"Blackberries Hurrah"
By Thom Calandra
Copyright © 2007, Thom Calandra
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED BY AUTHOR
Years ago, I took a stab at reading some of the modern fiction writers’ methods for how they came up with their story ideas. The process for most of these cats was pretty simple: get an idea and jot it down. One of these writers
was a British children’s author who also wrote some light pornography, chain-smoked, lorded over his wife and kids and died before he reached the age of 60. Inside the shed he used as his word workshop, he would jot down his early-morning
ideas, just a phrase or a sentence.
How about a candy factory run by an opium addict? Or a gap-toothed lawyer who wears braces on her teeth and sings Edith Piaf in cabaret and tells wickedly funny jokes about her closest friends? A marshmallow that might prevent the most horrid of neurological diseases? Just snits of an idea, really, a few words that might one day become a book. (OK, I made those up.)
The little story I'm thinking about took hold of my overcapitalized brain one afternoon biking up an old railroad grade in the county where I live. I caught some gravel and threw a digger into a blackberry bush, its branches spare and almost bereft of berries but its thorns still packing sting, and barbing my forearms and ankles.
That autumn afternoon, my taxi-yellow bike helmet spotted with a few spits of berry juice, and rubbing the blood back into my chafed arms and legs, I thought: what about a blackberry bush that extended or
enhanced life? What if we assume there are 6 billion people in the world, and of those, 10 percent or 600 million people, eat blackberries in
season, whether they live in Washington state or Chile or Vietnam?
Now let’s say 10 percent of those, or 60 million people, eat those blackberries at least once a week in season, or maybe twice, and even go out looking for them, as long as a blackberry bush is in the neighborhood, or
by the side of the road on their way home from work. They like them a lot, in the summer time. Now, let’s say 10 percent of those folks, or 6 million people, like blackberries a heck of a lot. More
than most berries. They’ll actually seek and pick blackberries in places they don’t usually go, just to pick those blackberries. They may decide to wear long pants to avoid getting hacked around the ankles, shins and
knees. They may take a 20-minute trip or a 30-minute trip JUST to pick blackberries. Now, let’s say 10 percent of those folks, or 600,000 people, have decided there is nothing more delicious in the entire
world of wild berries than a big fat ruby-colored blackberry. So they will actually plan their picking, and probably even buy them in the off-season from countries in the opposite hemisphere of the globe. Now,
of those, 10 percent, or 60,000 people, actually have what a professional shrink-wrapper would call a mania or a hypo-mania about blackberries, an almost compulsive 
desire to pick them and enjoy them
in a variety of ways -- in cobblers, pies, with ice cream, in exotic savory recipes, on their porridge, in smoothies and juices. Of those, maybe 6,000 folks a year experience a mystical blackberry moment, whether in the
fruit itself, or the picking of the fruit. This moment could be meditative. It could be a prick of blood on a fingertip after a brush with a thorny stem -- maybe a glimpse into mortality. Or it could
be gustatory -- the sweetest, or tartest, or plumpest, or richest, or mouth-feel poppiness -- of a wonderful blackberry. It could be intense camaraderie with friends picking blackberries, or nursing someone with
a blackberry pie. It could even be the scent of blackberries bringing back some wonderful memory, perhaps a roll in the bushes as a lad or a lass. Of those 6,000 people, 600 people are actually aware they have
had some kind of intense link with blackberries at that moment, or similar moments. Those 600 people are all around the world any given year, and each of them has ideas about that mystical moment. So they
search to replicate that moment. Few of them do, because most of those moments, while epiphany, are also happenstance. A happy accident. Or a pleasant conglomeration of emotions, sweat, blood,
adrenaline, peace and blackberries in one brief flash. Still, these 600 people are happy searching for that moment to repeat itself. Who wouldn’t be, snarfing blackberries at the crack of dawn, by a campfire,
in a cabin, at the picnic table, and so on? The few that manage to replicate that magic m
oment might number 60 in any given year, and they are able to replicate that moment because they have discovered, perhaps unknowingly, an
endowed blackberry patch -- something that for lack of talent I can describe as glazed with fairy dust or something, like in that movie “Cocoon,” where the senior folks flop around in a Florida swimming pool that has been
impregnated by celestial orbs from another planet. The seniors feel younger, get frisky, spunky, chatty, become more alive. Sort of what is supposed to happen when you use some of these new molecular
compounds the drug companies sell from their own pharma patches. Some of them might suspect their rejuvenation springs from the blackberries, or the soil where the blackberry bushes have taken root.
They have achieved the ultimate blackberry receptor in their brains, and neurobiological clinicians and researchers are blown away by the ability of the sticky sweet juice to firewall all sorts of gangly disorders and
multiple plaque-plagued diseases of the nervous system. Ahh, but see, none of the lucky ones really knows for sure, like in a double-blind clinical trial for some magic pharma, and few of these 60 can keep the
magic going for more than a season, a summer. They can't replicate the happy accident. Then there are the handful, maybe six people a year, just six, who absorb it all, more or less for keeps. They didn’t just
stumble onto the truth of these rare berries, these spare insiders and aficionados who called the best of the patch not berries, but “blackbezzles.” These lucky ducks sought the bezzles out, determinedly, and won them forever. No placebos.
And just maybe, for a peppermint plot twist, maybe out of all the people in the world, the patchwork, the rare patchwork of prized bezzles, as the fortunate ones call them, maybe those singular berries sought these half-dozen lucky mucks out? The berries would be in charge, just as a dazzled and addled senior citizen one day realizes his or her dementia is in charge. The beginning, middle and end of my story was Blackberries: Blackberries with a capital B. This was about the beauty of the berries, or bezzles as the case may be for those who discover the mysterious bush.
In that brief spill from my bike, I somehow concocted an allegory about wild berries ... that fast are being replaced in our accelerating suburbs by cinder blocks and parking lot asphalt. As I brushed myself off from the fall, I even formulated a name for the story, right at that instant: “Blackberries Hurrah.” And no, I don't have dementia. But yes, I'm going to have to watch the bramble next time I'm pedaling up that dusty old railroad grade and spin some gravel beneath my wheels.
About
the Author
Thom Calandra’s novel “Pablo By Numbers” was excerpted in autumn 2007 on the StockHouse.com group of web sites in Canada and the USA. Thom was a co-founder and a columnist and broadcaster at CBS MarketWatch.
