd go to the office and write out a check to him for $150.  I emphasized the phrase "at that point in time" because experience quickly taught me that Mr. Jo played a little trick to give himself extra cantaloupes to sell further down the road.  While I would be writing out the check, Mr. Jo would deftly remove one cantaloupe out of each case.  After he was gone, we opened the boxes to discover that there were only 11 cantaloupes in each box and not 12.

From that time forward when he drove up, we courteously provided an escort to Mr. Jo and 'chaperoned' him at all times.  We'd count the cantaloupes in the store prior to me giving him the check.  That way we'd end up with all the cantaloupes from Mr. Jo. In similar fashion, I'm hoping I end up with some cantaloupes this year from the garden.