Chinese Apples

A tutor finds meaning in her work and a link to her past through a pomegranate

 

 

 

Pomegranates are my favorite fruit. Most people don’t even know what a pomegranate is. Or a raspberry or kumquat for that matter. I wouldn’t have either if it weren’t for my dad. He was an adventurous gardener, as he had to be in Hollywood where I grew up. After all, cigarette butts and trash were much more plentiful than gardens there. But more than gardeners, we were an unofficial guerrilla-trained pair of fruit thieves. Our mercenary efforts yielded great booty for later consumption. Mangoes and kumquats were the rarest of acquisitions. Then there were oranges and apples, of course. But most prized, in my estimation, were our pilfered pomegranates. However, this was Los Angeles, not a small Midwestern town where one could knock on his neighbor’s door and politely ask to pick off his tree. So we scoured the neighborhood on our daily walks to the Hollywood park where the Hollywood sign was gaudily on display. The remembrance of that made me smile. The “badness” of it, the sheer piracy of what we were doing made me yearn for simpler times. As it is, I haven’t seen my dad for six years now.

This all passed through my mind as I was waiting for a kid last week at a tutoring session.  I was going to struggle with yet another stubborn inner-city kid who didn’t want to participate in the lesson I was giving. Thank God for the No Child Left Behind act; otherwise, I might not have this job at all. These kids couldn’t afford tutoring, but I was being paid by the school district. They’d have been lucky to have a dad like mine. I learned to read when I was three. I reminisce about my thoughts that day now, but at the time I distinctly remember suffering through a seven-day cleanse. But don’t let all the talk of organic fruit mislead you. I’m no health freak. Quite the opposite, in fact, thanks to life in the big city after my dad hightailed it to Oregon where he could happily disappear into the woods. My stomach was twisting in knots as I looked at my granny smith apple. I desperately longed for real food, but the cleanse food list required that I eat nothing but fruit and cabbage soup for the first day. Ugh. Way too much fiber for my own good.

True to my teaching philosophy, I always aimed to create lessons that were relevant to students. Today’s lesson required that I teach Salvador about sensory details, so I brought my fruit. What better way to teach about the five senses than fruit? You can taste it, touch it, smell it, hear it (well, if you bang it against the wall) and see it. Plus, I was hungry. I had a banana and an apple.

“Salvador, what do you know about sensory details,” I said. He stared out the window.

“Well?”

“Umm. They talk about the senses,” he replied reluctantly.

“Ok. Good. Why are they talking about it?” I prompted.

“I don’t know.”

“In fiction, we are describing the scene with sensory details so you can fully experience the story, right?”

“Uhh-huh.” He mumbled. I took out the banana.

“What does this look like? Describe it.”

“It’s yellow,” he said, obviously bored.

“So what?” I said. “You’re not telling me anything new. What else?” He looked harder. This kid always had to be challenged or his mind would drift. He was a boy, and I found that for boys, I had to make the lessons about winning or losing, knowing-it-all and acing the tests. They were so competitive.

“It has brown spots?” he answered carefully, still unsure what this was all about.

“Good. How does it smell?”

“Like a banana.” Hmm, he had a point. What did a banana smell like anyway? Was there a specific way to describe it?

“What does a banana smell like? Smell it.” This lesson was making all the household members pay attention. I usually don’t bring props with me. Salvador’s house was populated with a smorgasbord of parents, uncles, friends and siblings. Even the chickens liked to drift in and out of the house from the patio when unmonitored. One or two of his older relatives stopped to listen and smile down at us, although I knew they probably could understand little English. Salvador was unimpressed.

“It smells nasty,” he said. Ok. Well, he had a point. This was all about perception anyhow.

“Alright. What kind of sound can it make if you bang it on the table?” I made a thump-thump noise hoping he would say “thump” and get my point.

“It’s loud.”

“I want you to write down a word that describes the sound. I gave an example. He wrote.

“Ok. How does it taste? Taste it.” He looked frightened and shook his head vehemently. Obviously, he hated bananas. I didn’t blame him. I didn’t like them myself growing up. They were an acquired taste, in my opinion. My dad made me eat them because I had a heart condition. Bananas are chock-full of potassium. Great for the heart. Remembering this, I let him off of the hook.

“Ok. Touch it.”

“No.”

“I’m not making you eat it, Salvador. But if you don’t touch it, how are you going to describe how it feels?”

He touched the outside. I peeled it open and made him touch the slimy inside. I’d had enough. I could see bananas weren’t the best choice for him, although the texture and taste is remarkably unique. Think about it. The peel is hard and smooth on the outside. However, the inside of it is slimy when ripe and a bit flaky from the lining of the peel. Boomerang-shaped with a Frisbee-like similarity, I thought it would bring up lots of different comparisons. I looked at his worksheet. He had written down the following:

Yellow, brown spots, hard, wet (inside), nasty, bang-bang sound.

I sighed. Well, it was time for his quiz. His testing object would be an apple. He wrote feverishly on the page. I always had to caution this little guy to slow down. Again, for him it was all about who was the fastest, not the most accurate. After a 5 minute interval he handed it over.

I was impressed. For the apple, he’d written fresh under smell and chewy on the inside, hard on the outside for taste. For sight, he’d marked green, brown dots, drops of water, sphere. And so on. These kids never failed to amaze me. He’d done so much better with the apple. Perhaps he was hungry too? I laughed a little to myself. He scored 100% on his quiz.

Happily, I shared his results with his mom and said to her, “No le gusta plantanas.” He doesn’t like bananas. She laughed and I skipped to my car after our goodbyes, realizing why I started doing this in the first place.

When I got home I opened the fridge excitedly. I’d been planning this meal all day. I’d bought a pomegranate to eat for my dinner. I’d had enough cabbage soup for the day. As I reached for it, I noticed that I also had an old bottle of pomegranate flavored tea in the back of the fridge. I debated sucking it all down quickly, but I wasn’t allowed any juice unless it was squeezed. I sighed, mentally kicking myself for torturing myself like this. Then I saw something out the corner of my eye on the bottle’s label. It said Pomegranate: The Chinese Apple. The irony of it all made me laugh. My torturous session, Salvador’s failure with the banana but surprising success with the apple, and my scarce pomegranate dinner made me feel like this somehow was all connected. My dad would definitely get the funniness of this moment. It was my own little divine comedy. I sat down, broke open the pomegranate by first smashing it against the sink and then cut it in half with a huge butcher knife. I peeled back the skin and took a huge bite of the cluster of seeds.

 

Reviews

[thecoolone52]

its orginal a little strange............. great vocab and the sumary at the end kinda reminds me more of a personal essay then a short story............. come on your teacher..... hahahaha you should know that.................... i guess? hahaha anyway it was good though i enjoyed thanks for entering my contest

[Pax Analog]

Way to make fruit interesting!

Who thinks about the SOUND of a tapping banana? ;-) Woody Allen? A fruitless Zen master?

With the "punchline" (insert pun about drinkable punch here) pomegranate, one thinks of the sound of the word. Of rocks and open palms and half a cheerleader prop. I'm afraid to consider the anagrams.

And your "escape" from the standard apple to the "Chinese apple" was of course amusing.

Does a Chinese swain ever say to his sweetheart "You're the pomegranate of my eye?"

Suppose one blended five senses with five levels of cognition and five anagrams? Would that constitute a TROPE-ical fruit salad?

I have no idea why your sensibly humorous story has made me take leave of my senses. Oh, right, it's almost 3:30 a.m. in L.A.

Good work! Now, where's that old Bananarama CD before I snooze and dream life's a bowl of cherries. . .