Have an apple--and a nice day!

One morning last week they were passing out free apples at the station. Having gotten over my reluctance to eat unwashed fruit, I gladly took one. It was accompanied by a friendly "bonne journée." I carried the apple in my left hand and my violin in my right as I walked to school. There are some things I really love about walking to school. One is that there is a chocolate factory a couple of blocks away from school (anyone thinking Roald Dahl right about now?) and the air in the morning smells accordingly of vats of melted chocolate. For those of you familiar with St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota, the smell is somewhat like that of the Malt-O-Meal factory there. The other thing I love about walking to school is that I walk past a Dominican convent on the way, and I often see a Dominican friar walking along the Boulevard de Pérolles. This time I saw not one but three--dressed in full Dominican regalia, full-length robes and all. I was surprised the first time I saw one; they look like nobody I have ever seen walking down Mission Road.

When I reached school, I dropped my violin off for its stay in the office during the day (the lockers here are about half the length of a violin case) and proceeded downstairs to do some homework and wait for class to start. Since I was still carrying my apple around, I figured I might as well just eat it then. I bit in--wow! The texture was crispy and crunchy; the flavor, sweet and tangy--in fact, a perfect combination of the two. Easily the best apple I had eaten here. As I neared the core, I didn't slow down. The normal phenomenon, in which the core area becomes relatively bland and flavorless and loses the crispy texture of the outside, didn't happen. I reached the seeds and decided that it was probably time to stop and disposed of the remains.

Maybe it seems extraneous to describe my apple-eating process in such detail, but it was no ordinary apple. There was something special about it. Maybe it was fresh from the orchard. Maybe it was genetically engineered (sorry, Jamie), although I kind of doubt it; it seems like that is less prevalent in Europe than in the States. But the most plausible explanation that came to me as I was consuming the sweet, crispy goodness, was that the apple was so special because it was given freely, with a smile and a wish for a nice day to come. And I stongly doubt that the woman who handed me an apple that morning in the train station will ever read my blog, but still, thank you, woman who gave me an apple one morning in the train station. It really did make my day.

As a side note, there are three things I would like to point out. The first is that dashes do not automatically appear here like they do in normal word processors, which disappoints me a bit. Still, thanks to junior year English, I know how to make dashes out of hyphens. Speaking of which, the second thing is that I totally just used a junior year sentence pattern. Can anyone find it? If so, you are either an English teacher or...well. And thirdly, I don't usually eat that much of the apple. Once I even get close to the core, I usually just stop there. But there is someone I know seems to always eat the entire apple, with the small exception of the seeds and stem. That's why I am giving the Top Apple Consumer Award to Mr. C. Poplawski. And the honorable mention goes to Mr. R. Royer for a memorable day in math class that one time.