Mmmmmmmmmmm

Fall is almost here, and on the one hand that’s bad news, because it means winter is coming along right behind it.

But there is a silver lining, which is that yesterday I saw my first pomegranate in the grocery store. I can’t tell you how happy this makes me.

I have loved these things for many years. I like to get a great big one and spread some newspaper out in front of me and go to town. It takes a good 20 minutes to eat one, and the sheer volume of what you consume is not very much, since you’re just getting the juice from around the seeds. But it’s worth the effort.

Pomegranates are all the rage now, or more specifically, pomegranate-flavored things are the rage. But that stuff doesn’t really taste like pomegranates, just like cherry-flavored stuff doesn’t taste like cherries, grape-flavored stuff doesn’t taste like grapes, and so on. Why can’t we do some research on this? We can put a man on the moon, but…..

Pomegranates are messy to eat. The red juice stains your fingers and teeth, and my wife tries to dissuade me from eating them on the bed, but I’ll sneak one up there every now and then when I’m watching TV. Some guys leave the toilet seat up, I eat pomegranates in the bed. Nobody’s perfect.

When Allie was only a year old, she got into one that I had left spread out on some newspaper on the floor. When we discovered what she was doing, she was red as a beet from head to toe and sticky as a fly-trap, but she had a big smile on her face. We had to soak her for about half an hour to get her clean.

There was a big pomegranate bush at my father’s house that would produce about 15-20 big ones a year. I checked on those things religiously, from the time the little red flowers popped up until they were ready to pick and began to burst open. I babied those things, chasing the bugs away, looking for worm holes, giving them verbal encouragement.

One year the bush was overflowing with nice, big, red juicy ones. They were about a week from being ready, and my girlfriend at the time had a younger brother who was a bit of a redneck, and he wanted to go down to my parents’ place in the country so he could shoot his gun.

OK, I said, so I took him down there, and told him to make sure to fire toward the woods, and nowhere near the house nor the road. My girlfriend and I were in the house, and in about 15 minutes I heard loud booms, one after another. I said, “I think your idiot brother is shooting the gun near the house,” so I headed out to stop him and take the gun away.

I saw him walking toward the house, and I said, “I told you not to shoot near the house. What were you doing?” He said, “I didn’t hurt nothing, I was just shooting at those apples on that tree.”

Well, I guess that’s not so ba – wait a minute. We didn’t HAVE an apple tree. I began to run toward my pomegranate bush, screaming “nooooooo”, like one of those slow-motion scenes in the movies, when somebody realizes a loved one is dead.

Sure enough, all that was left on my pomegranate bush was the stems. The little son-of-a-bitch had blown them all away. I still regret sometimes that I didn’t go get his gun and kill him right then and there.

Pomegranates have much history and wide appeal. Some Jewish people eat them on Rosh Hashanah. Paintings of the Virgin Mary show her holding pomegranates. Islam teaches that pomegranates grow in the garden of paradise. The fruit figures prominently in the Greek mythology story of Persophene.

But I just like them cause they taste good. Here’s to the next four months of messy, sweet, sticky, red-stained pleasure.