Darabi is Pomelo

“What is that?” She asked.

“That’s golden rain tree. It’s pretty, but it doesn’t do much else. Shade. Beauty.” 

“Jesus would say, ‘Wither.’” She made her hand like a wizard with a wand. “And then the tree would just die.”

It didn’t make sense to her, the way, if everything is supposed to be about love, that Jesus would go and make a tree die. Then she sat with people who knew the bible. The people said this was a metaphor. The tree is like those people who take great pains to show how spiritual they are, but offer nothing to others, the people only concerned about their own beauty, about the way they are received. 

I fall somewhere between these two poles. We all do.

I don’t know about you, but I cannot keep pants new. I cannot keep pants clean. Shirts, either. Maybe this is why people sometimes spend so much for clothes. Maybe there is something in the act of giving up that much money that transfers a responsibility I lack. I tried this. I bought Mephistos, an amazing shoe, handmade in Italy, one shoe at a time, shiny blue shoes with zippers like the Kangaroo shoes I had as a child. For awhile, I kept these clean. Careful not to let anybody step too close, walking like the dude from that Spike Lee movie. And then they became just another object that helped me to get from here to there. Nothing more.

For those who stay clean, it must be difficult to watch the way I buy a brand new pair of Levi’s and three days later pick up stones and pull biden’s alba and cut branches and wander back and forth while waiting for my love. And in these moments she comes to me with mosquitoes having bit her legs, poking her head over the fence to say, “Are you out there?”

My phone is stuck somewhere inside, the ten minutes of work turned into thirty without my knowledge. I say, “Baby, reach your hands over the fence. I got you fruit.”

“They bit me,” she says. “The mosquitoes.” She holds up her hands. I give her two fruit. She sets them on an outdoor table. I gather the ladder to bring inside so we can go for a walk. 

When we get back home I tell her this fruit came from a woman on a street named after a bird in Lakeview. This little seedling of citrus was what she called a giant lemon eight years ago, maybe even ten. That giant lemon tree has edged the corner of my yard and only once produced fruit. And here we are, this year, a thirty-foot tree with at least ten fruit.

“That’s not a lemon,” she says.

I’m disappointed. I want to give her all the fruit in the whole world. “You want to taste it or juice it?”

“A little bit,” she says. 

I cut her half a slice. “Spit the seeds into here.”

“That’s Darabi,” she says. “Reminds me of my childhood. It’s better than grapefruit. Like a cross between grapefruit and lemon. Like a sweet grapefruit”

This is where Jesus really lives, in what cannot be predicted, in a seed that dropped to the earth in Lakeview and juice on the lips of a little girl in Iran who never could have predicted that there was a redheaded boy in Iowa at that very same time who thirty years later would feed her the same thing she was eating on a street in New Orleans that nobody knows how to pronounce.