I just ate an outstanding apple, standing in the sun in the funny little garden on the south side of Crowe Hall. It was a Honeycrisp--developed by the University of Minnesota and released in 1991, this cultivar (whose sweet, tart and flavorfully crisp flesh makes it ideal for eating raw) is now proud bearer of the heavy mantle of 'Minnesota State Fruit'--that I purchased from a sassy old lady farmer whom I banter with at the farmer's market every Saturday. I wonder if she'll let me haggle if I hit on her hard enough. New Student Week has begun and everywhere you turn your head, nametagged freshmen scuttle around corners. They move in large groups, or in trilateral family units, or sometimes even all on their own, with a purposeful stride and terrified twitchy features. The apple was so crisp and juicy that each bite sounded off like a gunshot and produced a mist of apple-scented vapor for the streaming sun to filter through.
(I wanted to describe the off-juicing as an 'arterial spray' but could not in good conscious do so.)
There were shady benches in this garden but bands of marauding yellowjackets, numerous and cocksure off of late-summer excess (and I suppose a healthy dose of pre-winter desperation), scared me off. I hate the hell out of bees. Standing on the sidewalk in the shade was not so bad, and it let me feel more like a strange and menacing prominence, which I enjoy because I am an egoist. 'Who is that forlorn and malevolent stranger with the harrowing beard and the nervous tapping foot? What magnificent pain, what tragic genius could drive him to flaunt social norms and so boldly eat that apple, with its crude crunchings and dribbling of juices (some into his very beard itself!), here in the sun before our very eyes? He pauses only to cooly appraise our daughter and girlishly twirl in place to shoo a bee, then turns his rage back to the helpless apple clenched in his hairy grip, back to the beastly heaving, ripping and tearing of the supple flesh, licking and smacking his lips, swallowing it down with demonic and overwhelming gusto. We are terrified, and strangely drawn.' This (really) is the narrative that ran through my head while I stood there and ate this apple.
I put all of my energies towards not eating a bee. People are coming back and I need to shave my hermit beard, which I suppose I grew to keep my company. In Peter the Great's Russia, men who wished to keep their beards had to pay a special tax and carry around a little medallion with a picture of a beard on it, and there was still a good chance that the Tsar himself would see you on the street, grab you by the beard and cut it off with the razor that he always kept on him for this purpose.* This apple, once the size of both fists held together (or brain-sized, if the old grade-school heuristic holds any water), has dwindled down to about one fist in volume. It is 75 degrees American and this tiny Asian girl is wearing jeans and three layers of sweatshirts; I suppose that come winter she will require a parka the size of a minivan. For her parents' benefit she has pointed out a dead bush of special significance but her mother would rather glare at me over sunglasses. (I suppose the 'Pax as Romantic Byronic hero whose all-consuming apple-passion destroys both himself and those around him' storyline above is pretty much from this woman's POV. Women fascinate me more and more these days.) I look back at her through my own sunglasses and take an especially big, sloppy bite of the Honeycrisp. I instantly regret not first sliding down my sunglasses and making true eye contact. I seem to have switched to the present tense.
*And here's the really great part: if you said a damn word about it, ol' Pete would probably take all your land and belongings and give 'em to his pals, exile your family to Siberia, and then cut your fucking head off, and everyone would say, "Well that was right and proper." Autocracy, everybody.
Curious about the mechanism by which creeping ivy clings to walls, I walked between those symmetrical dorm-things to examine their ivy-carpeted exteriors. One esp. verdant sun-drenched** corner was in unspectacular brown-gree blossom, said tiny boring flowers being however a subject of great interest for a veritable cloud of fucking bees. I stood mesmerized and transfixed and wished I had the power to strike bees dead, perhaps by breathing on them. By this point the apple was what most people would call a 'core,' but I continued to gnaw on it, as I enjoy eating like a refugee. Passersby reached for comment on the uneasy spook staring at a wall in his black cords and blue T used words like 'baleful' and 'maleficent.' My apple is gone, work starts in 5, and there are no bees indoors (if they know what's good for them). Excuse me.
**I find it interesting how often light, especially sunlight, is described in terms of water. Sunlight can drench, bathe, stream, flow, trickle or flood, and sometimes it will deluge or drown. I suppose sunlight and water both have a sort of primal patience and inevitibility about them; no matter how tight you seal it up, light and water will find a way in.
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