This is one of my few juvenile pieces that I can still remember actually writing, as well as the inspiration for it. The piece itself was written in late 1985, for my Grade 9 English class. We had been given the assignment of writing five short poems, and at the time (being a young teenager who still knew everything), I thought this was by far the stupidest of the five that I wound up submitting.

At the time, I couldn’t understand why the teacher seemed to like it the best. As an adult I now understand his reasoning. In short, the other four were a selection of several flavours of pretentious crap that took themselves much too seriously. This one at least had some whimsy to recommend it.

The inspiration for the piece came about a year earlier, in July or August of 1984, when I was with my family, and we had stopped at a french-fry truck (or “chip truck” in the local vernacular). I can remember that after we got our fries (thick-cut, cooked in peanut oil with glorious malt vinegar—this was in the days before half the entire planet had peanut allergies), we hung out around the parking lot to eat them, simply because my parents didn’t want any messes or vinegar stink in the car.

There was a ditch at the edge of the parking lot, which had water that was clean enough to host reasonably healthy lily pads, duckweed and a very large bullfrog that just sat at the edge, staring at me as I ate the fries. Being a stupid kid, I eventually had the idea of tossing one of the fries towards the frog to see if it might gobble it up like it would snatch up a big insect.

Of course, all the frog did was blink those big, googly, golden eyes at me once or twice, and it didn’t even move as the fry hit the water and sank to the bottom.