I hear the girls before I see them.  “Oh my gosh, it’s a lizard!” Then a swarm of giggles and scuffling footsteps travel up the street, into the driveway, onto my front porch where I sit with a glass of Cabernet in the waning October sun reading Joan Houlihan’s The Us.

 

A shriek rises when I say hello after they ring the doorbell, hidden as I am behind a hedge of potted tree-height camellias.

 

“What’s up?” I ask, emerging from my poetry lair.

 

There are six girls, all dressed in pink felt poodle skirts, white shirts and an assortment of saddle shoes, sequined Uggs and flip flops.

 

“Bigger and Better! Do you have anything bigger and better than this?”

This is an empty fax machine box.

 

Bigger and Better is a game, played most notably by Kyle MacDonald who, in 2006, made 14 trades.  He started with one red paper clip and ended with a house in Kipling, Saskatchewan. The game is popular for sleepovers or corporate team-building events. Groups break into teams. Each team is given one small identical object, like a pen or safety pin, and challenged to trade up, within a specified time, to something bigger and better.

 

My rhetoric students, heck all writers, play Bigger and Better too though we’d never use the game’s name to describe our attempts at vocabulary improvement. If “big” is a good word, then “large” is better and it takes up more space on the page. Page padding is a game early writers, especially students, learn fast. If “preferable” is fine, then “more advantageous” is even better. At some point we’ve all ended up stuck in a maze of synonym silliness. For example you could say “Brobdingnagion and the Rolls Royce Of” rather than “Bigger and Better.” Ugh.

 

Maybe it’s the poet in me, or maybe I spy the pomegranate perched on my porch next to the pumpkin and find the perfect metaphor for why bigger isn’t always better.  Pumpkins and pomegranates both ripen at this time of year with their fiery oranges and red in defiance of the coming brown and deadness. But they couldn’t be more different.

 

Sure a pumpkin offers a face for carving but it’s impractical at its primary function: food. Its seeds must be roasted to be tasty and prepping it for a pie is so time consuming most of us use fruit from a can. The flesh is stringy without baking and I’ve had to take a small handsaw to some pumpkins to get inside. Pumpkins frequently star as objects in “the biggest” contests, and in its most outsize form – 2013 World’s Largest Pumpkin weighs 2,032 pounds – it must be hauled in a trunk. Pumpkins are epic novels. Bigger.

 

 

Give me the small pomegranate any day.  It’s perfectly palm size, something to wrap your hand around and offer a friend. Its seeds, edible raw, create bursts of sweet sour pure quench.  It tastes of survival in arid climates. Sure there’s risk of finger stains and wayward chin juice, but pomegranates are pure poetry. Distilled. Intense. Small. Better?

 

I’m about to ask these girls if they’d rather invent a game called Lesser But Greater. It seems a bigger and better idea for our planet, one small way to introduce a new focus. Their voices jolt me.

 

“Bigger and Better! Do you have something?”

 

Writers know timing is key to audience receptivity so I set down the pomegranate I’ve been squeezing and open the garage door where a solid oak barstool blocks the entrance.

 

“Can you carry this?”

They squeal, all eyes upon the tallest girl who shows off her strength by hoisting the new trade over her head like a WNBA Championship trophy.  The girls giggle their way up the block.

“We’ll so win!”

“No one has anything bigger than this!”

“Oh my gosh this is so cool!”

 

Of course the larger challenge lies ahead. The game isn’t over until each team, upon returning to home base, convinces the entire group that its item is bigger and better.  Does bigger always win? What is better rated against?  Would they slam the door in my face if I showed up to make my case for the pomegranate?

 

Argggh, too many questions for one fall afternoon.

 

I head inside to slice the pomegranate and tease out answers in my journal with juice-stained fingers.

wr

~

 

Catherine Keefe is a poet, essayist, writing instructor, and editor of dirtcakes literary journal. She blogs at http://www.backyardsisters.com