Nebunele.com

When I was a kid, my friend Chrissy had a big lemon tree in her back yard. We had all the games about eating them without making faces, etc., down pat, but our favorite thing to do was get a ripe one, cut it into wedges, smother it with sugar, and eat it like an orange.

And that’s what I am doing right now with my little LA-born lemon. I cut it into tiny wedges. There’s lemon juice and sugar muddled all over the plate and my fingers, and my tongue is starting to smart from all the acid, halfway through. It reminds me of being eight years old. It reminds me of being twenty-one and drinking my first Lemon Drop. It reminds me of southern California sunshine, on this dreary Seattle chilly-wind Wednesday. It is an excellent way to put off the work I should be doing right now. It’s making my tummy feel unstable on the inside…but I love it, I can take it, sunny sunny vitamin C tearing my insides apart. Prana! Life! Fuel me, burn me, make me sharp and biting, make me fast, curdle the milk that was in the latte I had this morning, turn me inside out! Oh lemon. Oh, lemon.

Sweetly sour,
Alissa

Today I received a small box in the mail. Its contents were

1) a small lemon wrapped in a paper towel

2) a handwritten note on folded-up arty brown-and-gold paper.

It was sent by my friend Juniper, who wrote me a series of engaging and whimsical letters called “Dispatches from the Southland” a few years ago. She is the best letter-writer I know. In fact, in addition to the various missives I have actually received from her, there is one other letter she’s been writing me since…1996? that I have never seen most of. For a while, she claimed she was going to send it to me when it was finished, but I think the gig is up and I’ve finally figured out it will never be finished. She took pity on me and has been posting some of it lately on a blog called “Dear Alissa” (link on the sidebar if you’re curious. She’ll probably hate me for directing people to it. But it’s good! Be warned: she’s also been posting chapters from her novel there, which is also good, but agonizingly incomplete.)

Anyway. Back when she was writing me the Dispatches, she had developed hope about her recently-planted lemon tree. It had never borne fruit, but was starting to form flowers. But the lemons failed to materialize that year.

Now there are finally lemons! And since I was sort of peripherally involved in (well, at least kind of witnessing) the birth of the Lemon-Watching, she has decided to send me one. She wants to know what I am going to use it for.

This is a lemon with history! What should I do with it? How can I best use this lemon to glorify the name of the best letter-writer with whom I have had the pleasure of acquaintance and receipt of missives from, despite the shoddy frequency with which I returned them? I am accepting ideas for the next…one day. I want to use it while it’s still fresh.

About the lemon: It is bigger than a ping-pong ball, but smaller than a tennis ball. It is almost perfectly round, instead of lemon-shaped. Its skin is very smooth, not rough like grocery-store lemons, and it doesn’t smell very strongly at all. It is bright yellow, nearly gold on one side. As I understand it, it is the second lemon ever produced by a young tree in Los Angeles since it was planted three years ago in its current home. It glows a little on my dark wood-finished desk. It is too yellow to look quite like a full moon. There is a little inverted dimple on it, directly opposite from the place it was separated from the stem (which is faint green.) It weighs about the same amount as the pair of scissors I used to open the box that contained it. It will not be good forever.

Ok, so in order to combat the doubts cast on my Nerdliness by my embarrassing Nerd Score, I find it necessary to display some kind of Nerdly credentia. This should do it.

View my page on Nerdfighters

So much energy into gaining speed down the runway, engines grinding and swearing and panting and hollering, heavy effortful pushing that focuses so much on that drive forward, this heavy bird trying to run fast. And then—a flap drops, light—and we are airborne. Inside, people yawn and do crossword puzzles and meanwhile we are FLYING. Flying. Those Wright brothers and whoever else—I mean, holy cow, here’s something we can’t do and they freaking DID it! Left the ground. Not coming back. Freedom. Like fantasy. Man’s wanted to fly since he saw a bird. Hard to think that at that moment Evolution didn’t look up and go, with a satisfied nod, “My work here is done.” And what I think in the upward-rush-downward-press of that moment of liftoff is “I love, I love, I love. I love, and I am leaving the earth.” I want sex then, something naked and free and thrilling and hard. Flight! Think of it! We are all so jaded, we passengers. But the pilots know. Oh, they know the miracle and they hold it quiet in themselves while everything else goes on, the world, people running about. The pilots take people and put them in the sky. They know what it is they do. And then they bring us gently down again. And we, we put our magazines away and jumble inefficiently out the tiny exit, nodding at them as we fish out our cell phones. I will never get over this modern world. When I die and meet all those people in the afterlife who must be in such high demand I will hunt down Da Vinci and pull him aside and confide in him in a voice husky with emotion, a hoarse whisper because I won’t be able to manage a full voice, and I will say to him, “Leonardo,” I’ll say, “when I was in life, I FLEW.” And he will meet my eyes gravely, and the awe in mine will make his twinkle, and he will understand and be glad.

I am disappointed. It turns out I am only a mid-level nerd. Juniper, where’d you learn to be so nerdy?

Hey look! Pics from the show!

http://picasaweb.google.com/foolissa/MedeaKnowsBest200702

Wheeee!