Friday evening, seven o’clock, hectic times in one of Germany’s biggest organic food stores. I had just won a fight with a preppy couple in quilted jackets over the last hulled wheat bread with sesame seeds. Triumphantly, I walked on and steered my way through tons of trolleys towards the fruit stand. I caressed my precious trophy in the paper bag, and it felt good and heavy and healthy. I grabbed another bag and started to pick some insanely organic apples, when I overheard a young man explaining the differences between Belle de Boskoop, Elstar, Rubinette, Gerlinde, Gala and Shampion—yes, there is a kind of apple actually called that, according to Wiki it’s a cross-breed of Cox Orange and Golden Delicious—to his two sons who were about three and five years old. He knew a lot, that young man, he probably knew his Shampion story, too, and he reminded me of my own dad who would always tell us that the best apple was the Berner Rose, a chance seedling, and that all the new kinds were bland and too sweet and artificial. He loathed Granny Smiths and would instead buy big cartons full of domestic apples in the fall and then keep them in the cellar during winter, and we always had fresh apples, Glockenäpfel, Boskoop, Gravensteiner and Berner Rose, if he found some, because they were rare.
“And now, can we get a cheeseburger?”, said the older boy pleadingly, and I felt with him and thought of my dad again and of all his green and yellow and red apples in our cellar.
Some stories never get old.