a really good mango, a big one, which we had put into the refrigerator a couple of weeks ago and i had then “forgotten about” (been ignoring), maybe in part because of the minor preparation required versus some berries or a clementine or something, but, if i’m honest with myself, mostly out of fear of being disappointed by bad fruit.

which can happen across all fruit, even if you are a person who has grown your own fruit or if, like me, more uselessly, you have watched various of those TikToks and Reels where people at the grocery store are trying to teach you all the tells of bad fruit, like pebbly avocados have less water or what the belly button of the healthiest melons looks like (all of which i immediately forget and so then either have to look up again in the grocery store, which has bad cell reception, or, more likely, have the thought “i remember i watched that video and i don’t remember what it said” and then i just grab whatever i was going to intuitively grab anyway).

and, which, because i am in some fundamental ways a coward, has basically eliminated certain fruits from my general consideration and elevated others. it really takes a lot for me to roll the dice on a peach at this point because the frankly horrific sensation of an unsweet mealy one is too deep in my mental embeddings (nectarines can be bad too but somehow they are less abject). this summer, Deborah bought two separate watermelons that after the laborious process of field stripping and cubing, one of the more PITA fruit preparation processes beyond pomegranate and pomelo (both of which i love and which are generally dependable in their quality despite the hassle), she immediately juiced them because they were not at all worth eating as fruit qua fruit. years ago i became a devoted partisan of the fuji apple, not because it’s the best apple, but because, to me, it’s the most reliably not bad apple.

but in my mind the prospect of bad fruit is somehow particularly tragic with a mango. i don’t know why this is. maybe because of the the intrinsic unbelievable peaks of sweetness and delight of the best mango, which maybe exceeds all other fruit, which makes it all the more horrible when you have one that’s fibrous and watery. it’s maybe also because i don’t remember having ever tasted mango until i was in my twenties (mark of a white millenial?) and so it has this aura of special-ness beyond other fruits that were more common in my childhood.

yesterday i came upstairs from switching a load of laundry in the basement to find Deborah had cut it up for lunch and it was perfect: sweet, smooth, a beautiful golden yellow. when she cuts one up for us, the sliced chunks go in one bowl and she always leaves the seed, with the bits of flesh too inconvenient to cut, in a bowl for me in the fridge. happily, i sucked it off.

Elsewhere

• new Niina Pollari newsletter on, among other things, a poem from Mark Leidner’s new book that makes heavy use of the Baha Men’s “Who Let The Dogs Out” (earlier version of the poem available here, but the version she describes from the book sounds like it really blossoms)

• full throttle late summer slammer from Lisa, “SaWaDiKa”

(drawings by Deborah Kim)