Every English teacher you ever knew, every English professor you ever met, was always working on that one book. Or they would tell you about their book. Or they had it in them. It was the book of their childhood. Every autobiography was going to have long and beautifully intricate passages about the chrysanthemums in bloom, and their time romping with their friends and the little sisters and cousins of their lives.
It was always so silly because there would inevitably be a metaphor, but the metaphors were interchangeable and, often, not that good. You need a certain something to pull that off, and most people that spend a lot of time in the classroom, or grading papers, don’t have the opportunities to cultivate that certain something. So it all came down, finally, to a lament.
But those flowers were always there, and it was that loss of childhood, the flowers flaring, beautiful, and then fading, like so many bad lectures, and Moby Dick essays before them now
The only person that could write about it well, without it becoming a parody of himself, was when Willie Morris wrote about the jonquils blooming in his native Mississippi. He missed them from New York, where he was finding himself conflicted about so many things in the world changing around him, and he in it. He wrote about the smell of the jonquils, almost every year he was gone. And in most of his work after he went home, they didn’t seem to appear as much. You can use a metaphor up; Morris knew that, and that’s why it worked for him.
I always laughed at the cliché, but now I get it.
One of my lasting memories, he wrote in his best Robert Redford voice, is walking out back to the garden my grandfather kept. He would hold an old dull kitchen knife in his hand. It had a silver handle. Solid but light. It was, I think, the boning knife, that long thin one. He carried a salt shaker in his back pocket. It was a dull white plastic. A little beaten up. Probably it had been around for forever. I followed him as he stepped confidently over ground he’d trodden for decades. And out there, in the hot, bright summer sun, he’d find a great, big, ripe watermelon. He’d pull it from the vine and walk with me over to the edge of his row crops and, there, he delivered to me the secret indulgence of sun-warmed watermelon.
For a long time after he died, I wouldn’t eat watermelon. And then, for a while, I only did when someone brought it out, and only a little, to be polite, and I felt bad about the whole thing. It felt disrespectful.
But now, I do eat some watermelon. It comes with a weird mixture of that same great regret.
And there is also a maudlin nostalgia beneath the rind, the sadly sweet memory in the sweet flesh. I can’t not think about all of that. I thought about it when I cut this one up yesterday. It was a small melon, we got it from a local farm as part of a weekly produce box. I thought about it when I ate part of it yesterday, and again when I had some more today. I will think of it when I finish the thing off tomorrow.
I’ve always thought I was learning the incredibly valuable lesson that fruit was the best when it was still warm from the sun. Putting watermelon in the fridge is an awful act. I thought about setting it outside for a while and eating it the proper way, I thought I’ve never had before, but that really would have been stepping out. This is the thing I have difficulty reconciling. Maybe that’s what grandparents are trying to pass to us. Maybe, a grandparent’s lesson is really about what we can prize about what we had. Maybe it was something about those little yellow flowers on the vine, and the metaphor they hold, briefly, within. Or that salt shaker.
On today’s ride, I set out alone and, ultimately, turned in another slow one. I went through some of the nearby pasture lands and some of the row crops. I pedaled by the winery, turned left toward the gas station and then left again toward the park.
Past some sheep, on a beautifully paved road that has some nice curves into an old neighborhood that leads into the town. Through the town, and out the other side, I wound my way down to the inconvenience center and beyond.
It was that time of day, on a dramatically cloudy day, when you have to plan your route, and be ready to adjust it, based on the light. So I rode on two new roads out that way, watching the light, confident in my bike’s lights — one on the seat post and one blinking through my jersey pocket — and in the three mile downhill back to town. After that, it’s easy, through the town in just under a mile, and then four miles of open roads, and a reasonable bike lane, back to the house.
There’s one spot, in between two hills, and under a dense canopy of trees, that felt dark. But after that, it all opened back up to the same, even, gray light we’d had most of the day. It was 8:30, and I still had time to pick up the day’s peaches.
So many peaches. We’ve only just begun.
Please come get some peaches. If you do, I’ll promise to not torture you with literary allusions.
