A Final Thought: The Perfect Peach
By Mitch Allen
I grew up in Georgia, the Peach State, but as a kid I didn’t care for peaches. They were hot and fuzzy, made your face sticky and had a hard pit in the middle. The Southern classics I preferred were salted watermelon and boiled peanuts.
I say the peaches were hot because in August we’d pick them right from the trees in the orchards at Lake Walter Richards, a private park for employees of Tom’s Foods, a peanut and candy company where my grandfather worked. When they’d turn off the machines at the end of a shift, he’d hold a paper sack under the conveyor belt and catch the last pound of chocolate-covered peanuts destined for the garbage. I liked those peanuts so much more than peaches.
Until I got older.
There really is nothing like a perfect peach, that infinitesimally small moment between a peach being unripe and being rotten. It’s difficult to determine that exact instant if you don’t have access to the CERN Large Hadron Collider.
You just have to get lucky.
I got lucky the other day. After 32 years in Northeast Ohio, I enjoyed the perfect peach. I bought it at Szalay’s in the Cuyahoga Valley National Park, then resisted, allowing it to sit on the counter for a week until it became soft, sweet, juicy, succulent, sinful.
Close your eyes when you eat such a peach and think of Coca-Cola. You may come to believe, as I do, that peaches are a key ingredient in the company’s secret formula, which, by the way, was developed by one John Stith Pemberton in my hometown of Columbus, Georgia.
He fought in the Battle of Columbus on Easter Sunday, April 12, 1865, three days after Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox Courthouse. The telegraph lines were down, so no one knew this.
In the battle, Pemberton was injured by a Yankee bayonet to the chest. He spent the rest of his life in search of pain relief, which ultimately led to his formula for Coca-Cola (now lacking the cocaine).
I have a cousin named Peaches, the daughter of my grandfather’s brother, making her my first cousin once removed. One night several years ago, I was back home listening to a band in a downtown bar with my best friend from childhood when the emcee introduced the keyboard player as “Peaches Allen.”
Well, there can’t be more than one.
I hadn’t seen Peaches since we were both teenagers, so I walked up to the grey-haired keyboardist and said, “Hey, Peaches. I’m Mitch.” Her mouth dropped, and we immediately hugged. For the band’s entire 20-minute break, we recalled stories from our childhoods.
* * * *
Ever since I ate that perfect peach the other day, I’ve been thinking about fruit as a metaphor for a human life: We begin as a bud, but soon open into the world as a delicate blossom with little to offer but our beauty, tenderness, vulnerability, and infinite potential.
As childhood fades and falls away, we discover we are fruit, with purpose and ambition. But we are small, green and bitter, and we remain this way for most of our lives. We may grow larger with experience and the accumulation of resources, but inside we are hard and sour.
Eventually, if we are given the time, our aura takes on a golden hue, and we become soft and sweet, tender, plump with generosity. It is at this time when we realize the true purpose of our lives: to allow ourselves to be devoured, to give ourselves away completely to our art, to our cause, to our true loves, even to strangers and foes. Otherwise, we risk falling from the Tree of Life undevoured, taking our succulence with us to the dark forest floor where we rot slowly among the masses who chose the same path.
But all is not lost, for even in this rotting death, our seed, our pit, the mysterious inner spark of being we have come to call the soul, returns to the rich soil of creation where, as the ancients have promised all along, we are given the chance to live again.