It's usually leftovers that sit forgotten on the back of a shelf in our refrigerator, lost in the mid-week shuffle of preparing meals and shuttling the extra portions into Tupperware. But yesterday, I came face-to-face with an entirely different type of holdover: a fuzzy coconut of indeterminate age.
The coconut is neither bad -- although frankly, I'm not exactly certain when a coconut goes bad in the fridge -- nor noxious. It appears to be in nearly the same condition as when it was purchased, although the exact date of that purchase currently escapes my recollection, Senator.
I've tried to convince my wife that the only humane thing to do is take out back and smash it with a hammer. This, I've explained on repeated occasions, is how coconuts were dealt with in my childhood home in Connecticut. She believes I am telling stories out of turn -- not an uncommon occurrence in our relationship -- and that coconuts have never graced the shore of the Nutmeg state.
But this is one time when I am offering an unlikely, but entirely true, recreation of previous events. I distinctly remember my dad laying waste to a coconut on our back deck with a hammer -- pouring out the milk so that we could drink it and handing us broken chunks of the fruit to gnaw on happily like monkeys on a beach.
This was well before the cathartic joy of Cast Away or even my understanding that the whole fruit we were enjoying was the same as the white shavings that topped sundaes and baked goods. This episode with the coconut was likely as close to hunting as we got in Connecticut. And it's a sport that takes some skill, because a coconut can easily roll away.
So I will take this coconut into our backyard, while my wife and infant daughter watch safely from indoors. After a brief moment to honor its existence in our fridge, I will dispatch the wild fruit with hopefully a single mighty blow. And then, it's pina coladas or coconut milk for everyone.
[Image via Flickr: free-species]
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