Golden Delicious

I was eavesdropping, as I so often do. However, it must be noted that my eavesdropping isn’t as much invasive as it is that I’m much like a radio tuned in to a specific, soul-revealing frequency that can’t be changed. It’s just my state of being.

It’s kind of like the story about the old Hollywood actress whose new metal filling enabled her to pick up on radio broadcasts of spies trading code over the airwaves while driving home from MGM studios. Whatever I have is something like that.

Anyway, next to me was a lady getting out of her truck. She was holding an apple. A voice from behind asks, “Please tell me, what kind of apple is that?”

“It’s a Golden Delicious!” the lady replied. She was proud of it. Picking an apple worth talking about, I mean.

I thought, ‘Now, this is fascinating.’ People don’t ask each other about fruit enough these days. When’s the last time you said, “Christ! Where on Earth did you get that apple?”

Then, from behind the truck came a young man wearing a top hat and backpack. He was smiling like this information had changed the course of his life. He said, “Thank you! Have a beautiful day!” and went whistling down the street.

I thought two things, both important. I thought, ‘My God, I’ve just seen the ghost of Johnny Appleseed,’ and that I wished I had love enough to name a creation of mine something like “Golden Delicious.” Who needs wax when you have a moniker like that? They say a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, but I don’t think that’s the case when it comes to a Golden Delicious. The name is at least half the appeal: apple.

It was nice to hear about an apple that wasn’t related to sin, which would have been more expected because I was sitting in the parking lot of Saint Lawrence Orthodox Church. What harm could come from a “Golden Delicious?” Though, I suppose if Eve’s apple had been named something more on the nose like “Sinister Sweetness,” she might have asked whether or not they’d had a good season before deciding to take a bite.

Anyway, the apple thing. Like we haven’t all picked a bad apple, a real gritty one. It got me thinking about how you pick one bad apple, and suddenly, you’re the poster girl for badness. A real rotten turn, she got.

As an only child, I knew how a person could become both a city and a capital. An only child isn’t big enough to become a country. Nonetheless, you came to represent something because you were simply all there was.

And what is that? I haven’t figured it out yet.

But they say it started with Eve.