In the dying moments of August Kate and I went to New York City for a wedding. It was a really super great wedding. It featured Clive, whom you know and love as a prolific producer of Top Quality Content, and it also featured Emily, whom you also know and love as a prolific producer of top quality content, provided you read New York magazine, which you do, on account of it is mostly pretty good.

When Kate and I were in New York, we went to a place called The East Village. The East Village is where people live when they are super into staying up late and eating duck magret and buying obscure Polish beer at 3:00am but not at all into charcoal or propane or propane accessories or, indeed, grilled meat in general.

In the East Village convenience stores are called "bodegas." They are a lot like the "depanneurs" of Montreal, except that they offer more varieties of ice cream and fewer varieties of du Maurier cigarettes.

In one East Village bodega, we stopped to buy an emergency 2:00am tin of beer from Germany. What a relief, we said to each other.

Can you guess what else this bodega had for sale, in August?

No, you cannot.

OK, I will tell you.

This bodega in the East Village was selling pomegranates. Fresh ones. Plump lovely firm red pomegranates. In August.

"Spirit of ass," I said to Kate and the assembled throng. "How did a random NY convenience store manage to find fresh pomegranates in August? It is unbelievable."

"You are boring," said Kate. "Please stop talking about pomegranates."

"OK," I said.

Afterward, I was still troubled. I am the sort of person who makes regular telephone calls to exotic-fruit wholesalers, trying to score the first pomegranates of autumn. How could a convenience store have beaten me so soundly at my own game?

A week after we left New York and returned to The Centre Of The Universe, I was shopping for fruit at the little fruit store near our house. It is a friendly store and its fruit is cheap, and it would be perfect if only it weren't for the "Conditional Pass" sign the public health department keeps posting in its window. Most of the time we remember to wash the fruit.

So there I was, scant days after our visit to Clive & Emily's wedding and the Amazing Bodega Of Pomegranates. I was sulking, because our fruit store did not sell obscure Polish beer, and it did not have pomegranates in the summertime, and it kept forgetting to keep its pest-control measures and its hand-washing facilities up to date.

Then.

In a flash of light and excitement, I saw the sign.

"Pomgreates," it said.

"Wicked hot fiery excellence!" I said.

"Boo-yaaah, New Yorkers!" I said.

"Your precious bodegas aren't so hot now, are they?" I said.

"Unless you are shopping for Żywiec at 3:00am!" I said.

"OK, your precious bogedas are still pretty good!" I said.

"Um, fuck you!" I said.

"You want something or did you just come in here to yell at the pomegranates?" said the proprietor.

I bought 16 of them. I squeezed out their ruby nectar. I made many, many Persian Tarts.

They were tasty.

I liked them.

The moral of the story? It is now pomegranate season. Also, there was a beautiful meadow.

Posted by Bret at 11:27 PM | Comments (3)