There are a lot of bad things about living in the South. It can get so hot here that the asphalt roads literally melt. And NASCAR is entirely too popular. Mosquitoes. Snakes. Yankees on road trips. The list of aggravations is long.
But there are a lot of things about living in the South that more than make up for the frustrations, and I was reminded of that some time back when somebody sent me a story from the Monroe County, Alabama Journal.
The story, which was on the front page of the paper and written by Josh Dewberry, was headlined “Three picked up on pea theft.”
(My first job out of college was at a small weekly newspaper in Alabama. Let me tell you, editors DREAM of writing headlines like this. I bet editors at the New York Times were weeping into their Cheerios when they read that headline from the Monroe County Journal, because they realized they’d never get to write a headline like that. For some reason, pea theft in New York CIty goes largely unreported.)
Here’s the lead sentence of the story: “Three people were picked up Tuesday on charges alleging they stole fresh picked peas from the porch of a home on Bear Creek Road near Frisco City, Monroe County Sheriff Tom Tate said Tuesday.”
This, my friends … THIS is one of the reasons living in the South is so great. Because not only do we still eat fresh peas, we will hunt down and prosecute those who will steal the peas from us.
According to the story, Robert Finklea was picking peas “on halves” for the owner of the pea patch. For those of you cursed to live in a place where pea patches don’t exist, that means Finklea was picking the peas and giving half to the pea patch owner while keeping half for himself. This is a beneficial arrangement for both parties – the patch owner gets their peas picked for them, and Finklea gets some peas without having to buy the land to plant them on.
Finklea was putting the owner’s half of the picked peas on their front porch. The story doesn’t say, but I’m assuming he had Tupperware containers or paper sacks or something, because if he was just piling loose peas on the porch that could pose a problem. (Ain’t alliteration awesome?)
Anyway, Finklea apparently saw three people grab the peas off the porch, and he called the sheriff.
Now, in big Northern cities like New York or Chicago or Waukesha, I bet the police would just laugh at a report of stolen peas. “Call us back when you know about a REAL crime, Finky-boy,” I can hear those policemen saying to Robert Finklea. But not in Monroe County, Alabama. Nope. Sheriff Tom Tate doesn’t put up with shenanigans like that. Sheriff Tom Tate probably grew up picking and shelling peas, and he knows how hard it can be. He probably enjoys a good meal of fresh-picked peas, corn bread, mashed potatoes, green beans and a slab of Vidalia onion whenever he can. So pea theft resonates with him. His department sprang into action and arrested the three pea thieves soon after the theft was reported.
The story doesn’t say how the thieves were identified, although carrying around big containers of fresh-picked peas was probably a decent clue. I would’ve paid five dollars to see that chase, though, with the three people running on foot (you just KNOW that people who would steal peas off a front porch don’t have a car), shoveling peas out of their containers as fast as they could to get rid of the evidence while deputies closed in. I can hear the theme from the TV show “COPS” playing in my head while I picture it. I can see the sheriff’s deputies (or maybe even Sheriff Tom Tate himself) holding up some of the thrown-away peas to the camera, showing the evidence before they put it in baggies for the trial. I can see them forcing the three pea-thieves to the ground, spread-eagled, as they search them for other contraband, like okra or (depending on how hard-core the thieves were) maybe even yams.
The kicker is, I bet you the owner of the pea patch would’ve given these three people some peas for free. Might have even cooked them up first and served them with some fried squash and zucchini. We Southerners are fairly generous like that. But because these three lawbreakers couldn’t control their baser instincts, they’ll rot in jail. And pea-thieves are not very popular in jails around here, my friend. Oh no. Not at all. They rank below parking-ticket scofflaws and jaywalkers on the prison social scale. They will do hard time … and it will be hard.
So you Northern people, and you big-city people, and you so-called “sophisticated” people just go right on, worrying about your global warming and your sub-prime mortgage foreclosures and making jokes about the rural South being “fly-over country” and whatnot. Those of us here in the rural South (especially those in Monroe County, Alabama) will sit back on our pea-filled front porches, slow down, enjoy life a little, and rest easier knowing that the crime wave is over and our vegetables are safe and sound.
(c) 2012 John Puckett
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