The Muddled Male

Alien Fruit

 

By Bob Stevens, The Muddled Male

         Whew, the Holidays are finally over.  Now don’t get me wrong, I enjoy Christmas except that it makes me tense.  Ann, my wife, would say that I get irritated, and me being irritated is what makes her tense.  But either way the Holidays bring stress into our marriage.  Take Christmas shopping for example.  Ann and I long ago reached an agreement that she would do the Christmas-shopping and present-wrapping if I would do the Christmas cards and the Christmas newsletter.  I thought at first that I had negotiated myself a really good deal since I could just sit there in the den watching TV, eating candy, signing cards, and stuffing envelopes.  That was until I realized that when Ann is doing the Christmas shopping I have to wander around behind her carrying the wallet and nodding in agreement as she frantically tries to select sizes and gifts that fit both the recipient and the recipient’s personality. 

            But the real tension builder is not the preparation for Christmas, it is the peeling of the Christmas pomegranate.  A pomegranate, I am convinced, was designed by a sleepy mathematician relying heavily on random number theory.  Engineers, on the other hand, tend to design things using the repetition of well-defined structures like the simple triangle.  A pomegranate is constructed with chaos.  If you think I am joking, listen to the dictionary definition of that supposedly delicious fruit.  A pomegranate is “A chambered, many seeded, globose fruit, having a tough, usually red rind and surmounted by a crown of calyx lobes, the edible portion consisting of pleasantly acid flesh developed from the outer seed coat.”  See, even the definition is cloaked in chaos. 

            Well this year I decided to throw all caution aside and peel my first pomegranate.  The dictionary was correct in saying that the fruit has a “tough, usually red rind.”  I might say that it is more like a rhinoceros hide with which I had to use a knife to start the penetration.  Once started, however, peeling off the rind was fairly easy except for the risk of staining your hands, the cupboard, and every piece of clothing you are wearing.  In fact in the instructions for extracting juice, the first warning is to put on an apron and cover your work area with plastic shopping bags to keep from staining everything in your kitchen.  What you end up with is a ball made up of an infinite number of seeds, each of which is surrounded by a little sack of tangy juice that is tasty but contains a high concentration of red stain.  The complication of a pomegranate, besides the fact that it is difficult to spell, is that there are random egg carton membranes running randomly through the fruit into which the seed pods nestle to keep them from breaking, and you have to flip each seed pod delicately out of the membrane and into a bowl without breaking the membrane.  The slightest bit of pressure or a misplaced fingernail produces a squirt of red dye which always lands on your chest.  I remember Ann saying, “Put a bib on or you are going to stain your coveralls.”  Well I told her, as every husband would, that I would be careful and not get anything on me.  I lied. 

            I have to admit that all the while I stood there looking down into this alien piece of fruit with squirting little seed pods, I kept thinking of the original Alien movie where the man in the space suit looked down into a flower with a seed pod and something squirted out suddenly, pierced his space helmet and into his body where it began to incubate.  Ann said not to worry, this Alien was much smarter than to pick a decrepit old man’s body in which to incubate. 

            Well I went through all of this because the internet said that pomegranate juice was high in antioxidants and was thought to protect one’s body from those elements that may lead to premature aging, heart disease, and some forms of cancers as well as prevent the hardening of arteries and high blood pressure.  Now how much more could a decrepit old man ask for.  Next time, however, I think I will just buy one of those bulgy, six dollar POM bottles full of pomegranate juice and chug-a-lug it straight from the bottle.  Now I have to go out and find a remotely controlled thermostat that is better than the Un-muddled Mathematician’s and pay him back for making me covet.