Sunday, September 6, 2009
So someone brought a watermelon over for us today. It was one of those round ones like a bowling ball, yellow instead of red inside, and it has actual seeds. I haven't seen real seeds in a watermelon in years.
And it's funny, because my daughter, 9, is having a hell of a time eating the thing -- picking the seeds out with her fingers while I'm just doing surgery with my tongue and incisors and spitting when I bite too much and plowing through the slices. "Slow down daddy, I can't eat it so fast..."
So I try to explain that she should just bite small pieces and spit out the seeds, but she doesn't get it and is afraid of swallowing the seeds in spite of my assurances that this will not harm her.
And it occurs to me that she's never eaten a watermelon with seeds in it before. As long as she's been alive watermelon has been readily available sans seeds.
And I remember it wasn't so many years ago that my friends and I used to imagine a more perfect world -- a world in which watermelons did not have seeds, watermelons that could be simply chowed on with simplicity, no nibbling and spitting required. Imagine! 'Cause the seeds are always in the sweetest parts.
Yet we would scoff at this. After all, how could there possibly ever be such a thing as watermelon without seeds. Where would they get more watermelons from?
Seedless watermelon? Never happen. Can't happen. The mere thought is simply absurd. Do fewer bong hits and you'll get over it.
And yet, here's my daughter just a few years later and she's never had to deal with a watermelon that had seeds in it.
Just goes to show how time can make the impossible possible and the unthinkable routine.
Somehow she knows intuitively what we all knew: If you swallow a fruit seed, a tree will grow in your stomach. I'm still expecting branches to come out of my ears. I've grown melons on vines in my garden, and I know all about stomach acid and other digestive juices, but I know that watermelons and apples and oranges can all grow trees in people's bodies. Lots of other kids told me, so it must be true.
Too bad the strongly held, yet erroneous, beliefs of so many adults are just as scary, but not half as cute.
today, I saw a bowl full of pineapple, fresh, juicy, cut into nice big chunks, and I was slobbering, bracing for that first sweet and sour tang that would hit all the points of my tongue, I was preparing myself for the stringy plump pulp, and as I popped one of those succulent juicy yellow pieces into my mouth, a feeling of utter disorientation swept over me. The texture was wrong, the taste wasn't pineapple. It was watermelon!
But the feeling passed, and in its place was a serendipitous surprise: juice so watermelony sweet flooded my mouth as I bit down on the piece. I expected stringy pulp, but got solid fruit instead, almost sandy in texture, albeit, like wet sand. but sweet, juicy, unrestrained goodness.
I will never get another surprise like that for a long time. I will savor the memory.
Now that she's experienced seeds, she needs to learn this song. (To the tune of Frère Jacques.)
At the ripe old age of 9, though, she may be getting a little too sophisticated for this bit of silliness.