a radish-buncher speaks:

so wrote a former radish-buncher:

" Hey, Mr. Dix!

Believe it or not, I was looking up radish-buncher on the intenet and out popped your Sewer Raccoon News! I myself - I noticed you claim radish bunching as one of your jobs - was once a buncher! Hey, do you still remember the secret RB handshake? Maybe you people in WI didn't do it the way we did in OR.

That's what took me to searching radish-bunching on the web. To see if anybody has recorded (given out) the secret radish-bunchers handshake. I would like to think it has never been disclosed, but in the way of secret societies nowadays, I fear someone has ferreted the confidence out and spilled the beans. (I mean radishes.)

I think I am about your age, from the reading I've done of your blog. And I think I've read all of it, as it is so interesting. I tune it in every day on my lap-top, first thing in the morning on the ferry out to the island, where I am a practicing attorney. To find that a man as intellectually developed as you seem to be began as a radish-buncher like I did - and I'm assuming you bunched radishes as a lad (why, I don't know; maybe you bunch now) - gives great hope to us all, including the quiet but upward-mobile migrant workers.

I will give my address on the handshake question, but I will ask you to kindly have a blurb on radish-bunching sometime in the Raccoon News. It does appear that you cover just about everything. Keep those rubber bands tightly on your wrist. I was a righty, myself. "

Yours in veggies,

Oregon Bob

Bob:

Thanks for your inquiry about the radish-bunchers' handshake. I am mailing you a coded, diagramed portrayal of the way it used to be done here in Wisconsin. I am not at liberty to broadcast bunchers' lore on the internet. I am happy to say that I still have some rubber bands left, and they're - where else? - on my right wrist, for I was a (and still am) a lefty. But,so what? We still have much in common if you were a true buncher. I'd like to have a nickel for every bunch of radishes I put together for the Man. Matter of fact, that's what I got paid, five cents per.

Maybe I'll have more about bunching later.

Best Radishes,

Ed., Sewer Raccoon News

ps: Radish tap roots led me to beets. I just got my start in radishes. But I never made a vole-tail pendant. In some ways I was benighted back then.