KILLER HOBBIES

I love watermelon – but not twenty-first-century watermelon.  The current variety, the seedless – also seems to be increasingly tasteless.  I bought one on my grocery shopping trip yesterday.  I looked for the seeded kind but the only variety offered anywhere was the seedless.  I wish I hadn’t bought it.  There’s a curious taste to it, reminiscent of a noxious weed, and it was not at all sweet.  I am going to see if I can find a throwback farmer somewhere who grows the old-fashioned kind.  Yes, yes, I will spit slick black seeds in a steady stream, but the taste of the sweet red fruit those seeds come packed in is a hymn to summer.

The mottled-red geranium I bought last year that was advertised to tumble artlessly over the sides of the pot didn’t.  Or didn’t tumble far.  And in fact one main stem grew stubbornly upright.  But the blooms were very pretty and it looked so healthy in the fall I brought it into the apartment and kept it over winter.  In very early spring it resumed blooming – and collapsed until its stems were draped downward onto the table, leaving bare black soil on top with a couple of lines of naked stem along one edge.  I brought it back outside and hung it on a pole, where it continues to reach for the floor, and I planted a deep red dianthus to cover the bare soil.  And now the naked stems of the geranium are producing tiny leaves.  I’m not sure if they will sprout upward or follow their older brothers in the massive green waterfall over the edge.

Tomorrow evening the Calling Committee of my church will get its first chance at a phone interview of one of the candidates for Rector.  There are so many ways this can go well and almost an equal number of ways it can go badly that I can barely wait for it to be over so we can discuss it.  Our seven-member committee is a wide and marvelous mix of talents and skills, one thing it won’t be is unproductive.  This is such an important task for a church to undertake that I’m surprised to find myself among the members of the Committee.  I’m more known for my hats than my theology.