Day 651 April 14, 2022

The Joy of Carrots 

I wonder when I first had pistachios. I do not think they were common things in my childhood, not like the ubiquity they enjoy in today’s grocery store. Back then they were as uncommon as avocados, or pomegranates. And they were dyed red. After eating a bowl full of pistachios your fingers and lips would be stained red with flavor.

Something changed, and suddenly there was pistachio ice cream, pistachios crumbled and sprinkled on cake frosting, pistachios rolled into croissants. Now I come home and eat them like raisins, no more red dye, and for as long as the sleeve of nuts last, they become a part of my daily sustenance.

There was a time, when I was working as a guitar builder and helping my mentor teach a class on guitar building. His class was pretty expansive and drew students from across the country. Some were looking to start a new career, but most wanted to own an instrument they created with their own hands, and some were mainly purchasing a unique experience. One of these students turned out to be a pistachio farmer. We learned this only partway through the class, and for him, pistachios were nothing special. He thought nothing of traveling across the country without so much as a sample. So, to appease our curiosity, he had a 5 lbs bag express shipped from California for the class to share.

Those pistachios were the best pistachios I have ever tasted. There was a freshness to them that was foreign to all of us accustomed to nuts that have sat too long, were roasted carelessly, salted with abandon. Years later, I would think of these pistachios in the desert outside of Santa Fe where at side-of-the-road-stands you could buy bags of dried red pepper, and to test the pepper, they would scoop a thimbleful in one half of a pistachio shell to drop on your tongue, and then they would give you the other half shell with the meat of the nut to chase the pepper down. It was a delightful sensation, but it kept me yearning for more pistachios, and given the opportunity, I might have eaten all the pepper seller’s pistachios in one sitting, but I maintained my decorum and stepped away, held that yearning close.

Those pistachios, shared on the top of a workbench sprinkled with wood shavings, were a revelation. Who knew pistachios, something I enjoy in their normal state, held the potential for so much more? I felt the same when I accompanied my youngest daughter on a field trip to a local farm. We laughed at the pigs rooting the earth and preparing it for the next season’s planting, and then we were handed tools and sent into the fields to harvest carrots. We pulled from the earth extravagant specimens of carrot unlike anything I had ever seen in a grocery store. They were flecked with dirt, so we carried them to a large plastic barrel where we dunked and rubbed them in very cold water. And then we ate them, skin and all. 

Like my pistachio experience, I was astounded how flavorful the carrots were. I had never eaten a carrot fresh from the earth. I had never tasted a carrot so sweet and moist. I remembered my friend Hector, who took me into the woods behind his apartment complex and pretended to be a specter from a Robert Frost poem and swung from birch tree to birch tree. He pulled a carrot from his pocket and offered me one. He ate his as we walked, skin and all. Years later, we both appeared on someone’s list mentioning poems, but for me, our connection was a love of delicious carrots, but nothing could ever top that memory of playing farmer with my youngest daughter and pulling fresh carrots from an icy cold barrel and celebrating life, the joy of being alive.