The Attention-Grabbing Grapefruit: A Sociological Adventure

Hey folks,

So, Kyle’s been telling me for a long time that I should “sit in” on his blog and make “guest posts,” so I thought I’d post this here, seeing as he apparently missed this story. So, without any further adieu, I give you:

The Attention-Grabbing Grapefruit: A Sociological Adventure
(…or, “Everybody Wants to Be a Good Samaritan, Especially When It’s Easy.”)

Last week, Kyle, Papa, and I went shopping at Costco. If you’ve ever been to Costco, you know that the highlight of the experience are the loads of good samples… unfortunately, I burned my tongue on some cajun chicken pasta penne stuff, which pretty much ruined the remainder of my sampling. I hate it when that happens!

We also had hot dogs there for lunch — two dogs split among us three, a perfect amount. As we left the eating area, I saw a little puddle under our cart. I looked at the underside of our cart but saw no broken bottles or anything, so I figured it must have been from someone else…

Wrong. As we were loading up the car, we discovered that we had a leak after all. It was the grapefruit! One of the fruit at the very bottom was rotting, and leaking grapefruit juice! I didn’t want that thing in the car, but it was at the very bottom so it would’ve taken a while to get it out, so Papa put it on the roof! I protested at first, because a) I was afraid it’d fall off, possibly leading to an accident, and b) I knew we’d get honked at by lots of “good Samaritans” notifying us that we “forgot” to load up our fruit. But, we did it anyway.

As I was backing out, looking over my shoulder, the person in the car behind me started waving frantically. I recognized her from my improv class, so I waved back. Turns out I didn’t know her after all; she was just waiving frantically to draw our attention to our roof. Someone else nearly said, “you’ve got a bag of fruit on your roof.” We said, “we know!” and cheerily drove off. We hadn’t even left Costco and someone honked at us a few times. I gave a thumbs-up but they still honked. Such concern!

Driving along River street, an SUV pulled up beside us and the passenger said, “you’ve got fruit on your roof.” “We know!” A few blocks later, more shouting and honking… “We know!” It was so funny! (I nearly titled this blog post “We know!”) One person even got out of their car (at a red light) and told about the fruit through our window. “We know!” For the last few blocks we didn’t get any honking or anything, but I loved watching people in the opposite lane as I passed them, especially those waiting in an intersection… heads slowing turning, jaw slowing dropping, eyes widening… and then I passed them. lol! Beautiful!

My friend, upon hearing the story, remarked that the little citrus was probably suffering from self-esteem issues — being a rotten fruit, after all — but causing all the ruckus must have made it feel very important!