Fruits of summer

I have always been afraid of people who don't like watermelon. They don't seem human, as if some alien race had accidentally left one of their emissaries behind on Earth and the whole species abhorred watermelon as some genetic flaw.

On the Fourth of July, this isn't the most obvious blog theme that comes to mind. I could write about how Chicago is like a war zone on
Independence Day as families and friends set off fireworks all over the city. I am surrounded on all sides of the noise of fireworks of the caliber used by small towns for municipal Independence celebrations, only these are being launched in the streets and alleys of all the neighborhoods of Chicago. It's a spectacular display.

Tonight I took the dog on an extra-long nighttime walk, a luxury she rarely gets, but only because I wanted to stay outside and watch the pyrotechnics. Walking along Logan Boulevard, amid all the cacophony and irritated car alarms and police sirens, I smelled watermelon. Maybe it was someone's cheap drug store perfume who had just walked by before me, or maybe out of sight behind one of the fences someone was concluding their Fourth of July picnic, but I distinctly smelled watermelon, and my mouth watered.

I love the mellow, delicate sweetness of watermelon. Its rough chewable texture and simultaneous porosity, its extreme juiciness and its delicate fragility, all signify its ultimate summer fruit perfection. I love the sweet heart of the melon so much that I cut or scoop out the interior to the ring of seeds to save for later. I eat from the seeds to the white rind first, appreciating the tangier flavor of the exterior meat. But the center of the melon, the most perfect part of the watermelon, is sweetness and chewiness sublime. It deserves to be savored separate and last from the rest.

Yet there are people, stymieing people, who don't like watermelon. I'm not sure I trust these people completely. My first best friend in high school liked no melons. I bothered her about it every summer and tried
to persuade her to eat watermelon or cantaloupe, even arguing that honey dew wasn't like the other melons and was so far superior. But nothing would budge her. When pressured she'd say something about a bad memory of a picnic with her estranged birth mother and a germaphobe aunt, but nothing about flavor or texture.

My second best friend in high school liked watermelon with salt. My aunt told me once the white of the melon was best. I think they're both off.

My husband. What a special case. He doesn't like watermelon, but how can I distrust my own husband? What redeems him is that he enjoys cantaloupe, but I still don't understand how a person can like one and not the other. It is like eating Gala apples but not Fuji--they are both apples. For years I couldn't remember that my husband didn't like watermelon, "Mmm, this watermelon is perfect, try some."

"I don't like watermelon."

"What? How can you not like watermelon?"

"I just don't. And I've told you a thousand times."

"I didn't know you didn't like watermelon."

"We've had this same conversation over and over. I don't like watermelon."

"Really? Oh. That's right. Well here's some cantaloupe but it's not as good."

There is a restaurant we used to go to often that serves plates of melon as a complimentary appetizer instead of bread. I used to eat the cantaloupe first as a favor to Matthew so that he could enjoy all the watermelon. Over and over I did this, and then I would be upset that he didn't eat the watermelon I saved for him. Finally I remembered--after years of marriage--to eat the watermelon and not the cantaloupe. But I still try to pressure him from time-to-time. "Are you sure you don't want some of this watermelon? It's perfect."

He can't be completely human. No one sane could resist its mellow twangy sweetness. But at least my magnanimity is never tested. At
least I never have to share.