Go Fig or Go Home

“I only smoke weed on three occasions,” my new friend Ed told me as we sat down for a tasting of homegrown fruits on his back porch in Breezy Point. “The first is before a Rangers game. And the second is before I eat a pawpaw.” Then he trailed off, too focused on the fare to finish his thought.

I had met Ed two days earlier at Fig Fest, a homespun celebration of that biblical fruit, the Ficus carica, held every year in the plaza outside Staten Island’s National Lighthouse Museum. It was a sunny September day, and I came with two goals: eat some locally grown free samples and cheer the coronation of the 2024 Fig King, an event of such importance that I found it advertised in the Staten Island Ferry terminal as I made my way to the 3:00 p.m. boat. Ed, on the other hand, was there to sell some of the young plants that he kept in pots along the side of his driveway—not just figs, grown from cuttings, but pawpaws too, seedlings that were a product of his own twenty-year-old tree. Other dealers sold grape vines, geraniums, and even tropical citrus alongside their figs, but…