Pears

I hate pears. I apologize to all of you out there who happen to like them, but I don’t. I’m sorry if you are a member of the Association for the Advancement of Pear and Pear-related Products of America, but I can’t stand pears, especially when they come in pairs.

Why is my hatred so vehement? How can I get so emotional about an innocent, pale, bland-tasting tree fruit? To explain, I’ll have to go back to a topic I addressed in yesterday’s blog entry. It has everything to do with going back to school.

You see, even if I was going back to my familiar old school with familiar teachers and familiar classmates, I still wasn’t wildly excited about going back for another school year. But add to this the coincidence that Back to School fell at the very same time as the height of the pear season.

My lunch during those first few dreaded days back at school always included a pear or two. And as I remember, pears don’t travel well in paper lunch bags or rattling around inside plastic lunch boxes. By the time I opened up my lunch at noon, the pear had done some serious bouncing around and was covered in dents and bruises.

Worse than dents and bruises was when the skin was punctured, and pear juice covered the inside of my lunch kit. If the pear made it to lunchtime unscathed, I hated the taste because of its association with coming back to school. Again, I apologize to all of you pear lovers out there, but I simply can’t ignore the wave of emotion that overcomes me every time I see a pear.

What brought me to rant about the pear? I suppose yesterday’s entry brought back some other memories of the first days of school, and it got me thinking of how powerful food can be with emotional connections. Although we breathe more often than we eat, air isn’t nearly as interesting to write about as food. Food can be a great focal point in a story (How to Eat Fried Worms, The Worldwide Dessert Contest, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory). You can also tell a lot about a character by what he or she eats, as well as how they eat. Food certainly is something to consider when developing a character or grounding a scene, provided the author avoids writing about PEARS!

Until tomorrow,
Chris