I love orange juice and cloudy apple cider. I love jam, sherbet and peach ice cream. Strawberry is fine, too. I love jellybeans and other fake-flavored fruit candy.
A bee stung me on the tip of my tongue, when I was about four years old. It happened because I put an orange Halloween lollipop in my mouth, and didn't notice the bee which had landed on it. Its sting...stung.
A few years later, I went to a school carnival and bought a lollipop. This time, it was grape. I picked it up from one of those game booths where the lollipops are stuck in a stryofoam block, and the "winning" lollipop's tip is colored black (but unseen). I picked a pop, saw that the end was white and shrugged it off. Oh well, no prize for me. The next day, I put the lollipop in my brown-bag lunch for dessert. When I unwrapped it, the candy itself had a sticker on it saying "YOU'RE A WINNER." But the carnival had already ended. No prize for me.
In my third year of high school, a large orange fight broke out between the juniors and seniors. Both sides had brought dozens of oranges to school, and were hurling them across the quad at each other. It went on for awhile, and I watched. I finally bent to pressure and picked one up. Halfway through my throwing motion, I was suddenly struck with remorse, thinking "Jeez, an orange could really hurt someone!" I staggered my delivery, and pointlessly threw the orange way left to an area where no one was standing. Someone groaned and smirked "NICE THROW!" at me. Then a teacher ran up, grabbed me and took me to the principal's office. I was the only one of my circle who was taken.
My father also had a relationship with fruit, even if he was a rigid meat-and-potatoes man at heart. I've never seen such a carnivorous approach to fruit consumption. He ate fruit like it was meat. He would grab a red apple or a Bosc pear, pull out a stubby kitchen knife, and go sit in a soft chair in the living room. He wouldn't simply slice a piece of fruit in half, or eat it directly out of his hand. Instead, he carved off thick chunks, one bite at a time, and then would chomp the morsel directly off the knife's blade. When he finally had whittled off all the meat and eaten it, he would stab the blade through the fruit's stripped core and drop the pierced corpse on the coffee table with brutish finality. Eventually, he or my mother would dispose of the remains.
Fruit continues to play a role in my life.
