The whole thing started out as a funny miscommunication: the kind where, when you say "Yo Jennifer," the other guy hears something like “pro janitor” or, if you say “mezzanine” he hears “Pez machine.”
So one day, when Jordan Reynolds was talking to his boy, he used the words "somewhat strange."
Back then, Jordan was produce manager of the Bellevue Piggly Wiggly. His son, who was five, loved to come to work with him. He watched his father stacking the fruit. He watched the customers pushing their carts past the produce and sometimes (oh joy!) stopping and picking items out and bagging them up for purchase. The boy had learned to identify almost all the produce in the store. Even the seasonal and specialty stuff. The artichokes for instance. Scallions. Shallots. Pomelo.
“Kumquat strange?” asked the boy. Which Jordan found very funny, especially since the boy's facial expression in that moment communicated a kind of extravagant puzzlement.
"He had this hilarious frown," Jordan says.
At first “kumquat strange” served as a consistent in-joke, a family phrase:
"We'd used it for comic relief," says Jordan. "Say after an argument. Or maybe during a traffic jam, to cheer up the situation." But then, after his boy fell from a tree and was killed, and after the subsequent break-up of Jordan’s marriage (it came only a year after the boy's loss)--after all this, Jordan Reynolds began to regard "kumquat strange" as a phrase to live by.
- He moved to an orange trailer and drove a small orange car.
- He bought a dog and he named him Quat.
- He had Quat dyed orange and trained him to respond appropriately to the command: “Come, Quat!”
- He (Jordan) meditates an hour a day, visualizing himself as a fruit on a kumquat tree and visualizing every blood cell in his body as one of the cells of that kumquat.
- He eats kumquats. Every possible day. Kumquat after kumquat.
To be sure, Jordan has experienced many obstructions and disappointments in the pursuit of his unique passion. Not once, but twice for instance, the greenhouse glass (of his backyard kumquat orangerie) has been broken by vandals. Also, just last year, his KUMQUAT vanity plate was stolen off of his car; it has not been recovered. And yes, five years ago, “Quat” the dog went lame in one leg, and eventually had to be put down.
In general though, what does he feel about his less-than-average life? Are the kumquats obtrusive? Will he ever get over them? Should he change fruits? Our conversations on these subjects have been deep and long, so I summarize his response:
First: No one should dismiss his enthusiasm for kumquats as a “stage.” Kumquats represent a continuing era in Jordan's life, an era with its own wisdom, challenges, defeats and triumphs. If he were a painter, Jordan says, kumquats would be both the subject of his work as well as the paint. In other words the means of expression and the thing expressed.
Second, to anyone who might consider his passion trivial or trite: who's to say that the kumquat (both as object and ideal) isn’t a fruit worth living for? Even dying for? Isn't every kumquat God’s handiwork too? Doesn't it amount to something like a beautiful bright letter in the greater text of life? Never never discount the importance of a single exuberant letter in that Text, Jordan Reynolds says. No matter how small it is. No matter what others say. No matter even whether it reminds you (somewhat mercilessly) of a brighter time.
HB
Until Saturday the 9th!
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