More on Raspberries

It seems a very good year for raspberries. Once or twice a day, walking the dog, I pass the patch and get my fix. It must be the recent hot, dry weather that's making them so plump and sweet and numerous.

The taste is marvelous, of course, but I must confess to another pleasure: the seeds that stick in your teeth. They are of the perfect size to lodge creatively, and for the several hundred yards back home, I explore and excavate, which is pleasurable enough, but the highlight is the satisfying compulsion to spit them out, or more correctly blow them out, concentrating on accuracy and distance. With the Olympics coming up, we're going to be hounded with personal bests, the year's best, American records, Olympic records, world records, Lithuanian records, and dreaming of a raspberry seed world championship is as important as any hundred meter fly. I especially like it when there's a breeze out of the west, although of course any record thus established would be wind-aided.

If I'm unlucky, I'll find a seed hiding between gum and one of my implants, often much later, in the house. Dental implants are a decidedly un-boyish thing, with few Olympic records, and since I don't quite dare to bombard the wife or the dog, I must step outside or swallow. When I was a kid in the early 60s, my brothers and I had no such compunctions and my mother would have to intervene. Fortunately for her, the raspberry canes that Dad planted behind the shed at our summer cabin lasted only a year or two before he gave up. At the slightest hint of redness, the deer got breakfast, and he did not want to get up early enough - it was summer, he was a teacher - to prevent it. The boys waited for watermelon season.

I'll wait for tomorrow, and another swing at the very definition of carefree: walking in the woods, eating berries, imagining the podium.