Jul 27, 2018 4 min read

It’s time for another in a whole line of columns about my watermelon love, but this one’s not a happy one. Although I’ve spun out thousands of words about my favorite food, this will be the first time the sentences are full of pain and not poetry.

This is the story of mushy melon, dashed hopes and wayward seeds.

I went to the local grocery store last week to buy a watermelon.

I picked through the bin, moving the seedless melons around like they were bowling balls, and settled on a good one: dark green, rough skin and a large yellow spot on one side.

Took it home, wiped it clean and stabbed it with my best chef’s knife. My heart always jumps a bit at that part. Soon, I’d be peering down into that crispy, juicy perfection.

I found dark red mush. The melon was overripe and rotten, and was pocked with seeds, to boot. It didn’t smell right, so I wrapped it in the blue plastic grocery bag and set it aside to return to the store for a refund.

Days passed and the bad melon was still loitering there on the counter. Knowing I wouldn’t be returning it, I threw it away. (Option two would have been to toss it into the side yard for the deer but, you know, ticks.)

I returned to the store two days later, dove into the big vat of green bowling balls, picked a good one, took it home, sliced it open.

Rotten again.

This was now 10 bucks and two shopping trips worth of disappointment. How does a major supermarket chain manage to screw up two watermelons? And what were the chances I would find both of them?

I drove it back to the store right away. The young man at the customer service counter handed me my five-dollar refund and said, “We’re getting a lot of these bad ones back.”

My melon selection skills had not led me astray in a bin of otherwise perfect fruit. If I’d nabbed two rotten ones in four days, and if other melon lovers were doing the same, then the whole shipment was bad. This called for an intervention.

Store manager: Can I help you?

Beth: I think all your watermelons are rotten.

Store manager: How would you know that?

Beth: I bought two from that bin this week and both were rotten. And I know my melons.

Store manager: ??

Beth: The young man at the counter said a lot of people are bringing them back. Don’t you think you should get rid of all of them in that box? This doesn’t seem right.

I could have gone on and on, explaining how some people may have bought the melon for a picnic, cracking it open in front of hungrily waiting guests only to find the mush. And how some of those people don’t live close enough to return the bad melon to the store to get their money back, and there are other things those people could buy with five dollars, such as a couple of Powerball tickets or a box of Nutty Buddy cones.

The manager said he’d look into it, and walked away. He did not walk toward the watermelons.

I thought about standing near the bin, to warn people away. Or maybe I could amend the sign there, changing “Juicy Seedless Watermelons” to “Juicy but Rotten Seedy Watermelons,” and put a Mr. Yuk sticker on it.

I lurked in the produce section for a moment, ready to warn the next melon picker away. Nobody came. I went home without a watermelon, which doesn’t seem right.

Beth Dolinar can be reached at cootiej@aol.com.