Thumping the Melon

No, this is not like jumping the shark, although some might disagree once they read this blog.

Yesterday I bought a watermelon. Big deal, you say. That depends on where you grew up, and when, I suppose. In the coastal part of Texas where I lived the formative years of my life, watermelons were summertime, and their selection was not taken lightly at my house.

One of the things I remember about my father was that he was the only one in the house to select the family melons. He might not do jack shit around the house for my mother, but he imparted a mystic ritual every summer, The Thumping of the Melons. We would go sometimes to a roadside stand, which actually was just a farmer from the valley set up on the tailgate of his big flatbed truck on the side of the highway, and peruse the various melons. Less eventful would be performing the ritual at the grocer's, but I have seen it done there, too.

The family would pile in the Buick, whether it was the '52, the '56', or the '59, and head out for the melons. He'd drive up and down the highway, checking out the prices, because there were always melon wars along the road. Cantaloupes were the gauge: this guy would have ten for a dollar; half a mile down the road they might be twelve for a dollar. (Yes, they were that cheap in my childhood. Gas was also twelve cents on occasion of a gas war.) The watermelons would be priced in accordance, usually by the pound. Having found the vendor with the best deal and the best looking Charleston Greys, he would park along the roadway and our clan would exit the car like clowns in the circus.

We would all gather round as my father would curl back his nicotine-stained second finger and give the long green orbs a thump. He'd successively narrow his choices until he was down to two. To this day, I could never figure out what tone he was aiming for in his criteria for selection. Once satisfied that he had the perfect melon, he'd hoist the behemoth onto his shoulder, pay the man, and ceremoniously load it in the trunk. The last pictures we have of my father are some home movies that my oldest brother took. He is bringing in the prize melon from the car, smiling his toothless grin for the camera, the big melon cradled in his arms like a precious commodity. My brother and his new wife were home for a visit, and I would bet it was the 4th of July. That was when we had THE Melon of the Summer.

There were three holidays when I was growing up: Christmas, Easter, and the Fourth of July. We generally went somewhere on the Fourth, either to the beach at Freeport, or to Hermann Park Zoo in Houston. These events for a time were well documented because my father was a bit of a camerabug, and I can remember all too well having to stand at attention facing the sun and tears streaming down my eyes because he was fiddling with the shutter on his Argus. There are a lot of squinty pictures of us kids.

These family outings were always accompanied by The Melon. If we went to Hermann Park, The Melon was done before we went to the zoo. If we went to the beach, The Melon was passed around with the caution not to drop it in the sand. (Duh.) The point was to eat your slice as sloppily as possible, juice dripping down your elbows, and spit the seeds farther than your brothers. (Alice's Rules of Melon Eating.) My father always cut out the center part of his slice and put it aside on his plate for the last to eat, and he referred to this as "the goody bite" as it had no seeds and was the sweet heart of the melon.

So yesterday I bought a watermelon at Kroger. The sign said "Seedless Melons". (How do they reproduce these things if there are no seeds? I know, it's just another miracle of science.) They all were uniform sized, little round dark green melons about the size of a soccer ball. Nothing compared to the Black Diamonds of yore. I grabbed one out of the bin, and thought, wouldn't do me any good to thump it, because I have no idea what it's supposed to sound like. Forgive me, Daddy, for I know not what I do here. I just hope it's ripe.