Playing Squash
Playing Squash
Squash is a complicated game rich folks play. It is played in a bare room with one glass wall where players knock a rubber ball off the walls scoring points in ways I don’t understand. Clearly, squash was invented by someone doing time for insider trading, and the criminal mind is a dark and mysterious thing. I’ll stick to badminton, which is far simpler and less stressful. It was invented by a British Lord and follows the fine English tradition of sports which do not involve exercise.
However, there is a much more challenging game with much higher stakes that I want to talk about, and it is truly a game of squash. Squash is a vegetable of the cucumber family used exclusively by parents to torment their children. People have been known to starve to death on a desert island in the middle of a squash field, and this is understandable. Squash grows in large quantities in any kind of soil including granite, but its edibility has been compared to old lithium batteries. Unfavorably.
But everyone who has a garden in the back yard grows squash, particularly zucchini. They do so because the whole point of having a garden is that there should be green things growing in it, but most plants require good soil to grow in. The average Maine garden spot is suitable for growing rocks and withered tomatoes, presenting a discouraging faded-brown appearance. Unless you plant zucchini in it, in which case your garden becomes a lush green jungle with tentacle-like vines creeping out into the yard as the zucchini attempts to expand beyond the borders of the garden.
While this is very satisfying to the gardener, it soon presents a problem: Zucchinis. Thousands of them. Along with being very hardy, each zucchini plant produces seventy-five zucchinis, which have to be harvested. Otherwise you end up with a yard full of rotting zucchini, attracting insects that have not yet been classified, from places that have not yet been discovered. An entomologist's delight, sure, but the neighbors will not be pleased when their dog is eaten by newly-arrived Goliath beetles.
Thus every summer zucchini growers are faced with the daunting task of figuring out what to do with all of their wonderful home-grown zucchini. They can it, puree it into zucchini relish, bake it into breads, serve it at dinner every night, try to pass the small ones off as pickles, and turn it into many other delightful dishes no one can stand. This takes care of the first few tons.
Then they are faced with a crisis: They can't let all that good zucchini go to waste, but their families are already considering planting the gardeners in the back yard. The site would soon grow over with an impenetrable growth of zucchini, and no one would ever know. So the game begins.
The growers turn to the community for help. At first they go to their friends, giving them shopping bags full of zucchini so their families can learn to loathe it too. Early in the season, they still have time to turn the raw zucchini into more useful nauseating items such as jelly. But soon, harvesting a fresh crop of zucchini every eight hours, they are too busy for such niceties.
Gardeners soon find their circle of friends narrowing to include only other zucchini growers, and they hold ritual zucchini exchanges wherein they swap grocery bags full of them. Soon they realize that they are not reducing the overall quantity of zucchini in their houses. They are forced to take drastic measures.
Zucchini begins to be found abandoned on doorsteps, in the back seats of any cars foolishly left unlocked in zucchini season, and occasionally even on park benches. Gardeners generally want their produce to be given a good home, but sometimes desperation gets the better of them. At this time of the year, members of the clergy are deluged with gifts of produce from their parishioners, and there is no gracious way to stop them. Many clergymen are forced to take up gardening so they can say truthfully that they have more than enough zucchini of their own. But then they have to find a way to get rid of it so it won't go to waste. Lock your doors.
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