A Prophetic Fruit

By Max Smart

Clementines always remind me of those early elementary school lunches. My mom would pack a state-of-the-art lunch box with built in ice packs to the brim with a beverage, some snack food, likely a sandwich, and certainly a clementine. Their bitter-sweet, citrus taste always bursts in your mouth with an undeniable joy and brightness. That culinary sensation was always matched by the moment of sheer joy when the lunch monitor would excuse our sloppily cleaned table for recess. Rain or shine, we would be out there, playing basketball, football, or maybe swinging on the monkey bars. Some days I would have a lot of fun playing, others I would not. Clementines always seem to capture this dichotomy in their aftertaste, not always pleasing, but certainly better than going hungry.

Clementines always seem to capture this dichotomy in their aftertaste, not always pleasing, but certainly better than going hungry.

The clementine is a strange food. Something of a misfit. A fake orange. At least it seems this way from the outside. So what’s the point? Why not just eat an orange?

Although it’s appearance may be discerning, the clementine’s taste is certainly not that of a knock-off. It’s unique and different. Perhaps less desirable than an orange, but people eat bitter-sweet chocolate for a reason, right? It was this clementine, this strange, strong, citrusy food that always made its way into my elementary school lunch box. Why my mom always bought them over oranges I would never know. Nonetheless, I ate it every day. It is this fruit that my mind associates with those lunches, with my childhood, and with elementary school.

I suppose I can think of one benefit of eating a clementine and not an orange. They’re far easier to peel than an orange. Perhaps eating a clementine, then, is in a sense a bit of a sacrifice. I am sacrificing the taste and size of large, scrumptious oranges for the accessibility and ease of the clementine. At first blush, this may seem like an irrelevant detail; however, I believe it’s yet another aspect of the clementine that provides insight into my elementary school and later academic years. Allow me to explain: as time went on and I furthered my education, the pace of my learning only sped up. From the first moment I stepped onto a school campus to the moment I am typing these words, the clock has never once slowed, but continuously ticked faster and faster with more and more vigour. Just as the clementine embodied both the fun and boring recesses, it embodied this theme of slipping time.

Now I ask myself if choosing this fast paced course was for the better or for the worse. Ironically, this increasingly fast paced academic schedule funneled me into reading and analyzing Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, a book I truly loved, in the eighth grade. This book demonstrated to me the danger of our world’s constant positive acceleration and velocity. It showed me how this robotic direction of humankind may soon lead to the loss of books and writing like this essay in and of itself. It’s clear now I hold some disdain in my heart for the lack of care toward experience and taste and increased care would forebode as early as my first lunch of the first grade. However, as the optimist I am,

Of course the young elementary school Max never knew any of this; but, I believe now that the clementine certainly served as a road sign, signaling where I would go in both the near and distant future. This now leads me to wonder what road signs may be hidden in my current life.

To this day and in my present epoch, I frequently bite into clementines with the same willingness to choose the strange, small, orange ball over a ripe and meaty orange itself. Regardless of their ease of access, I’m still curious as to why they keep appearing in our kitchen over other fruits. Are they cheaper than oranges? I’ve clearly associated the clementine with my childhood, so perhaps I associate it with me too. I’ll seldom regret eating one.

Blue Pastel, Colored Pastel, by Alex Hodson