The Fruits of My Neighbor

These days, it's not so easy to figure out what season it is just by wandering through the fruit section at the grocery store. Supersonic transport has given us plums in January, all varieties of juicy summer fruit in the dead of winter. It's nice, I suppose, but sometimes it's better to wait, to have something to look forward to.

Back in the dark ages, when I was in college a good five and a half hour drive north of New York City,  we had to wait until about eleven o'clock in the morning for the Sunday New York Times to arrive in the one store in town that was open on Sunday. Same with the bagels, once a week, imported from what might has well have been a foreign land. Winter lasted a bit longer up there than it does in normal climes, and for the life of me I cannot remember ever seeing a peach or a plum before it was time to pack up and head south for the summer.

I read an article last Sunday morning -- these days the Times arrives  in the wee hours of Sunday morning, even in the Midwest -- about the benefits of delayed gratification and redirected gratification and something called "underindulgence." Underindulgence, a word that, as yet, is so emphatically unrecognized that an online dictionary service corrects your query, suggesting maybe you meant counter intelligence. Did they mean counter to intelligence? Maybe the concept is just counterintuitive. Why underindulge when the world is our oyster, when there is summer fruit in winter and when you can get New York bagels anywhere and any time you like and when you don't even have to leave home to shop. Three cheers for free shipping and hassle free returns! Indulge, consume, accumulate. It's what we do. It's how everybody else knows we're doing okay, it's how we occupy all the extra time we have that doesn't have to be spent waiting for the New York Times to be delivered late Sunday morning.

My neighbor grows his own peaches. (He also makes wine in his basement, and has been spotted, in the past, mowing his lawn in a Speedo, but neither his grapes nor his, um, other fruits hold much interest for me.) The peaches, though, they are a rite of summer, and no matter how many bushels of peaches I have enjoyed all year long, I look forward each August to the offering from my neighbor. Bags full of fruit that he loves to share, and not only because he and his wife would otherwise be up to their eyeballs in peach pies, peach preserves, and whatever the hell else people do with tree loads of fruit before it goes bad.

Next month, when my neighbor beckons me from across the fence to collect my stash, I will be reminded of the beauty of delayed gratification (who the heck waits until August for a good peach?), redirected gratification (i.e. sharing -- my neighbor's enthusiasm when he hands over the bags pretty much sums that one up), and underindulgence. The spelling Nazi buried somewhere within my laptop insists on underscoring the word, a silent warning against screwing up. (And, by the way, it suggests that what I meant to say was counter intelligence.) Not quite as annoying as that GPS bitch who whines incessantly when you decide to delay a right turn, but close. I know where I'm going, bitch, and I know what underindulgence means, Herr Spellcheck. At least in theory.

My neighbor can probably afford to fly periodically to South America to get fruit out of season, and he can probably afford to have somebody else -- fully clothed, or at least in boxers -- mow his lawn. He does not need to watch my house when he knows I am gone, and he does not need to watch extra carefully even when I am home, just because he knows that I am a woman, alone. He is in his eighties, happy to sit for hours on a sunny day on his front porch, or take off every once in a while in one of his vintage cars. And he appears to be genuinely happy when he delivers my peaches, or, sometimes, tomatoes, or whatever else he happens to be growing. He appears to live a life of underindulgence, which, as far as I can tell, is neither counter intelligent nor counterintuitive. In his small house surrounded by newer and more spacious models, on a street crowded every Thursday from April through October with landscaping trucks, he seems content, gratified, living life well.

I may sneak a few peaches in before my neighbor delivers my annual home grown stash next month, but those peaches, shared from the yard next door, will be the sweetest.