Great Coconut Adventure

 

Great Coconut Adventure

“You don't like coconuts? Say, Brainless, don't you know where coconuts come from? Look at here. From Tahiti, Fiji Islands, Coral Sea!” (Young George Bailey character from, It’s a Wonderful Life)

I never saw It’s a Wonderful Life until I was a teenager and the movie became a staple of primetime Christmas season programming.  And I never was convinced by young George Bailey that the way to happiness lies in wondering all over the globe.  I’ve always been more of a homebody, especially when I take the liberty to consider all of Wisconsin my home. 

My kind of adventure was fifteen minutes ago when I opened the patio door just so I could hear the rain better.  It was coming straight down, so the risk was minimal.  Still, I remember one day from my youth where the sense of adventure overcame me, and strangely enough in these parts, it did involve a coconut.

I found while growing up that all you needed to create adventure was two boys with time on their hands.  The other boy in this case was my older brother Mike.  And I would also say that my mother was involved, maybe even to blame, because she took us both along on her weekly grocery shopping excursion, rather than leaving us home alone. 

It was while trudging dutifully alongside the shopping cart that we saw it.  There, openly hidden right in the middle of the Produce section, was a bin full of genuine coconuts - temptation imported from the far south seas!  We had watched enough Sinbad movies to know a coconut when we saw one.  “Can we get a coconut, Mom?” “What in the world would you want that for?”  I don’t know what my mother’s own experience with coconuts was.  I did know that she used it in a lot of baking, my favorite being a chocolate cake with vanilla frosting and sprinkled liberally with shredded coconut. 

Anyway, it was apparent that my mother had no sense of adventure when it came to coconuts.  But, while we didn’t press the issue any further with her, we didn’t give up on the idea.  As soon as we got home when ran upstairs to pool our ready cash resources.  I can’t remember for certain what the cost of a coconut was back then.  I want to say that it must have been less than a dollar, because we didn’t have much more than that laid out on the bed in front of us.  And, as determined as we were, I doubt that we would have been willing to spend most of our money.  Anyway, we grabbed what we needed, and asked if we could ride our bikes to the park. 

Now, Murphy Park was only three blocks away, and the grocery store was only a block or so from the back boundary of the park.  We didn’t really lie; we did go to the park; we just didn’t stop there.  Once at the store we didn’t waste any time; we headed straight to the coconuts.  The price I remember was per coconut, so selection was easy; we simply picked the largest one.  Only now as I'm writing this, do I stop to ponder what the checkout girl was thinking as she rang up our strange purchase.  I suspect that she had to have chuckled a little.  

It was once we were heading up our driveway that we suddenly realized that we needed to be a little discreet.  That was fine; everything we needed was in the garage.  We shut the door behind us.

Mike suggested that the first thing we should do was drink the coconut milk.  Every coconut that we had seen on television poured out a fountain of thick white coconut milk.  What to do.  “Let’s pound a nail into it;” I suggested.  We found a ten-penny nail and a hammer.  I held the coconut steady and Mike pounded the nail into it.  Easy enough.  But when we tipped the coconut to pour out that milk into our open mouths, nothing came out.  We didn’t understand that it would be helpful to pound a second hole to allow a little air inside.  Hmm, we decided we must have bought a dry coconut.  Oh well, we could still eat it. 

Again, I steadied the coconut and Mike brought the hammer down hard on the shell.  He hit it again, and again.  After a couple more whacks, the shell finally cracked enough that something looking more like water than milk leaked out onto the garage floor.  We learned, too late, what coconut milk really looked like.  Mike pounded that coconut like a coal miner.  Finally, a large piece broke off.  Then he pounded a couple more pieces free.  The coconut meat itself stuck stubbornly to the shell. 

I tried to gnaw off a bit of the white away from the shell.  I had to stop several times to spit out little bits of the shell.  At last, I gnawed a chunk of pure coconut free.  I chewed it.  And I chewed it.  And I chewed it.  It was like chewing a piece wood.  It was tough, and it was definitely not sweet, and definitely did not taste like the coconut in my mother’s cupboard. 

Mike and I looked at each other.  The coconut turned out to be a waste of money, a waste of time, and a waste of risk.  We gathered all of the pieces of our now-shattered coconut and dropped them in the garbage can.  We put our tools away.  And we put our interest in coconuts away.

The lessons of the story, at least the the ones I learned, are that not every adventure turns out as planned, and the most important one, if you have to hide what you're doing from your mother, what you are doing may or may not be sinful, but it sure isn't one of your better ideas!

His Peace <><

Deacon Dan  

Photo by Shibi Zidhick on Unsplash