Avocado

Avocado. One of my favourite Slim Gaillard lyrics and a fine fruit/vegetable to boot. Today I refer to three little known facts about avocados.

1. I love avocados. I do not love them in a rude or unnatural way. I just want to eat them. Fact: There are these large organic Hawaiian avocados you can sometimes locate at a local gouger, um, produce store, which are so rich they taste like macadamia nut butter. There was a period in my life when I routinely made a meal from one of these avocados, with a 1/2 lemon. So good it was a sin, it was.

2. One may wonder what could be contemplated in the depths of an avocado grove, in the mottled light, listening to the sussuruss of wind and leaves. What flights of fancy, of change, or spiritual enlightenment may follow? I had the chance to know.

My step-brother, who comes from a fairly well-established line of Winnipeg Jews, decided to become a Buddhist monk of the Thai forest tradition. After many immigration-related travails he obtained his special visa for bald clergy-people and off he went to some mountainside near Ontario California where he dutifully removed his hair and eyebrows, donned the official saffron towel set, and set about contemplating nibbana in the depths of an avocado grove. While at first I thought he was going to great lengths to avoid 1. his family, and 2. employment over the next two years or so I came to admire his dedication to his chosen path. Eventually he became an ordained monk which is to say he went without eyebrows for a long time. I had ill-formed plans of visiting him in his idyll, watching him meditate while I ate avocados fresh from the tree, with a squeeze of lemon. Yum.

Of course, this all came to naught. One night his dad flew down from Winnipeg and convinced him to leave the monastery for the frozen charms of Winnipeg and family. So he did.

Now he is ultra-orthodox and a yoga instructor in fucking Etobicoke or something and I will never know the depths and heights of consciousness he reached in avocadoland because I'd sooner visit Winnipeg than go to Toronto. Asshole.

3. E does not like avocados. We fed her some mashed avocado when she was starting on solids. The first spoonful went down well enough but the second was ejected with force and a facial expression taken from a Buckley's ad.

A, on the other hand, has taken to avocados rather well. He picks up cubes in his chubby little mitts, manouvres them into his mouth, chews them with his 4.5 teeth and gums them into submission. Once he's eaten what he was served he pounds the table (for more, I think, maybe he is having an abreaction). I am pleased he enjoys avocados, obviously. More to the point, as I watch my little guy working intently on something new each day, be it manipulating avocado cubes or launching himself at the knee-areas of unsuspecting passersby, I see my baby becoming a little boy. That's enough to transport me to the shady groves of my mind, where the past is awash in soft warm light, the present is truly where I am, and the future is a brightly lit path, too bright to see in any detail, but inviting, beckoning me forward.

P-man out.