lemon squeezers

I saw that we had gotten a new lemon squeezer. Or, in fact, a lemon squeezer, since we surprisingly had never had one, given what connoisseurs we allegedly were.

That evening, my parents wanted to test it out. They halved a lemon, placed it in the squeezer, and held the handles together firmly. Juice came dripping as the two handles met. It put a smile on my father’s face.

Then, my father made the strangest suggestion: that we try it on a grapefruit. My mother asked the obvious question. My father said that he knew. He knew that a grapefruit was not a lemon, but that we could always find a way to make it work.

He suggested that we chop up the grapefruit into a certain shape so that it would fit perfectly into the lemon squeezer.

I was strangely infuriated (and excessively so) by his remark. A flow of questions came rushing into my head. Too many questions that now, writing about it, I can’t even recall them all.

Why must a grapefruit be shaped and chopped like a lemon? Is it really worth going through all this, only to use the lemon squeezer? Why not just buy a grapefruit squeezer? Do those even exist? Isn’t this the most inefficient thing for a human to have done in the 21st century? Why put in the extra and unnecessary energy into chopping a grapefruit to make it look like something smaller than half its normal size? Why reduce something to another thing that it is completely not, just so that it would fit comfortably and easily into the familiar? Why not just peel the grapefruit and squeeze the juice with our hands? Why did he have to try to use the lemon squeezer on a grapefruit? Where did he see the connection?

I refused to stand by such blasphemy, even idiocy. I walked away and into my room. My brain was telling me that this plan had to have failed, and I was shaking my head. I let out a sigh. I walked away because I didn’t want to be a part of that world. I didn’t want to be a part of the world where grapefruits are chopped up to fit into lemon squeezers because they only had lemon squeezers in the house and no grapefruit squeezers. I had to remind myself that I did not belong to that world.

I do this a lot. I walk away — into my room, where I can be in a world where there is no one who tries to use lemon squeezers on grapefruits. I feel safe in it, unviolated. That evening, I walked away from the scene, shaking my head and knowing that this brilliantly inefficient scheme would fail. But as soon as I got to my room, I knew the real reason I had to escape. I knew that I couldn’t live knowing that grapefruits could be chopped and shaped to fit into a lemon squeezer. I knew that at that moment, my entire existence depended on it.

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