Thursday, February 17, 2005
Red
Today promises to be full and busy. I’ve got a meeting which I actually somewhat resent, for an organization-wide committee I’m not a member of but whose work I was somehow appointed to do; I’ve got elaborate memos and evaluations to write and much desk cleanup and file preparation to do before I leave work early to get the cat to the vet before they close, as we’re boarding her there for the long weekend. Yes, a long, even an extra-long weekend, because not only is monday a day off for us for President’s Day, but I’m also taking friday off, because we’re taking off friday - on a flight to Arizona and then a drive up into the Coconino Ponderosas and the ironically-named San Francisco peaks where my dear lilsis lives with her stalwart cybergeologist hubby and their adorable tiny deadhead daughter, whom we’re visiting for the weekend and we won’t be home till monday. So my mind is full of thoughts of departure, reunion, exoticism and domesticity, all bound together.
At the same time I have just learned that a member of my extended immediate family is gravely ill. My cousin tells me that the situation is very serious, but there’s nothing any of us can do but wait - for recovery, or otherwise. This situation was not unanticipated, but that hardly softens the blow. My prayers and wishes are with these gracious and beloved people, the ill and the well, and my thoughts turn to the cycles of life, the departures and returns of our natural condition as well as of my own perigrinations.
With this welter of petty details and serious themes bouncing off each other every time I turn inward, I thought this was a good time to share a few words about my favorite fruit - one that’s been a mythic symbol for millenia and that’s been important to me personally for most of my life. I’ll be back on Tuesday. Till then, don’t eat the rinds.
I am sure the fruit is far out of season, but I love them so much that when I see a bin of big ruddy pomegranates at the produce market I pick one without debate - one that’s large, but not too large, a rich mottled red, a little heavier than I’d expect it to be. It fills the palm of my hand with mute promises.
A few nights after I get it home, I decide it’s time to split it open and strip it of its luscious arils - the tart succulent nodes that fill its interior. Years of eating these fruit have taught me the bloodless way inside - not with a crude blow right through the heart, splitting it brutally in two, crushing and gashing untold juice-filled jewels inside it, leaving a dark red spreading stain behind - no, I take a small sharp knife and cut only through the bitter fleshy rind, tracing a tidy incision right around it, circling the orb with a careful blade, sensing as I slice when I’ve cut deeply enough so I’ve only penetrated to the maze of seed sacs, but not down into it. Having bisected the rind I grip the fluted vestigial flower at the end with both thumbs and, twisting, pull the fruit into two pieces.
It resists at first, then opens with a crisp crack as membranes and rind are severed. Inside I see exactly 840 rubies (for that is how many each pomegranate contains), nestled together in luxuriant complicity. It occurs to me that I am the first to see this particular wonder of nature, that these beautiful nuggets of taste and texture have never before been exposed to air or light. I also notice that some of the interior of the rind, some of the translucent membranes weaving among the tightly packed pips, even a few of the arils themselves, have turned grey-brown. It is past season, yes - but most of the fruit still shines rich and red in the crass kitchen light, and will be all that my mouth desires, all that I’d anticipated in my memories of late summer afternoons and long lingering evenings made bright by inbibing pure redness.
I take out a bowl and begin to pull the rind into smaller sections; arils fall into the concavity with something between joy and resignation. The light catches on the facets pressed flat by contiguity to all their bretheren in the womb of the fruit. My thumbs and fingers loosen them now, pulling the tenacious morsels from the rind that noursihed them, stripping them from the space they have occupied for their entire existence and letting them drop onto the heap of seeds growing in the bowl. I pull the membranes out, as convoluted as the surface of a brain, and the red treasures caught in its folds fall freely and dryly, captured for my delectation. As I reach the occasional grey or brown patch I slow down, testing the pips one by one for freshness, leaving behind those that have lost their luster or that feel soft or deflated.
I rip at the rind now, excavating the seeds that are secreted most deeply in the labrynth of its crannies, pulling at them with inexorable gentleness, willing neither to forsake them nor to crush them as I extricate them. The odd specimen occasionally escapes my fingers and the mounded bowl, skittering to the tabletop and then to the floor; I am careful to retrieve these before they are inadvertently smashed into an sticky stubborn stain on the linoleum, denying them the freedom to choose their own destruction: I have other plans for them.
I work my way through each section of rind, exploring and denuding it thoroughly till nothing is left but empty shards and shreds gaping from my dismemberment of them, denuded but for those few small sections too far gone to be worth eating, that lie sullenly, dully on their forsaken portions of rotted husk. Next, I gently paw through the bowl, pulling out the spoiled seeds that have snuck past my vigilent eye, clearing out the scraps of membrane and rind that fell in or that clung with dumb instinct to the arils that grew within and among them. Soon the bowl is rid of rot and dross; I gather up the inedible remainder, dispose of it without ceremony in the gleaming steel trashcan.
Then I peer into the bowl, select a single, perfect, undistinguished pip, pop it in my mouth, and bite. I crush it lightly, feel the skin burst, feel the juice, like summer sunlight, splash across my tongue as the seedlet in the center shatters impotently between my teeth. It is delicious, unimproveable, divine. It is not the pomegranate that was out of season - it was I.
