Buster and the Pickles

Buster and the Pickles Buster was always getting into trouble. Sometimes, he had good ideas that went badly. Sometimes he had bad ideas that went well. And sometimes, well, sometimes it was a little bit of both. One day, when Buster was about two years old, he was at the ice cream shop down the street with his parents when he noticed a big jar full of pickles on the countertop. The sign next to it said, “Pickles, one dollar” – he wasn’t worried about that. He couldn’t read it anyway. But he had never seen a pickle before and he was fascinated by these big green lumpy things in what appeared to be water in a big glass jar. So he pointed and made some noises that he might have thought were words, though they certainly didn’t sound like any words I know, and it got his parents attention, which is all that mattered. So they picked him up so he could get a better look, and said, “Those are pickles, Buster, do you want one?” Well, Buster might have been a troublemaker, but he was no dummy, and if someone was going to offer him food, he was not going to say no. He liked everything else he’d ever had at the ice cream shop, so he was sure the pickles would be sweet and creamy and delicious. They got their ice cream and Buster got his pickle and they went to find a table and sit down. While his parents fussed with the high chair, he kept eyeing the pickle. By the time they had gotten him into his high chair his mouth was watering. The pickle was just an ordinary pickle-size, but it seemed huge in Buster’s hands. He opened his mouth wide and took a big bite. Crunchy. Cold. He liked that. And a fleeting moment of sweetness before its true flavor hit him. Sour. So sour. His face puckered up and he grimaced. “What on earth is this thing?” he thought to himself, “People eat these?” He wasn’t a quitter, though, so he kept chewing until he’d swallowed his first bite. He gave his parents a look of confusion, and felt a little betrayed, until they handed him his ice cream. But as he ate his ice cream he kept glancing at the big jar on the counter, with all the pickles in it. They looked like something familiar. When he finally realized what they reminded him of, he started laughing. He didn’t know the words to explain to his parents what he thought was so funny. He just laughed and laughed. “Oh kids!” said his parents, unaware of his thoughts. “It’s so cute the way they just laugh at nothing!” Well, that day he wasted nearly all of a perfectly good pickle. But that did not get him into trouble. A few weeks later, Buster was going through the grocery store with his mom, sitting in the little seat that’s built into the shopping cart, when he saw a lot of little jars of pickles on a shelf. He immediately started talking, or trying to, and pointing at the pickle jars. It wasn’t nearly as big as the one at the ice cream store. But, it would have to do. “Pickles?” said his mom. “It didn’t seem like you liked them very much. But, sure, you can give them another try.” So, the jar came home, along with the rest of the groceries. And she opened it for him. And he ate one. He still didn’t like them that much, but now that he knew what they were, they were growing on him. “These aren’t half bad actually. But I can’t eat all of them,” he thought to himself. Buster wasn’t sneaky. But he had learned from experience that you could get away with more if you went about things quietly. So he didn’t grab the pickle jar right then and there. But he made a mental note of where it had been put away (refrigerator door, bottom shelf) so that he could come back to it later. One day, soon after, while his dad was at work and his mother was busy watering the garden, he opened up the fridge, and took out the jar of pickles. And up the stairs he went with them, into the upstairs bathroom. And he lifted the toilet seat. And opened the pickle jar. And – before I go further, I probably should point out that Buster, at that moment in his life, was in the middle of what grownups often call “potty training” – which meant that recently he had been hearing from his parents a lot about how toilets worked, and what they were for, and how to use them properly. So perhaps we should excuse young Buster for still being a little curious about a thing that most of us eventually get used to and stop caring about, namely, that long lumpy things go into toilets sometimes, and then you flush the toilet, and they go away. In any case, what happened next was, as you might have guessed, Buster very deliberately plopped each and every one of those pickles into the toilet. And to his great satisfaction, they really did look like a green version of… what normally goes in toilets, when toilets are used correctly. Buster laughed and laughed, completely amused by the sight of all the pickles floating in the toilet. This is not, quite, what got Buster in trouble. Right then, he heard his mom come in the door downstairs. He had not planned this far ahead. He was pretty sure, as amusing as it was, that pickles were not one of the things his parents had mentioned when they had been working with him on potty training. So, he panicked a little bit, and in a moment of foolishness – you might think that putting pickles in the toilet in the first place was foolish enough, but believe me, what he did next was worse – in a moment of foolishness, he flushed the toilet. They didn’t all go down. And that’s how his mom found him. Standing in the bathroom, next to a toilet with one pickle in it, with an empty pickle jar in his hand and a guilty look on his face. Buster’s mom didn’t think long about it. It was immediately clear to her what had happened. Unfortunately, she was a little too distracted by the pickle in the toilet, and did not give the empty pickle jar the attention it deserved, and so she didn’t think to ask if there had been others, or if he had flushed any of them down. So Buster got into some trouble, but a little less than you might think. “It’s one thing not to finish one because you don’t like it, but it’s wrong to waste perfectly good food!” was the main lesson that day. His mom had to pretend to be serious, and she couldn’t say it to his face, but the truth was, she thought the pickle in the toilet was funny too! What got Buster in trouble happened later, when the episode about the pickles had been all but forgotten. You see, the reason people started making pickles in the first place, way back before your parents were born, and there were still dinosaurs and dodo birds and things like that, was that before refrigerators were invented, it was really hard to keep food from going bad. And pickling was one way to make food last longer. A regular cucumber might last a week or two in the fridge, and maybe just a day or two if it’s left out on the counter. But a pickled cucumber will last years, even with no fridge. They won’t rot, they won’t get soft, they won’t break down. They stay pickles. And so if pickles go some place they don’t belong, such as down a toilet for example, no matter how much else goes down the drain after them, that might wash other things away, nothing will make those pickles fall apart. And if that drain is below a toilet, then bit by bit, whatever other… things get flushed down after them, some of it will get stuck on top of them, inside the pipe, and at some point, quite a while later, that toilet will clog up sure as anything, and no amount of work with a plunger will make it flush. And so one day, weeks later, his parents noticed their toilet was blocked, and so, not knowing why, they called their plumber. And he came, and got to work. And he was working at it for quite a while because it was not an easy problem to solve, and in the end it ended up being a fairly messy and unpleasant job. But finally, when he was done he came downstairs to talk to Buster’s parents, to discuss what he had found, how long it had taken him to find it, and how much money it was going to cost them. And what the plumber had found, and carefully extracted from the pipes after hours of smelly, messy work, and carefully rinsed off with clean water, and put in a small clean bucket so that he could carry them, and brought downstairs to show them, was unmistakably, undeniably, unlaughably, a whole lotta pickles. And that’s why Buster got in trouble.