Schadenmelon

Maybe it’s a Southern thing, but certain foods are forever associated with specific people in my mind. My sisters? Chocolate covered cherries. My grandfather? Lima beans. And I never eat watermelon without thinking of my mother.

She grew up on a farm in Georgia that had a big watermelon patch. Every summer as she cut a watermelon open for us (outdoors, in our oldest clothes, with a lot of paper towels, and a big old knife) she would tell us how, when she was little, she would go out into the field and just break open a whole watermelon. She would sit right there and just eat the middle, the very sweetest part, and walk away leaving the rind for the hogs. And then she would watch us as we dug out every bit of sweet flesh, down to the rind, scraping with the sides of our spoons to get every last bit of pink off until the last few bites were half-bitter. She would shake her head as though we were falling from grace before her very eyes.

So this weekend, as I sat down to a piece of ripe red melon, of course I heard my mother’s story in my head. And just when my spoon went beyond the very sweetest heart into the second-best-but-still-pink part I wondered why I still never stop where she did. I could. I’m a mom now. No one would tsk. But I never do.

And I wondered, what is the drive that pushes me past the perfect moment? Why do I keep eating the pie when I don’t really taste it anymore? Why stay in the tub until all the bubbles are gone? Are there people in the world who only want the cream? Who stop at the top? And what makes them tick that isn’t in my clockwork?

Is it optimism that this time what goes up might just keep going? Is it a need for contrast, the darkness that defines the light, the bitter that sets off the memory of the sweet? Or are some of us just too dense to know when to go?

I’ll bet the Germans have a word for it. They came up with schadenfreude, joy in someone else’s misfortune, surely they have something to sum up this propensity to pursue pleasure to the point of disappointment. Until I find it, I’m calling it schadenmelon. Sometimes the joy we remember is sweeter than the one we experience.