My love affair with the pomelo

I have this fear that I make up memories for myself, that the things I remember are amplified versions of what really happened. I remember my entire family riding on my father's motorcycle. At the time that was my father, my mother, my two older sisters and myself. My father died when I was two years old. I don't remember what he looks like. My mother has pictures of him but in my memories he is a body with no head or a body with surroundings but a hole where his head should be just like the pictures in the albums I use to flip through when I was younger. Some village old wife had cut his head out of all the pictures in order to keep him from haunting us so that there was a hole everywhere his head should be. So in my motorcycle memory all five of us are on this light blue motorcycle with my father at the helm. Behind him sat my mother and behind her were my sisters. I sat on the handle bars but that doesn't even seem possible to me so I must have been on his lap. I remember feeling the vibration and the bumping and I remember laughing. Over the years I convinced myself that I'm wee bit nuts and that I was probably too young to make memories then. I went to the Philippines when I was 20 and I asked around and his brothers and sisters remembered that bike and my mom remembered us all riding on it. I'm glad that memory is true. It's the only one I have of him.

I remember this gigantic fruit that use to fall from a massive tree, the kind they use to make you write essays about in SAT's, near the school-house where my mother taught. I remember that they were so big I could barely pick them up. When I did manage to get them I remember that for a long time I wasn't strong enough peel the rind to get to the sweet pink center because the skin was too tough for me to break. I've described them to people as basketball size grapefruits, only sweeter. About 5 years ago the local super-market started stocking pomelos.

They looked vaguely familiar. Like an oversized grapefruit but certainly no basketball. After I got through the rind and heard the crack as a opened it in half, I knew. This was it or a version of it anyway. This was my chimera, my basketball fruit. When I take the first bite of every pomelo I remember the Philippines. I remember the mugginess when a storm is just a drop of moisture away. I remember catching beetles, tying string to one of their legs, keeping them in match boxes and letting them out to fight somebody else's beetle. I remember that massive fruit tree and having to be careful when standing under it when the fruit was ripe because they'd been known to knock you down if they hit you just right when they fell from their own weight. I remember the motorcycle rides with the man with a hole where his head should be.