A Day in the Life

Day in the Life

Avocados!

When I was about five years old, I was sitting in my father’s lap while he was eating half an avocado with his lunch. Despite his warnings that I “wouldn’t like it,” I insisted on tasting it. Much to everyone’s surprise, I loved it! From that day on I would share an avocado with my father whenever I could get my grubby little hands on one. Even back then avocados were expensive, so we didn’t have them as often as I wanted. About that time it became my wish – my dream – to have my own avocado tree with unlimited fruit so that I could enjoy some whenever I wanted. I made that wish known, so, when I was about eight, my mother showed me how to grow an avocado plant from a seed (suspend the seed over a glass of water with some toothpicks so that the blunt end of the seed is submerged – and wait.) Eventually the seed will split and a sprout will grow. For the next fifty years I used that method and was more often successful than not – an avocado plant would rise from the seed. Each time my hopes and dreams would grow with the sprout, but alas, eventually, every one of them died a premature death. The last time I tried, I got one to grow about three-feet tall. Although it was spindly, with only two or three leaves at the very top (the lowest one would soon fall off as a new one grew higher), my hopes rose – maybe this time! When it died, so did my dream of having an avocado tree and I quit trying. Some years later I moved to Costa Rica. Avocados were cheaper here and I was able to indulge myself and eat them more regularly, but gave no thought to trying to grow my own – that was a childhood dream I had put aside. Then, one day as I was sitting on my balcony in Santa Ana, I looked down and saw some familiar looking leaves sticking up above the weeds growing in the vacant lot next door. I was suspicious, it looked like all those leaves I had seen falling off my avocado plants over the years, but no, it couldn’t be! I asked my wife, “What is that?”

July / August 2020 19 by Allen Dickinson

Her answer blew me away; she casually glanced over at the plant and said, “Oh, it’s an avocado. I threw a seed out there one day.” OMG! An avocado plant was growing wild next door! No toothpicks, no glasses, no encouraging words, just Mother Nature thumbing her nose at me! Periodically, I would sneak onto the vacant lot and whisper a few kind words to “my” plant. And it was responding! It grew to about four-feet and had begun to bush out when the owner of the lot mowed it down with the rest of the weeds. It was a disappointment, but not a shock; I had experienced a lifetime of broken-avocado-tree-dreams, and this was just one more. Time passed and life went on. A few months ago, as I have chronicled here, we moved to a new home. It’s an older house and there are mature trees and bushes growing in the yard here. One tree, which is about 30-feet tall, annoyingly drops about 40 or 50 leaves a day onto my patio. They have to be swept up and disposed of; it’s my teenage son’s job to do that every morning. I have not paid any attention to the tree at all. Then one day I looked more closely at one of the leaves and it looked familiar. Sometimes dreams come true. I discovered that the annoying, leaf-dropping tree is an avocado tree! And it is loaded with little baby avocados! In fact, it has been dropping little avocados all over the place! I can’t pick them up as fast as that damn tree can produce them! But alas (again) Mother Nature is still messing with me. When the avocados remaining on the tree started to become mature, I began harvesting. But, to my dismay, they are all rotten inside and inedible. So close, but so far. Others have so many avocados they sell the excess at the side of the road, but not me. Oh well, at least the mangos from the tree across the street, which is dropping fruit faster than the neighbors (from blocks around) and I can keep up, are delicious! I love mangos too.