A Prairie Home Companion from American Public Media: First Person

Bullfrog
by Yossi Ginzberg
March 28, 2007

This tale reflects poorly on me, and I am hesitant to tell it, but I feel that if I am to retain my claim to being a truth-teller I must. Please, please be compassionate and forgiving of my childish frailties. I have punished myself often enough over this, so that I have no need for you to add to my torments.

My otherwise extremely intelligent grandparents were fortunate enough in their finances to actualize a dream: They bought a large tract of land near the Wisconsin shore, about an hour drive away from their Chicago home, and built a huge bungalow there, intending for it to become a family compound where their three children with their spouses and children would all spend quality family time together.

This was not a good idea. First of all, their children had all married very very different and non-compatible types. Second, this building lot was totally isolated, and there was absolutely nothing to do and no one to do it with, outside of the immediate household. While perhaps back in the Ukraine at the time of my grandparents childhood this type of setting was as idyllic as it looked in "Dr. Zhivago", in the Midwest of my childhood this was far closer to a forced detention as a foreign national, something that stops slightly before cruelty but still is unwanted and boring to tears. This place was so remote there was no television, no camp, nothing.

For whatever reasons, my grandparents somehow failed to see into the future, and actually proceeded with this project. They built a very large one-story summer home with a huge screened porch, a gigantic kitchen, and plenty of bedrooms. I don't have any idea where the legal property line was, but for all practical purposes our yard extended as far as the eye could see in every direction. A totally flat plain, it had tall grass, train tracks far off, and nothing else. The beach, on lake Michigan, was a 15- minute walk away. And free of annoying lifeguards or anyone else to watch you drown, as we somehow miraculously avoided.

On the very first weekend of having the whole extended family together, there was enough tension to convince the two sons-in-law never to come back, and the only daughter-in-law was very pregnant with her first child and came only for weekends with her husband. Being that she was chubby, indolent, surly to us kids, and gave off an aura that made the whole family despise New Yorkers for two decades, that suited us all fine.

This left the house for most of the week with only my grandparents, their two daughters, and several kids of assorted temperaments and natures.

With virtually no traffic, the street was part of our play area, and one of the high points of our day was the occasional freight train passing.

The bigger boys walked out to the train tracks to place pennies for flattening, while we younger boys amused ourselves otherwise. I cannot remember who invented this or where we learned it, but we would cut the reeds known as Cat-tails, tall stalks with a furry brown collar around the top. We would dry these in the sun during the day, then at night sneak over to the family car and dunk them into the gas tank. After a few more minutes, we would light them, and enjoy our own private fireworks show. (Parental warning: This is VERY unsafe, and you should not attempt this trick. Even if by some miracle you don't burn down your house, you will ruin your car. I really mean this. It is really nothing short of incredible that none of us kids died in those rustic surroundings, unsupervised as we were in those carefree days.)

Anyway, kids have ways of coping with boredom, and heaven protects those too dumb to protect themselves. We somehow managed to survive both the ennui of the endless summer days and the dangers of unsupervised boyhood.

My older brother had a cousin about his age, while I had one exactly 10 days older than I. Both named after the same forbear, we spent far too much time in each other's company, for lack of alternatives. In good weather we spent our time outdoors, but in the rain, we were forced to stay within the confines of the house with the adults, minimizing the dangers but increasing the boredom.

Our very-pregnant aunt, Toby, was not a popular figure in the house at that point in time.

She was a classic New Yorker to our minds, meaning sophisticated people who thought themselves better than us. Even moodier than usual with her first pregnancy and presumably able to feel the hostility inherent in staying alone with two new sisters-in-law and a mother-in-law, she opted instead to spend the week in town with her husband and come out only for the weekends. During that time in the country, too, she spent most of her time in her room, reading movie magazines and eating chocolates, using her pregnancy as an excuse to avoid contact. On rare occasions she would ask me to bring her a drink from the kitchen, and she would reward me with a chocolate bar from the copious supply in her bedside table.

So on a rainy Monday, hanging out and bored stiff with being confined again to the house, I realized that while she had left back to the city, the stash of chocolate probably had not. Easily ascertaining that I was correct, I liberated a bar for myself, and took another to bribe my cousin to not blow the whistle on the operation.

Unfortunately, I had unleashed a monster. Not only were we bored, we were severely under-sugared for lack of access to a candy store. The result was an ever-increasing frequency of trips to the night table, which took on the role of our pusher.

Two insufficiently-supervised seven-year-olds can consume prodigious amounts of chocolate. It didn't take past Thursday to deplete the entire contents of the drawer. On Friday morning, hearing the older people talk about plans for the weekend, I realized that my uncle and aunt were on their way to the house, and immediately also realized that they were sure to realize that the only possible candidates for the theft were my cousin and myself.

Luckily, I was also old enough to realize other facts about my family, and formulated a plan to avoid punishment.

I went out and managed in short order to catch one of the monstrous bullfrogs common to the area. Putting him into the now-empty drawer that had contained the chocolates, I busied myself with a book in my own room, and hoped for the best.

Beginners luck can be the prelude to a gambling problem, but in this case at least it cured me of the temptation to ever steal again. The plan worked like a charm.

Aunt Toby came into the house, complained about the heat and her hard trip, and plopped herself onto her bed. Reaching for a magazine with her left hand, she reached with her right for the drawer. Opening it by habit without looking, she was astounded when the bullfrog immediately jumped out of the drawer, right onto her stomach.

The shriek, even though I had expected it, was incredibly shrill. And loud. And angry.

The womenfolk, running in to investigate, went into absolute hysteria. The old-wives tale about the dangers of a pregnant woman being scared were the talk of the house for the rest of the day. Calls were made on the party-line telephone to doctors, rabbis, and advice-givers of all sorts, in a frantic attempt to find a "cure" for the very upset woman.

As planned by the cunning of a child, the theft of the candy was totally forgotten in the tumult, as was the well-deserved punishment.

So perhaps it is a form of poetic justice or irony that to this day I feel terrible about this episode. And not over the theft of the chocolate.

You see, to this day when other people look at the baby with which she was pregnant, today a grown man, they simply see an ugly adult.

I see a man with an uncommon resemblance to a bullfrog.

About the author:
If you liked this, I have a whole drawerful more! I live in Manhattan now, and while I miss Minnesota, I make up for it with Central Park, where I spin yarns about the idylls of growing up Jewtheran. Mostly, I spend my time enjoying my singlehood and my love for bright lights and interesting places. I also volunteer-teach at several Jewish interest programs, and read voraciously.