This is just to say I bought four plums at Albertsons last night. And some yogurt. The yogurt is not relevant to this post, except to say that it contains no animal fat. I do, but enough about that.

Four plums. And they looked pretty good, so I took a picture of them. It’s lucky that I did, because now there are only three.

The one that I ate wasn’t as good as a plum ought to be, which brings me to the point: quality. That essence of a thing which makes the perceiver of it aware of himself with respect to it. Or something like that. I’m paraphrasing a very old memory of reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. It’s like art; I don’t know what it is, but I know it when it makes me sentient.

I have a memory of a tub of cool water, and plums floating in the water. It was on the screen porch of my grandparents’ old farmhouse in McFarland. I don’t know how old I was, but I was a little kid. And I can remember the taste of those plums, at once sweet and tart. They tasted like summer, like the rich soil of the San Joaquin.

The plum I ate today was a lot more like wax. Still it holds the power of memory. It took me back almost 40 years to a hot summer day in the country. I remember countless feral cats moving in the shadows around the old barn, the ground covered with with the split husks of black walnuts. I remember Papa’s chair in the living room, and on the table beside it, Readers’ Digest and novels by Louis L’Amour.

This Is Just To Say

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

— William Carlos Williams