As the robot dinosaurs waited nearby for their cue to devour the land, a family rumbled up to my poetry stand in an old peace-stickered Volvo that smelled deliciously of hot French fry oil.

The driver turned out to be a pale woman with fuchsia hair and so many rings in one eyebrow she could have been a spiral-bound notebook. With her was a man who had long fuzzy golden dreadlocks that reminded me of this hanging cactus I saw once. Also he was covered with so many colorful tattoos it looked like he'd been shrink-wrapped in superhero comics.

The couple were accompanied by three kids—a boy and two girls—who looked bored.

The kids were very tidy in proper-looking, "picture day" or elderly-relative-visiting clothes, the sort of stiff, itchy attire that Dougie and I always had to be bribed to wear. The boy even wore a tie. The oldest, he seemed to be somewhere around that middle school tweenage range, right before squeaky voices and greasy hair kicks in. All three kids wore serious-looking eyeglasses and serious-looking expressions.

The adults introduced themselves and I could have sworn the woman said she was a "Sioux chef," but I might have heard her wrong. She didn't really look Native American to me. She said she worked in a restaurant popular with "locavores," which I gathered meant "crazy eaters."

The tattooed man said he was a homemaker. I wondered what kind of homes he made.

"We're homeschooled," the woman said, with a neck-jerk toward the rest of the group. I think she was speaking for the kids this time. (I guess that's what you call using the common We.)

"Actually," said the tattooed man, "un-schooled, some of us feel, is the better term."

"Oh," I said. I told the kids that I myself had kind of gone to un-college, but had not really graduated yet. I asked them what their favorite un-subjects were.

The oldest said, "Economics."

The second oldest said, "Accounting."

"And piano!" the mother said. Then, a bit pleadingly, "You like piano."

The youngest said, "Finance."

"Finance!" the dad said, with a deep sigh. "You're seven!" Then, to me: "She's seven."

The dad turned to the kids, and said—in that loud, stagey way adults talk to kids, that's really meant for nearby adults—"Now, kids, remember, we can be anything we want to be!"

The kids looked doubtful.

"That's right," the mother chimed in, also over-loud and stagey. "You can be a marine biologist! Or a chef!-but no pressure! Or a . . . a unicyclist. You can even be . . . I don't know, a llama farmer! It's all okay!"

"Or, maybe, a drummer!" the dad said. "Wouldn't it be cool to be a drummer? I always wanted to be a drummer. But nooo, Grandpa wanted me to go to law school."

"I want to be a stockbroker," the oldest kid said, crossing his arms.

"No, silly, you don't want to be a stockbroker," the dad said, glancing at me with this flummoxed look, like, See what I have to put up with?

"I want to be chairman of the Federal Reserve," the second oldest said, with a spirited nod of her head.

"What would you want to do that for?" the father said with growing dismay. "You can be anything you want to be."

"What I want to be is chairman of the Federal Reserve."

"I wanna manage a hedge fund," the youngest piped up.

The parents looked at each other and sighed.

"All right, kids," the mother said, "We're here so Mom can find some good local ingredients, and also because it's important we know where our food comes from. See, food doesn't come from a grocery store, does it? First it comes from farms, big ones, and not-so-big ones. Small, local farms are the best, though."

"Why?" the future chairman of the Federal Reserve said.

The dad said, "Well, because . . . the food is fresher, right? And not full of chemicals. And because of a smaller carbon footprint. And because it's supporting the little guy." The dad smiled at me.

"It sounds like an inefficient system," the future chairman said. "We had to drive nine-point-three miles to get to this 'farm stand,' when the grocery store is less than two miles away. And there's no corn here. Now I guess we'll have to drive around looking for corn, when I could be home mastering polynomial equations. If we have to drive nine miles per food item, our average week's grocery shopping will take us 378 miles to complete."

"Yeah . . . I'm sorry about the corn," I said. "Next year there'll be corn. And tomatoes."

"But!—would you look at this King Bolete!" the mother said, picking up one of the pinkish-brown mushrooms that had a cap nearly the size of her head. "What a beauty, right? You can't get this at a grocery store."

"Whatever," the kids said in chorus.

"Or these!" she said, picking up one of the pawpaws. "We used to call these Indiana bananas when I was growing up. Kids, you gotta try this."

She pulled out a paring knife and divided one of the pawpaws. Each kid complained that it looked gross and they didn't want to try it and how come the other kids both got bigger pieces? Finally the youngest kid braved a tiny bite. She decreed it "yum," and moments later they were all slurping their pieces down and begging for more.

The kids were somewhat less impressed by my poems. Most of the poetry they'd read in un-school was written by dead people. They were surprised to learn that live poets still existed at all. They were under the impression that Poem Making, as an occupation, had died out long before they were born, going the way of ice men and lamplighters and leech collectors.

They wanted to know what was the point of a poem, anyway? Didn't I just take something simple, and make it hard to understand? Couldn't I just get straight to the point instead of making people figure it out?

I played along and asked them why they should read a whole book when they could just read the CliffsNotes? Or why they should bother playing a video game when they could look up the cheats?

They shrugged, using the handy all-purpose debating point employed by kids everywhere. Nicely played, kids.

"Oh, uh, we're not allowed to play video games," the mother said. (I think she was using the common We again.)

So I asked the kids if they ever had a toy they'd gotten bored with, and forgot all about—until one day they realized it was gone. And then, didn't they look all over for it, terrified their mom or dad had gotten rid of it? And the harder they searched for it, maybe the more it started to mean to them, just because they had to really look for it?

Again, the kids shrugged. It seemed I would have to up my game.

I opened the coffee can and took out a penny.

"What's this worth?" I said.

"Nothing," they all said.

"Are you sure?"

"Fine," the future stockbroker said, "a cent, but that doesn't buy, like, anything."

"All right, but now let's say I bury it somewhere, and write a treasure map leading to it—you know, full of riddles and clues? Don't you think the game of finding the penny would be the real treasure?"

The kids looked skeptical. I got that look from most people.

"Well," I said, "poetry is kind of like that, I guess. You get this little, shiny idea and you don't just tell it as is, because then it wouldn't seem worth much. So you bury it instead, and you make this sort of map of clues—not a picture-map but a map made out of words—that people can follow to discover the idea for themselves. Getting there is the whole point."

"Whoa," the dad said. "You get that, kids?"

The future chairman said, "So you're saying, reading poetry is like wasting time driving around looking for corn here, tomatoes there, when you could just go to one place and be done with it."

The parents sighed.

The future hedge fund manager said, "I think the whole point of treasure maps is, there's like a whole chest of gold and jewels and tiaras and stuff where X marks the spot, and people know if they follow the map they can get rich."

"Hmm," I said.

The dad told them, "Kids, be nice."

"Well," I said. "If you really want to be rich, I can tell you how to get rich."

The kids made a point of eyeing my clothes and shoes. "This is going to be one of those 'do as I say, not as I do' lessons, right?" the future stockbroker said.

"Kids . . ." the dad warned.

I peered into the coffee can again, and found a dime. I slid it onto the table, and then pulled a dried-up tomato seed out of my pocket and put it next to the dime.

"Which would you rather have?" I said.

The kids pointed to the dime.

"See, that's what most folks would say. But look at it this way. This dime, you can either spend it, save it, or invest it. Well, you won't be able to buy much if you spend it, right? I mean you can't even get a phone call or a pack of gum for ten cents anymore. And if you save it in a piggy bank it'll be worth less and less each year because phone calls and gum packs will cost more and more. Right?"

"That's bad money management," the future chairman said, pushing her glasses up her nose. "I wouldn't waste it on gum and I certainly wouldn't put it in a 'piggy bank.' I would deposit it in a high-yield interest-bearing account like any sensible person."

"Okay . . . so you put your dime in the bank and wait for it to collect interest, which will take who knows how long to earn even one extra penny, at which point your eleven cents won't be enough to buy whatever you could have bought for ten cents today. See? You can't ever catch up."

Her eyebrows knitted together.

"But this seed, on the other hand . . . it increases in value so fast, you can't even count fast enough."

"You can count anything if you know the algorithm," the future stockbroker said.

"Well, I guess so. But anyway, what you do is, you invest this seed by depositing it in the ground, instead of in a savings account. And in just a few months it grows into a plant that makes dozens of tomatoes, right? And each tomato is full of dozens or maybe even hundreds of seeds. So you save some of those, and reinvest them in the ground the next spring. Right? And then, in no time at all your one original seed can earn hundreds more tomato plants, which can then become thousands and thousands of tomato plants, earning like a million percent interest, way more than you could possibly ever need, enough to give a tomato to everyone in the county. You can go from being a tomato pauper, to a tomato tycoon, to a tomato philanthropist in a couple years."

The kids stared at me with their brows identically furrowed, then stared at the tomato seed.

"Your premise intrigues me," the future stockbroker said.

"I suspect you've over-simplified," the future chairman of the Federal Reserve said.

"Maybe I'll try agriculture," the third kid mused. "I mean, like, if the hedge fund thing doesn't work out."

Meanwhile the Sioux chef was poking and sniffing everything on the farm stand (except for the poems). She seemed to be most interested in the mushrooms, which I figured would please the hunting party. She put a bunch of the big pinkish-brown mushrooms in a bag, declaring them "beautiful kings, with hardly any worms," and then picked up one of the other mushrooms, which was white and not as fanciful looking. She sniffed it, scratched it, and peered under the cap. "Nice horses," she said.

"Kings . . . and horses . . . ?" I said. I picked up the third type of mushroom, a big, scaly-looking yellowish brown thing. "So this is a . . . prince?"

"I know," the Sioux chef said.

"Ahh," I said. "Well, I have these other things, too? Truffles."

"What?! You have truffles? Can I see them? What kind?"

"They're not candy . . ."

"Where are they?"

I reached under the spool table and brought out a shoebox. I took off the lid.

The Sioux chef said, "It's a shoebox of dirt."

"Well, the truffles are in there." I dug around until I felt the lumps, and scooped them out.

"You keep them in dirt?"

"Well, to keep them fresh. It's where they came from, dirt, right?" She was looking at me strangely. "I mean, I did punch holes in the lid," I said.

I laid them out on the table and her eyes widened.

She pointed to the biggest of the lumps. "Can I . . . can I touch it?"

I picked it up and plunked it in her hand. She gazed at it like Gollum staring at The Precious.

"You mind if I . . . smell it?" she said.

I shrugged. Personally, I could smell it from ten feet away.

She cupped her hands around it and sniffed, hard, the way Pepé Le Pew would sniff a flower. "Good aroma. Smells ripe." She held it out to the tattooed man. He took a sniff, and smiled. Then the kids sniffed it and made gagging noises. I could see where they were coming from.

The Sioux chef asked if she could sample it. I shrugged again, and she may have started to pant a little bit. "Loca" vore is right.

I expected her to take a nibble out of the thing, but instead she took out her knife and sliced off a sliver so thin it was almost see-through. She then took out a Bic lighter and briefly warmed the mushroom chip over the flame like a crack addict cooking drugs in a spoon. She offered it to the tattooed man but he shook his head, and the kids all looked so horrified she didn't even ask them.

The Sioux chef popped the little mushroom chip into her mouth and sort of let it sit on her tongue like a communion wafer or tab of acid.

A moment passed, and then she made this weird face that was like a combination of Dougie trying not to cry and Mama trying not to smile. "Ooohhhmmm," she said, still holding it on her tongue. "Mingk mushk . . . fungky cheeshe . . . shpoiled fruid . . . a liddle pead mossh . . . garlig, schkunky beer . . . " She swallowed. "And maybe a touch of unsweetened cocoa."

Yecchk. Sounded about right, I thought.

After a minute she said, "Do I dare ask how much?"

"All food is free with purchase of a poem."

"Yeah yeah, how much does the 'poem' cost?"

"How much do you think it should cost?"

She looked down at the ground and nudged the dirt with her toe like a bashful kid. "I could give you . . . three?"

"For what's left of that thing? And what you've got in the bag?"

"Yes . . . ?"

"I guess so," I said, thinking three dollars was kind of a lot.

"Really? Really?!" she said, making that laugh/cry face again. I was about to tell her that on second thought, a dollar would be plenty, when she handed me three little greenish portraits of Benjamin Franklin and rushed off toward the French-fry-scented Volvo, giggling hysterically and cradling the mushroom like she was holding an injured baby bird.

I stared at the portraits of Benjamin Franklin, not sure what had happened.

Finally, I called out, uselessly, "You forgot your poem . . ."

The tattooed man took it for her and said, "Well, thank you for a very interesting un-field trip, right, kids?"

I said, "Oh, um, if you happen to talk to the Internet? Tell them next year—I mean, if I'm here—there'll be tomatoes."