I was at the grocery store this morning when I
suddenly heard, “Sir! Sir!” A man with a green apron
was running towards me, yelling, waving something
threatening in his hand.

“Sir, you can’t do that. You have to stop now! Or I’m
going to have to ask you to leave,” he said. “You
should know you can’t do that!”

I could see what was in his raised hand. It was a
banana. The stem end pointing toward me. I
imagined what a dry brown banana stem could do to me.

“Drop them NOW!” he said. And I did. I heard them
drop, one after the other. Thump, then thud.

“Sir, I saw what you were doing, and that is not
allowed.”

“What?” I said.

“You were comparing Apples and Oranges, you know you
can’t do that. I am the Produce Manager, and it is my
job to make sure you don’t compare Apples and Oranges.
You know that is not possible.”

I looked on the ground, and saw the apple and the
orange I had been holding, one in each hand.

“But why not?” I asked, “I mean just look at them, one
is round like many things and the other is a unique
distinctive shape.”

“Sir, Leave Now! You can’t compare Apples and Oranges.
Everyone knows that.”

I asked him to please drop his banana, which he did,
right in-between the apple and the orange.

“But why?” I asked. “I mean, one is crunchy and the
other juicy, one is in sections and the other is in
one piec…”, he stopped me, held his hand up as though
he was trying to stop a locomotive.

“What goes up, must come down,” he said, taking a
penny out of his pocket and continued talking, “And
you can’t compare Apples and Oranges.”

He threw the penny up into the air to demonstrate. It landed on one
of the flourscent lights above the grapefruits. And it stayed there.

With one hand gloved, and the other bare, he pushed me
hard, and I was stumbling.

“You see” he yelled “You’ve ruined EVERYTHING!”

I stumbled onto the banana, and it opened and the
banana shot out like a missile, lodging itself in the
Produce Manager’s underarm. I slipped on the banana skin
and flew into the air, was headed head-first towards
the ground, when I saw that if I put my hands out, one
would land on the red apple, one on the orange orange.

By this time, the Store Manager had come over, and was
yelling at the Produce Manager. “I told you to keep a
banana in your FRONT pocket if you want to do that
joke, you idiot!”

The Store Manager stopped himself, as though he was
thinking about what he just said. Then he put his arm
around the Produce Manager, and they whispered.

“You’ve ruined EVERYTHING”, they said in unison.

I landed gently, one hand firmly in the grasp of the
stable apple, and the other hand balancing on the
rolling orange. I quickly did a half-flip, landed on
my feet, took a look at my right hand and had a nice
big bite of the apple, then took a look at my left
hand, and said:

“Wait a minute, you have to peel an orange, but not an
apple.”