Grapefruit Memories

 

On Tues, today is Friday, our neighbor Bonnie, gave me a couple of grapefruit.  Perhaps that is an odd thing to wax nostalgic over, but nonetheless it brings back many memories.

My father was a big believer in the power of vitamin C to cure all ailments.  In the bathroom cabinet he kept a bottle, it was  indeed a brownish glass bottle, of chewable vitamin C tablets.  We girls; Leslie, Teresa and I, would occasionally amuse ourselves by getting them and watching each other's faces as we chewed one up.  They were not mixed with any sort of sugar or flavoring whatsoever, just tiny pills of straight whatever-it-was they used to put the actual vitamin into a tablet form. Just thinking about it makes my jaws pucker up.  Haha! The faces we would make! I believe Dad usually encouraged to do this when someone had a cold, or even thought they were coming down with something.  It was supposed to be a preventative measure as well as a curative one.

To get more natural daily vitamin C into his diet my dad also believed a grapefruit a day would do much to "cure what ails you." So my mom would buy them by the bag.  This usually happened in the evenings after supper. Of course I would eat one, or half of one, as well. 

It was a production to learn to cut them in half in the right direction in order to be able to scoop the sections out of their little pockets. I am not sure exactly how old I was, but I remember the excitement when Dad learned there were spoons made expressly for eating grapefruit.  They had little roughened, narrowed tips to the spoons! This revolutionized our grapefruit eating.  Ha!

Another grapefruit eating ritual I remember was squeezing all the juice out into the spoon after you'd eaten all the sections.  You fold the halves up and squeeze really hard.  My dad could always get more juice than I could when I was a kid.

In the picture above is one of the exact spoons that so revolutionized our grapefruit experience when I was a kid. I think it's the only one I have kept for lo all of these years. 

It is amazing how the simple giving of a extra fruit can trigger so many good memories.  Never underestimate the good you can do with the giving of the simplest of gifts.