The elusive flaming pear

I brought a pear in for lunch today because we were out of bananas. It's yellow, rather than the usual light green, with a slight pinkish blush, so it stands in well for my daily banana. I also have a woodblock print of a pear by my desk that I like having around, along with family photos, a jovial little wooden troll from Minnesota, and other visual artifacts that help make a cube a habitable space.

Not everything has found its place in my new cubicle environment, and that, like the relocation to a new office itself, will take time. The pear theme, however, stands a good chance of continuing, even when I get back to the daily banana.

My wife Gven Golly is the pear person in our household. She can be counted on to buy pears in season at the grocery store, and they're always in season somewhere, aren't they? Pears from California, pears from Argentina, pears from New Zealand, maybe even the occasional pear from - gasp - Ohio. Does anyone grow pears commercially in central Swingstate? If so, do they look as pretty under the lights in the produce aisle as the cosmetically enhanced, genetically engineered variety that's shipped as containerized cargo from some far-off trading partner? Probably not.

Today's pear is d'Anjou, and the bar-coded sticker on it says "USA/E-U" (estados unidos), which tells me it might have come from some temperate place in latinoamerica. The sticker has an image of a mountain next to a giant ladybug next to the word 'Stemitt', all of which is code for some hemispheric operation that I can only wonder about and guess at. Okay, Ladybird Johnson's family owns a division of United Fruit that grows pears on a plantation in Uruguay, and their marketing people had fun with the play on the words 'stem' and 'summit'. No?

Week 2 in the new location has now come and gone with remarkably little turbulence. The usual comparisons with the old location are inevitable, usually saying more about the speaker than the place itself. And my own cubicle microcosm has not radically altered either, with only a few images tacked on the cube walls: a randomly found poster of Bookwus Mask by Beau Dick [1992. Red cedar, paint, feathers, horsehair. 43.2 x 38 x 51 cm (17 x 15 x 20"). Northern Heritage Art Co., Ltd., Tucson, Arizona], a calendar, a department phone list, photos of my family c. 1956, 1973, 1985, and 2007, and the pear print.

When Gven and I were courting, one of our early dates was a trip to the High Museum in midtown Atlanta, where there was an Asian art exhibit that quickly got our attention. The most memorable work was a painting titled The Elusive Flaming Pear that was both beautiful and hilarious. Something about it spoke to both of us - quest for enlightenment, mystical transformation, chance encounters with the unexpected, fresh fruit - and the phrase stuck.

The one on my desk, while just a bit overripe and not exactly flaming, is still delicious with a bit of baby Swiss cheese. Bon apetit!