Ode To Fruit Cocktail
(With apologies to all the manufacturers out there.)
Dad loved fruit cocktail. I hated it.
That should end this essay. There's more. In fact, this story is more like a fruit cocktail of words, with a connection to the business world improbably dangling from its rear. Let’s go.
If you're unfamiliar with fruit cocktail, let me enlighten you. In the world of canned fruits, there are canned peaches and canned pears. You can get canned pineapple. (1) And there's one can that combines a bunch of fruit under one metal roof. That's fruit cocktail.
I grew up in a home where canned fruit was the dessert at every meal. If my Italian grandfather hadn't planted fruit trees in our backyard, I might have grown up thinking that fruit existed only in cans. As it was, we didn't do too much with all that fresh fruit, if you can believe it. Mom got some apples from the apple tree. When I was a teenager, I harvested beautiful cherries from the cherry tree. There was a perpetually ill peach tree that yielded little more than sap from a running wound on its bark, as well as a pear tree, the runt of the litter, dwarfed by everything else, pretending to grow in the far corner of the yard, and only providing, as best I can remember, leaves for raking. In the other corner, the plum tree, supplier of mushy purple ammunition for the Great Fruit Wars we neighborhood kids fought in the backyard. No way could my mom (or any of the other kids' moms) get those purple stains out of our clothes. (2)
The reason we didn't eat fresh fruit was because Dad said he could only eat canned fruit. Fresh fruit gave him "trouble." I had to live another thirty or forty years before I would understand what "trouble" was.
Because of Dad's "trouble," every night one of us three kids would fetch a can of fruit from the low cupboard by the sink. In Dad's mind, canned fruit would tie a pleasant bow on supper.
I realize that lots of people call this meal "dinner." We didn't. We ate supper at the Supper Table in the kitchen. The Supper Table was one of those chrome-legged beasts topped with an indescribable, ultra smooth and indestructible surface that was far harder than quartz, granite, or any other exotic material in use today. Miraculously, it had a pattern injected into its surface. I think they stopped making these table tops because they needed the material to line the heat shields for the Apollo missions. The Supper Table was ringed by red-backed steel chairs. The red backing was made out of some kind of tough but bendable substance, vinyl I suppose, fastened to the steel frame using light artillery. This was life just after World War II, you realize. Kids today have no idea what they're missing.
The Dinner Table lived, aptly, in the dining room, where people "dined" instead of merely scarfing down supper. It was generally used for anything but dinner. Papers, books, and family errata randomly littered its surface. It might have even hosted (and survived) Dad doing income taxes on it. It shared the room with a built-in birch breakfront that reached almost to the ceiling. In the six inches or so that remained betwixt breakfront top and ceiling, Mom vainly tried to hide the Halloween candy from a marauding Dad. Dad defied the laws of physics by creating a hole in the bag protecting his prize (Milky Way bars - back when the space race was a thing and we named everything from candy to cars after outer space stuff), from which tiny hole he could extract candy bars bigger than the hole's diameter. Mom could never figure out how the bars went missing. Octopi had nothing on Dad (3).
We often don't recognize, much less appreciate, the tiny miracles routinely performed in our families.
The Dinner Table's legs rested on a rug that in my pre-teen years I thought was some indeterminate pale pinkish color, with a strange pattern in it that reminded me of older ladies' perms. I later learned the perms were actually roses, but the subtlety escaped me. One spot, near a corner of the Halloween candy breakfront, sported a smudge I took for granted. Carpets get stains, after all, and kids don't really care. Only later did I learn that, when this beautiful rose-patterned carpet had been freshly installed, my brother (likely a toddler at the time) knocked a bottle of India ink from the breakfront counter to the carpet, where it created an admirable, inky mess. When Dad came home from work that day and saw what had happened, Mom later told us that he just shook. His self-control was admirable. My brother lived.
I think this. After numerous attempts at "Out, damned spot!" (4), Mom and Dad realized they had a patch of rug that was now much lighter than its surroundings, after which, somehow, they'd managed to convince someone to bleach the rest of the carpet to match the area surrounding the now much lighter stain. Hence, the pale color and the ladies' perms. I can't prove this. It seems impossible. But I refer you to Dad and the Milky Way bars above. Plus, I've done enough woodworking and amateur carpentry around my home to recognize an attempt to correct a previous attempt to cover a mistake made masking an original mistake that really should have been left alone.
Oh, sorry. Back to the Supper Table. Back to fruit cocktail.
Picking out fruit after supper was a task that usually fell to me. This, by the way, is how Dad taught me about democracy and voter's rights. As in, we didn't have any. One night after supper, he said to me, "Pick out some fruit for dessert. You can have anything you want, as long as it's free-stone peaches." Thanks for the freedom of choice, Dad.
But the worst -- the absolute worst -- was when Dad told me to get a can of fruit cocktail. Dad thought this was the best stuff. I thought the grapes looked like boiled eyeballs. The pear and peach chunks were OK, and I was too young to realize that fruit cocktail was what industrial fruit processors made when they had fruit that needed eviscerating to remove rotten or wormy parts, reducing the edible remains to small bits, which inevitably retained little shards of pit that jolted your teeth if you encountered them. My favorite fruits were the Maraschino cherries, which looked great and tasted wonderful and doubtless had been injected with enough sugar and red dye that, if left outside and unprotected, would first attract and then eradicate entire rodent populations.
Dad would say, "Get some fruit cocktail!" I'd say, "Sure, Dad," while inside I was politely responding with "AAAIIEEE!!!!"
I'd get out that horrid can and our ancient, hand-cranking can opener -- an invention that hasn't seemed to change in about a thousand years -- and grind away at the can. Can openers are how you get part of your RDA of iron, or galvanized steel, possibly, in the form of miniscule shavings that peel off from the edges of the can and drop into whatever's inside. To avoid this, today we have pull tabs, first used so you couldn't clandestinely open a can of beer (SCHPLORP!), but now used on everything from soups to sardines. This is an improvement, I guess, though I routinely collect a bunch of these tabbed beauties and take them to the local zoo to get a gorilla to open them for me. I think the strong nuclear force (5) binds them shut.
Once the can was open, I divvied up the portions, making sure my brother got the boiled eyeballs.
Fruit cocktail. Sigh.
I became a dad, and then a grand-dad. The older I got, the more I came to appreciate this stuff. I won't serve it, mind you. I certainly won't inflict it on my grandkids. They need to grow up safe from things like this. At some point in the distant future, they may come to appreciate it.
OK.
Having been through a nearly fifty-year career, I can assert that humble fruit cocktail has a relationship to what we encounter in the business world. (Oh, stop rolling your eyes. It does.)
Think about it. Most canned fruit is just one variety. Peaches. Pears. Pineapples.
Only fruit cocktail brings everything together.
That's the business world.
Go to a typical business meeting, and you'll encounter relatively bland peaches and pears, grapes (those boiled eyeballs), and preening, sweet-tasting Maraschino cherries. But you know what? You need all of them. All the flavors get represented here. They all contribute to the syrup, the magic that results when a business recognizes (a) that its people are not costs, but investments, and (b) that the whole of the various flavors interacting together is greater than the individual sums of the parts. It's why we have DEI. It's why we bring people of different backgrounds, colors, persuasions, faiths, genders, and perspectives together. Our markets are not homogeneous. Our customers are varied. If we're truly to serve customers, providing them with products and services they want and value, then why wouldn't we want them all represented on our teams?
Of course, fruit cocktail can yield some pretty funny observations. As in, "What Maraschino cherry dreamed this up?" Or "This has all the vision of a boiled eyeball."
Nonetheless, we'd do well to remember that we grow into fruit cocktail. As kids, we might hate it. As adults, we might appreciate that all our human flavors are represented -- and valued. Businesses comprise fruit cocktails of teams. Best we mature into being able to appreciate them and let them lead us to great results. As leaders, the burden's ours, not theirs.
I'm going to get a gorilla to pop open a can of fruit cocktail. How about you?
A FRUIT COCKTAIL OF FUN FOOTNOTES
(1) Actually, you can get canned anything, even farts. Though what canning process is followed here (water bath or pressure), I have no idea. And I'm not giving you a link to canned farts. Go find it yourself, if you're that puerile.
(2) Sorry, this was the 50's and 60's. Moms did this stuff back then. The only other purple memory I have is from my teen years, when I really should have keeled over from diabetes. I mean, my neighbor Phil and I would routinely drink gallons of Orange Crush. One time, we overdid it with Grape Crush, and a certain biological solid of mine emerged sometime later as, well, purplish. You laugh when you're teenager. If it happens some fifty years later, you panic and get tested for all kinds of things.
(3) Go watch an octopus slide through a tube that seems way smaller than its diameter. I don't know how they do it, either.
(4) Lady Macbeth. Read Shakespeare. That's a far better use of your precious time than reading footnotes like these.
(5) OK, I'm no physicist, but here goes. The Strong Nuclear Force is what keeps atomic particles together. You need one of those gigantic, multi-mile physics labs that generate about a zillion volts of energy. The energy gets squeezed like a nuclear camel through the eye of a laser needle (sorry, Biblical - look it up). Guys who make far too much money and whose brains operate differently from the rest of us aim all this energy at an atom, to get it to split up. It sometimes works. Me, I just liked mixing funny chemicals from my kid's chemistry set to see what color I could make water turn. It's a wonder I didn't blow myself up. For Strong Force (and zeptoseconds, of all things), see https://www.livescience.com/48575-strong-force.html
