Truck Stop 2: Twenty-One Seeds
The young man from “Truck Stop,” whose image erased my traveler’s fatigue and existential gloom, faded over time, and I am left to face the morning newspaper headlines with only my own resources for solace. This morning, before coffee, I mistakenly skim the front page of my beloved New York Times, and all that is wrong with the world once again fills my brain: “China Kept World in Dark as Outbreak Rippled,” “First Tainted, Then Set Free By the Senate.” Threats of pandemic and autocracy are too much to face before coffee and threaten to cause the twins of rage and despair to erupt. But now is not a time to respond to the evil twins with a plan for political action. So I tuck the headlines into a side pocket of my brain and turn to breakfast.
Time is short this morning, so I turn to the quickest possible choice, boxed cereal. Then I discover that the wrong kind of breakfast cereal somehow found its way into the cabinet—sugar-coated to the tune of 17 percent of the RDA. Now I can add crankiness to rage and despair. If I can’t offer a plan of resistance to the evils of the world just yet, at least I can mount a resistance to the sugary breakfast cereal lurking in my cabinet.
With stubborn determination, I turn to the refrigerator. There I find an orange, a lovely, fresh orange from my friend Doreen’s orange tree. As I eat it, I notice that each segment has two seeds. Why two? Why not just one? Distracted from my crankiness, I eat on. Two more seeds in each segment, until the last. Then three! Twenty-one seeds altogether in this very small orange. Such profligacy, such energy! It must be a remarkable tree, indeed. Somehow this thought cheers me.
I ask Doreen about her tree. She tells me that, as a child, when she and her parents came to the U. S. from Taiwan, they planted an orange seed in a pot. It sprouted. They put the little plant into a larger pot, and each time they moved, the increasingly larger pots went with them. When they came to Houston, the plant, now a small tree, went into the ground. This year it produced so many oranges that Doreen had bags of them to give away. Thus, some ended up in my fridge, and one on my breakfast plate this morning.
I shall plant one of its twenty-one seeds in a pot and see what happens. With any luck, Doreen’s tree will have progeny thatperhaps cheer some person at breakfast in a future world. And if there are still any newspapers, perhaps they will have happier headlines. If not, maybe some cranky person will eat an orange, and its twenty-one seeds will remind her that life can be stronger and more mysterious than we know. Maybe it will remind her also that faith in the future is the foundation of action. Maybe it will help her make a plan to counter rage and despair, a plan of hope.
