Watermelon Seeds and the Second Amendment

There is a fruit and vegetable stand, called a fruteria, on the street just outside our apartment complex. It is open daily, from 7 to 7, and seems to be a family run operation. I think the fruits and vegetables are locally grown, but it's hard to tell since the apples have a label "From Chile" on them, and I don't have the words in my Spanish vocabulary to question about the other stuff. I at least know the potatoes are local - they come with about a quarter pound of dirt on each. Some of that would fall off in shipping, I imagine.

Either way, the stuff is fresh. You don't have to wait a week for the avocados to ripen. And I haven't yet seen a green banana. It's actually how I have always idealized my purchase of fruits and veggies. Convenient, fresh, and cheap. So, it is nice to be able to finally realize the ideal.

Maya, Jonah and I walk there almost daily - that it is walking distance is part of the convenience. The other part of the convenience is that I don't have a lot of things to do during the day, so I can go there whenever I want. The things we buy include papayas, apples, tomatoes, strawberries, potatoes (There is small variety of potato which Maya likes. They are the size of a walnut), bananas, pineapples, watermelons, onions, garlic, eggs, tomatillos, spinach, avocados, tangerines, lemons, oranges, and granadillas.

A granadilla looks like an orange, but when you crack it open (not peel it open) it is white and mucousy on the inside with black seeds that look like tadpoles. It tastes sort of citrus-y, but is sweet and crunchy. Rebecca likes them.

Some of the other differences from buying fruit/veggies at home are that the onions and garlic come already peeled. So no messy onion and garlic skins turning up under your toaster oven and all over your floor. If that sort of thing bothers you.

The strawberries are cool because you can rummage through them to get the good ones. You aren't stuck with whatever comes in the plastic green tray. The other day after we brought some strawberries, we were sitting back in our apartment eating them. Maya followed each bite with an "Mmmmm" because they were so sweet. Finally, Maya got one that was kind of white on top (Jonah must have picked that one and it slipped past my quality control). She ate it anyway. When I asked her how it was, she said, "It was sweeter than I thought it was going to be."

The watermelons have seeds. This morning I spent about half an hour de-seeding a watermelon. My kids won't even eat the piece if it has seeds. Same thing with the tangerines. Seeds in fruit is so foreign to them and they can't be bothered to deal with it. I'm interested to see how they would handle ice cream if it came with seeds.

Can you even buy a seeded watermelon in the States anymore? As far as I am concerned, seedless watermelons are one of the great inventions of the United States. I can only imagine how much better our society would be if we had invented the seedless watermelon earlier in our history. George Washington would have led us to victory in the Revolutionary War at least five years earlier if all those hours that he spent de-seeding watermelons for the troops could have been spent strategizing. And imagine how much sooner Barry Bonds would have broken Hank Aaron's home run record.

I understand also that Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation originally included language about a fair wage for watermelon de-seeders, however, the Northern moral-elite who were funding the war wanted that part cut out and Lincoln caved.

Some other watermelon lore you may not have known about is that the operator of the Hindenburg was eating watermelon and spit a seed out that jammed the steering column. Gandhi actually walked to the sea because he mistakenly thought he could get a free watermelon there. Shortly before Hurricane Katrina, Bush ordered FEMA to fortify the levee's in New Orleans with the surplus watermelons the Federal Government had purchased from the Nations farmers for $8.6 billion under the "Let's Make Agri-Business the Nation's Business Act of 2006"

And, I read somewhere that the day Thomas Jefferson delivered the Bill of Rights to the Continental Congress was the day of his grand-daughters fourth birthday party. He spent the day prior cutting and de-seeding eleven watermelons for the event. Because he was on deadline for his assignment for the Republic, but still had to prepare the watermelons, he didn't have time to give his draft a proof-read before he turned it in. That's why the Second Amendment is so ambiguous.