"Blow me down. Yuck, yuck, yuck, yuck." - Popeye.

One hundred and fifty-two days.

A twig snapped behind me as I stood at the edge of the vegetable garden. I whirled around.

"Crikey, a T-Rex," I mumbled too afraid to scream.

I remembered reading that the ugly brown and red, drooling beast with twiggy arms and smelly breath flowing out of his slobbering mouth have poor vision. I stood still as a naked mannequin in a downtown department store window on a day so cold that grandfather said we had to have someone watch the fire to make sure it didn't freeze. It roared like Jackie Gleason after eating a Thai pepper that Norton had given him. His yellow eyes stared at me like I was a tuna surprise, yet I did not move a nostril hair. He sniffed me like a florist in a rose garden. The foot-long teeth had yellowed over time and the urge to floss them with rope rose in me. Suddenly, the fifteen foot high beast leaned over into the garden and pulled up a row of my early surprise corn and chewed it up. He sucked up twelve stalks of okra, and the sound of satisfaction dribbled out of his mouth like Dom DeLuise at a breakfast buffet table.

"Are you going to eat those carrots," he asked, imitating a Sean Connery brogue.

I shook my head and moved aside just as he scoped up fifty or so carrots and relief overcame me. "You're a vegetarian?"

"Well, my cholesterol is a bit high," he said slurping down the last of the carrots, "I mix things up most days." He smacked his lips and bent over.

THE END