For years wife and I have maintained our similarities, but with individual wrinkles. Her juicing infatuation in the mornings is the newest example. A combination of kale, carrot, apple, strawberry and cucumber go in the juicer for her breakfast. Stray strawberries and bananas go into the blender for my breakfast smoothie.
A recent trip to the local farmer’s market harkened back to a summer where a cucumber was the length between adulthood and adolescence.
It was 2002 and I was a packaging engineer at a grocery store. Scrawny and lacking self-awareness it was a period where the summer seemed endless.
On that steamy Florida evening the boy whistled a Beatles song. From Me To You was in his mind because it was on a relatively new compilation release. Upon hearing the lyrics, the cucumber-carrying colleague at the grocery store inquired about the lyrics.
“If there’s anything that you want,
If there’s anything I can do,
Just call on me and I’ll send it along…”
The lyrics were just the opening she needed. Instantly, she quipped there was something she needed and I could provide it. The cucumber the coitus-seeking-cashier was twirling in her hands answered the question before her bespectacled brown eyes.
The boy’s joke about being able to answer the question and her desire received a woman’s response. A raised eyebrow and a lustful look were enough to unnerve the lanky wiseass.
She was 10 years older. A combination of being older, with money and interested in my comings and goings made her seem exotic to someone who had no responsibilities other than saving spending money for college.
She drove a brown Ford. It was probably a Taurus, but his memory evades him. The open ended invitation was too much for his synapses to compute while coolly strolling to his car. Sensing his insecurity, she said the cucumber would suffice.
At the time the cashier was 27. It was an age that seemed beyond imaginable and well into the future. Four weeks before my wife’s 27th birthday, the case of the curious cucumber arose again.
Wife’s eyes didn’t bulge at the sight of the massive cucumber at the market. To her, it was going to make a lot of juice — the type that was far from the tongue of a teenager a decade ago. Throughout the years the cucumber remained the same, its application, by two different women wasn’t the same. In short, it was the difference between adolescent and adult.
