Tricks

 Today I’m having an allergic reaction. I think it’s to the mango my friend brought for dessert Saturday night, which was when all the itching started. It was delicious, and this hardly seems fair, because I’ve eaten enough mangos in my life to fill a barn. No kidding. When I was growing up in a small town in Honduras called Olanchito, my friends Rina, and Eva, and Norma, and Angie and I would spend our entire afternoons, once school was out—public school for them, and homeschool for us—hunting and gathering fruit. Mostly mangos, though ovos, and nances, and yuyugas, and guayabas were acceptable as well. It appeared to be our job as neighborhood children to wander like herds of pets from back yard to back yard, climbing trees, shaking them, or poking them with long sticks to coax the fruit down. We gobbled up anything we found, never storing it but eating it all, right there, in whatever stage of greenness or ripeness it fell into our hands, with no thought for tomorrow. 

Even in junior high, when I should have outgrown this habit, I

remember visiting at my friend Pati’s house and seeing, from the second-story window of her kitchen, those luscious, green Haden mangos, tempting us from the enormous trees in her back yard. I think we used the stick-poking method, because even the bottom limbs were way out of reach, and eventually we (was this all my idea? I don’t remember) managed to get one down and whisk it back upstairs to the kitchen. Haden mangos are the ones the size of rabbits that turn bright red and yellow outside and deep orange inside, and are worth every bit of string between your teeth to finish. And when they are green, they are purple on the outside but pure white on the inside, and the seed is a smooth, pure white, soft bean too bitter to eat (believe me, I tried), but that you can pop out with your thumb, and the green skin tastes just like the meat, so you don’t even have to peel it, but you cut the whole thing up on a plate and douse it with salt, ground cumin, and vinegar.  Ah. The thing sets my teeth on edge just to think of it, but I remember devouring the prize in ecstasy. To this day my kids tease me because I can’t pass a fruit stand without wanting to stop. My hunting, gathering instincts run deep.

So now to be banished from the world of mangos by a lousy chemo regime seems unfair. I’ve joined the ranks of people who shun food by necessity, who have lists of forbidden meats, or grains, or products, or fruits, as the case may be. I’m hoping my restriction is temporary, that the ban will be lifted when my hair grows back, but who knows. Mangos are in the family of poison oak, and many people, including my mother, sister, and son, suffer allergies from them (especially when they are green and oozing a milky white sap), so my body might consider one barnfull enough.

Isn’t it strange how you can put something good into your mouth and find out a few hours later it was poison? And it had never been poison before? Your body has changed its mind, not you, and the food hasn’t shifted any ingredients, but suddenly you’ve made a mistake you didn’t know was possible: you’ve ingested an allergen. It’s those unintended consequences. There’s just so much we don’t know out there. None of us need convincing that we’re not perfect when it comes to our behavior, but sometimes it’s so much harder to convince us our minds are not perfect, either, that they can miss the difference between goodness and poison, make damaging  judgments and assumptions.

It is the nature of the brain to justify itself and think its knowledge is whole and sound. Malcolm Gladwell describes in Blink how we make snap decisions based on emotion, and then our slower, rational brains catch up and slap logical explanations onto our emotion-guided behavior. We’ve all watched human brains come up with justifications for just about any behavior there is, good or evil. Not that I don’t hold out for free will. I do. It’s just that I also hold out that we are no more guaranteed perfect thinking than we are guaranteed perfect behavior. We are farther off on both counts than any of us realize or wish for a helpful spouse to point out. Saying we are wrong in our actions is one thing, but admitting we are wrong in our judgments is worse.

So who knows what my body is doing under the influence of this wretched chemo regime. It makes me pant going up stairs. It makes my eyes twitch shut when I’m awake. It forces naps and deadens senses. It gives me allergies to the world’s best fruit—or does it? And if bodies can fail, and brains, then what? Maybe this will remind me to make lighter judgments and take comfort that there are things beyond logic: like love of husband, child, friend, God.  Maybe there is assurance when the body plays such tricks.