Peaches and Tomatoes

Peach yogurt is the best. Yoplait original. Ninety-nine percent fat-free (as if it matters. I haven't reached that level of enlightenment yet; fats are still part of my diet). I didn't even realize I liked peach the best until last week. Thousands of years have gone by where I have NEVER eaten peach yogurt. How can this be? Raspberry, strawberry, blackberry, blueberry, strawberry-banana, all the berries of the vine I've eaten. Never peach.

And the thing is I even LOVE peaches. Growing up we had three peach trees in our yard, a veritable orchard by most people's standards. Every season, in late summer I'd eat a bushel of peaches straight off the tree, rinsed under the garden hose (it was attached to the house, so yes, potable), skin peeled off with my own hands. Sun ripened, pesticide-free, hormone-free, chemical-free, guilt-free. What a way to live, peach juice all over your hands and mouth, the summer sun on your back, the garden hose at your feet. Did it matter that the juice was sticky or that it was drizzling down my arms, dripping onto my clothes? Back then it didn't. These days I prefer fruit juice in a Minute Maid bottle, and that's a little sad.

But peach yogurt, that's not sad. That's delicious. How can it be so good? It's thrilling to think that life can still take me by surprise. That I can find out I like something I've never tried before. That on occasion I'll still take a chance and order something so unlike me from a menu at a restaurant. I've always been a person who relies on the tried and true, who doesn't mind getting her hands dirty (but rarely does), who prefers order over confusion, and who will be ruined over a small stain on a favorite shirt. But sometimes, now that I’m older, I'll go into the garden and pull a fat, red tomato* from the vine, sprinkle a little salt on it and take a bite, without even rinsing off the weather and earth. That's part of the flavor. And if a little juice gets on my hands and clothes, I'll be okay. That's part of the experience**.




*I love tomatoes almost as much as homegrown peaches. Tomato yogurt? Hell no.
**But now, isn't part of THIS experience a desperate attempt to relive the perfect, guileless experience created in my youth, which I've now elevated to represent some kind of more purposeful living? Living on purpose. You know, kids do it. We lose it when we grow up. I just think it's sad, that's all.

Blessed Brown Bananas

I have two extremely ripe bananas on my desk. I’m considering eating one. Mostly because with each second that passes, the yellow fades to brown. They look diseased and I’d say that if I don’t eat both of them pronto, my entire cubicle (a.k.a. cage) will begin to smell like a banana boat stuck in the doldrums.

Once, I actually found a bunch of black, shriveled bananas behind my computer monitor. Someone from my department had hidden them. I accused just about everybody and no one would admit to the crime. So now I look upon everyone with suspicion. And instead of getting a fresh bunch to put behind someone else’s computer monitor, I took the shriveled ones and hid them in my neighbor’s cubicle. Apparently I work with a bunch of jokers here and I’m just not joker material (if I was, I would have realized a shriveled bunch of bananas wouldn’t achieve the proper sense of hilarity. Then I would have stolen a fresh bunch from the break room on Monday morning to hide in a coworker’s cubicle). If you’ve read any of my previous posts, you’ll remember that no one gets my sense of humor, anyway.

So. The bananas. I don’t even really like them. But they were going bad in my mother’s pantry and I felt like it would be criminal to just to let them waste away like that in defeat of the banana’s higher calling, which is to feed me and provide me with sustenance. Blessed sustenance. So I brought two of them to work.

There’s also an apple on my desk. It’s been there since last week. I like bananas more than apples. But as you can see, I prefer pineapple. And I mean that. As far as I’m concerned, cottage cheese (of the low-fat variety) and pineapple is the breakfast of the gods. When I say gods, I mean Zeus and that lot of Greek gods who reside on gorgeous Mount Olympus, which I happen to have a great view of right outside my office window. I’m not kidding, either. Currently Olympus has a few feathery clouds crowding around it and has received a light dusting of snow. It’s been raining down here in the valley of the mortals and so I guess right now, we’ve got it better than the gods because at least it’s not snowing.

I keep eyeing the bananas. Like they’re my enemy. Like the smell is bothering me. Like I wish I hadn’t brought them to work because if I don’t eat them, I’ll feel enormously guilty. If you know me at all, you’ll know I have a deeply ingrained sense of guilt. I feel guilt for everything. For feeling annoyed at traffic. For not eating all my food at restaurants. For not recycling. For driving a car instead of riding my bike to work. For not wanting to eat the bananas. If only this guilt were balanced by an equally congratulatory feeling when I do something great, like eating a healthy dinner instead of a cheeseburger at the Dairy Queen, like when I refrain from flipping another driver off, or for recycling the rejected papers from the office printer instead of lazily throwing them in my own personal trash can. If only.

So. I’ll let you know how the bananas go down. And in case you’re wondering, the pineapple and cottage cheese this morning was divine, as was the sun momentarily shining through the clouds as it rose over blessed Mount Olympus.


p.s. My sister just came into my cubicle and asked me, as she pointed in disgust at the bananas, “You’re not going to eat those, are you?”