Tomorrow is a busy day. First and foremost, it’s my first born’s fifth birthday. As is my husband’s design, Eleanor will not wake up in her own bed on her birthday. She never has, and hopefully never will. It’s a quirky thing, but it’s his, or , more precisely, his and hers. Tony has to work all morning, so we have big plans for the afternoon. Before work, Tony is dropping off a large fruit salad at the church.
Now, Tony doesn’t cook much any more. I like to think it’s because I am such a wonderful cook that he fears the competition, but I bet it’s because I am a food snob and have put FAR too many rules on the foods I allow in the house. It’s like cooking with one spatula tied behind your back. Nevertheless, he can make fruit salad. Since Eleanor is away, I volunteered to go to the Farmer’s Market and pick up fruits while he had some special Daddy and Sara time, which worked out great.
I got a wide variety of fruits, left them all out on the counter so he could get jiggy with carbon steel, and I slunk off to the lappy to watch Warehouse 13 in peace (and not get suckered into slicing and dicing.) I come back out and, even though he’s using a steak knife to cut the strawberries, he’s mostly done. He’s used half the strawberries, most of the green and red grapes, and all the blueberries and blackberries I talk him into cutting up the cantaloupe and we use half of that, and the bowl runneth over. We clean up and I say, “Hey, here’s the kiwi.”
“I’m not using the kiwis.”
“?”
After much discussion, it comes down to, in his mind, “Lutheran men don’t do kiwi.” Sure, the guys are all fine with tropical fruits, in theory. We eat pineapple, right? Every Wednesday at the community supper, but why not kiwi? We teased out the thought and realized it is about the fuzz. Lutheran men come two ways: fully bearded or with a clean shave. I did a mental roll call, and found no scruffies in the fold. In fact, there’s just one man with a moustache, and it’s finely groomed. Kiwis are like Don Johnson in his Miami Vice years. Neither bearded nor smooth. Not one thing or another. Not cut and dried (except in that one aisle at Trader Joe’s – because Joe will cut and dry EVERY fruit, and a few veggies, too.)
One could argue that in a fruit salad, the kiwis have been shaved of all hair – even their skin, and in a bowl heavy with red, purple and blue fruits, a snappy green would contrast very nicely (and I argued such), but Tony vowed that his fruit salad would remain kiwi free.
Poor little kiwis, chilling their fuzz in the fridge. I will likely eat you tomorrow… reaching the hand of fellowship to you would be the yummy Christian thing to do.
