Top It Off with a Cherry

In our family, camping took place at the lake. But “summer camp” was almost always a music camp held at one university or another. Our favorite was at SDSU in Brookings, South Dakota where we spent two weeks rehearsing & performing in musicals, choir, orchestra & band. But in 1974 I also attended a five-week orchestra camp in Wisconsin, the last three of which were held at the University of Wisconsin—LaCrosse

Now, I have to tell you that if you were looking for great cafeteria food during that summer, UW—LaCrosse was the place to be. I remember thinking that school food had never tasted so good, & the number of options was fairly staggering. But it’s not the food they served that sticks in my memory. Rather, it’s the simplest of summer foods I served one evening in the dormitory.

It began with an afternoon walk my roommate & I decided to take when we had several hours free from rehearsals. We had gone about a mile when we happened upon a neighborhood grocery that looked interesting, so we popped on in looking for a little refreshment. They had a promotion going at the time with big signs you couldn’t miss advertising a lug of cherries for some ridiculously small amount.

You might have guessed by this time that I really love cherries—not to mention sales. I didn’t have a lot of spending money, but I had enough for that, & the deal was too good for me to pass up. My roommate thought I was crazy, but I bought myself a lug of cherries.

Perhaps you remember, we were walking & something like a mile from the dorm. And, in case you were wondering how many cherries are in a lug, it’s twelve quarts which weigh between fifteen & sixteen pounds. I was accustomed to delivering our hometown newspaper which could get pretty heavy at times, but those I carried in a bag hung over my shoulder. The cherries came in a box I had to hold in my hands.

I was a little guy at the time, fresh out of the ninth grade, just a little over five feet tall & something like a hundred ten or twenty pounds. My roommate may have offered to help once or twice, but I was determined to carry them myself. He asked me what I was going to do with them since we only had something like a week & a half of camp remaining. Twelve quarts of cherries is a lot for one little kid to devour within that timeframe, especially when you already have breakfast, lunch & supper provided.

I told him we were going to host a cherry party.

(To this day I have no idea what the other students thought when I invited them. I was one of the youngest at camp. You couldn’t attend unless you had completed your freshman year of high school, & I had started school when I was four. Add to that the fact that I was extremely naïve for my age & had no idea that “cherry” was often used euphemistically.)

I dutifully washed & stuck them in our fridge (another luxury I had never before come across) & announced to everyone there would be a cherry party in our room the following evening after supper.

When the time came, we set out the cherries, opened the door & waited for our guests to arrive. A few people stuck their heads through the door to see if anything was happening, then promptly left. Who knew that high school students in the summer of 1974 weren’t really into sitting around in a room chatting & eating cherries with two guys who were not exactly considered cool? It was okay, though. The party was supposed to be come & go. I was feasting on cherries & the two of us were enjoying each other’s company. One couple stopped by for a little while. (I don’t know whether they knew one another before camp, but by the second day they spent an entire bus ride making out in the seat right in front of me while I sang the full score of “Jesus Christ, Superstar”. They were nice & not nearly as naïve as I. And he only asked me once if I could possibly stop changing keys in the middle of songs.) They visited for a bit, ate no cherries, & left. My roommate ate a few. No one else even touched them. But by the time we decided to call it a night, we were down over three quarts.

That’s right. I ate over three quarts of cherries after a delicious meal, all in one sitting.

Now, I’m not exactly sure what happens with cherries once they enter the digestive system, but I can tell you it’s interesting. As we prepared for lights out, I walked down the hallway toward the bathroom. As I passed the full-length mirror on the wall, I literally did a double take. I stopped in my tracks & leaned back to see if I had actually seen in my reflection what I thought I had seen.

I had a “Sad Sack” tummy. If you’re not familiar with the “Sad Sack” comic strip, it was one we had as a part of the funnies section in our hometown newspaper. It was a humorous take on army life, much like “Beetle Bailey”. The thing that always stood out to me was that so many of the characters had prominent tummies, almost as though the cartoonist had simply drawn half a beach ball in front of them. That’s precisely what eating three plus quarts of cherries did to me.

It also made me really have to go to the bathroom—&, at the same time, not be able to. I had never known constipation could be like that. I spent what seemed like an eternity squeezing & wheezing & doing everything I could to push it out. When my bowels finally released their contents, they did so all at once, blasting the entire load into the bowl. There was no Alka-Selzer involved & there was no “Plop, plop, fizz, fizz,” only a powerful “Splooooooosh!” But I will tell you most definitely that I was I thinking, “Oh, what a relief it is!”

As I passed the hallway mirror (after washing my hands & brushing my teeth, of course—I’m not an animal!), I found that my tummy had returned to normal. As I laid down in my bed, I replayed the surreal adventure with my roomie.

As I finished, I asked him, “And do you know what it smelled like?”

“No, what?” he responded from the other side of the room.

“Just like cherries—like you could reach right back into the bowl & eat them all over again.”

He laughed for twenty minutes.