Buying An Avocado

Helene was making Mexican food for dinner and Margareta, our eldest daughter (who has a God-given gift for mashing avocados into guacamole, which a wonderful tortilla chip dip), pulled her head out of the fridge and announced that we didn’t have any avocados hiding in there.

“Well, we need avocados,” Helene said. “Mexican food is no good without guacamole.”

“I’ll go and get some,” I said, pulling my coat over my shoulders, eager to make my contribution. I scooped my car keys off the kitchen table and made for the door. Then I stopped suddenly and turned and looked at Helene. She has since described the look on my face at that time as ‘funny.’

“Er – ” I said, sheepishly, “what does an avocado look like?”

Helene rolled her eyes. “It’s round,” she said, “sort of oblong, really. Get a green one. Make sure it’s hard. Don’t get a soft one.”

Half an hour later I returned with a small plastic bag filled with potato chips, dill pickle potato chip dip, cookies, peanuts, pretzels and oh yeah – an avocado. Helene took the bag from me and put it on the counter. When she did this there was a loud bang, as though there was a brick in the bottom of the bag. Helene looked at me and said, “What’s that?”

“The avocado,” I said. “I got a big hard one, just like you said.”

Helene reached into the bottom of the bag and pulled out my avocado. She looked at it and turned it over in her hands. Then she looked at me. “This is a coconut,” she said.

“It is?”

“Yes.”

I looked away. “Well - uh - I thought it was an avocado,” I said. “It’s round, sort of oblong like you said, and hard. Really hard. In fact, I was wondering how Margareta was ever going to be able to smush it up.”

“Do you know what would happen if I dropped this on your foot?” Helene asked me.

“No.”

“It would hurt,” she said. “In fact, it would hurt a lot. But if I dropped an avocado on your foot it would not hurt. That’s the difference. And that’s what you should do the next time I send you to the store to buy an avocado. Pick it up and drop it on your foot. If it hurts it’s a coconut. If it doesn’t hurt it’s an avocado and that’s the one you bring home.”

The next day Helene took the coconut back to the grocery store and returned it. The lady in charge of coconut returns wanted to know why Helene was bringing it back. So Helene told her how her husband thought it was an avocado and, she says, they had a good laugh. They laughed about men in general and especially about how you should never send a man to the grocery store to buy an avocado because he’ll always come back with a coconut. “Those aren’t the exact words we used,” she said. “But that’s basically what we said.”

And a friend of mine gave me this piece of advice: “Store your new socks in a drawer until you are ready to wear them,” he said. “Don’t keep them in a basket unless you turn the basket upside down. Then it’s like a cage. They can’t get out.”