Things Get Worse

Somebody brought some fruit to work to share with our group, and we didn't recognize it right off. It turned out to be litchi (lychee), and one of the guys tried it and thought the texture (after peeling it) was something like flesh would be, with the skin and some underlying tissue. So naturally, he encouraged me to try it and see if I thought it was creepy too.

I tried it, but found the texture to be more like I imagined an eyeball to be, rather than flesh, since tissue-attached skin seems less firm than the litchi. It wouldn't have been that much of a creep-fest, if he hadn't planted his images in my mind.

But that doesn't change anything about litchi, because I've had it before at Chinese restaurants. They serve canned litchi as a dessert, and I remember the texture (not the taste) being more like canned pears. The taste starts out sweet with the first bite, but every bite after that is less and less sweet, and pretty soon, I can't eat it anymore.

There are other things in life that have that same effect on me. They become worse and worse the more I partake.

When I was in my early twenties and my husband and I went on our pre-children bicycle trip to Europe, we mostly stayed in campgrounds to help conserve our money. There was one place in France (can't remember where--it wasn't a big tourist spot) where the campground was full of tiny travel trailers, but the place was deserted. We got our tent set up and went into town to buy dinner and breakfast.

When we got back to camp, the place was full of men in the trailers. One of them struck up a conversation with us (my French was fairly fluent at the time), and he said they were a group of itinerant butchers. They'd work there in that town for a few months, then they would be headed for the south coast of France, then the Netherlands, then Ireland, and then it would be two years from the time of our conversation, and he'd go on vacation to America.

He really liked talking to us, and all the other men just looked on and listened. After a short time, our new friend pulled out a bottle of Suze (scroll down), a golden-colored liqueur, to share with us. He poured us each a healthy sample, and I tasted it. Sweet, with an interesting undertone that I couldn't identify. I liked it.

My next sip wasn't as good. Sweet, but that undertone was more forceful. After a few sips, the sweetness was gone and all that was left was a bitterness that I couldn't choke down if I wanted to. I stopped drinking it, and in the years since then, I've issued general warnings to people to beware of the stuff if they ever came across it.

My earliest experience with the getting-worse phenomenon was when I was a kid, about 10, and we used to go to the swimming pool on the Navy base, because my mom didn't like taking us to the beach where we would get sand all over everything. The pool at the Navy base was olympic-size and had both a regular diving board and a high diving board (no platforms). All the kids would test their courage on the high dive, and I was no exception.

On the low dive, there's practically no time between jumping (I didn't dive) off the board and landing in the water. From the high dive, seconds would pass. The first jump was scary and exhilarating, and I'd hurry back to the ladder for more. But the next jump took longer before I hit the water. Each successive jump stretched out the air time, until finally I couldn't do it anymore, and I had to go back to the low dive for a while.

When the low dive started feeling too tame, I'd head back to the high dive for another round of longer and longer jumps. It never stopped being that way.

Litchi. Suze. The high dive.

Some things get worse, and there's no explaining it or changing it.