On a Mission

“The amount of good luck coming your way depends on your willingness to act.”
Barbara Sher

“Hey Honey, will you stop at Whole Foods and get four ripe avocados for tonight?” I don’t know about you, but that request takes me out of my comfort zone. The cook in our house is my wife, not me, though I do make good omelets and can handle the barbecue.

There are usually two types of avocados at Whole Foods, Haas and the other kind with the thinner, shinier skin. Choosing four that are good to go for tonight is way harder than picking up just one. If we need one, I get three, hoping that one of them will be just right.

We love avocados around our house, and with five of us they usually go pretty quickly. I can tell when they are overripe, because they have a red sticker that says, “Ready to Eat!”

I can also tell when they are nowhere near ripe, because they shine like my dress shoes and are as hard as a brand-new baseball.

Picking the right avocado by squeezing it is sort of like testing the bathwater by running your hand under the faucet. In either case, you don’t really know until you’re fully committed.

So, when I walk into Whole Foods and find the giant mound of avocados, there’s a large sign that reads, 5 for $4. I’m in luck, that gives me four good chances out of five to get the right ones. But as I sort through them, most feel like the first day of spring training in Vero Beach.

Finally, with five in my reusable shopping bag, which rarely make it out of the car, I do what I usually do with avocados in the grocery store. I look for a woman that looks like she knows what she is doing. That means she has a lot of produce in her cart. I don’t trust men in this situation, because they could have a loaded cart and have no idea what they’re doing, just like me. And anyway, there aren’t many men in the produce department. They’re mostly over in the frozen food aisle, where I spent a lot of time when single.

I see a woman with a loaded cart and green onions in hand and ask her the question. “Do you think these are good for tonight?” I try to look like I don’t know what I am doing, which isn’t hard to do in this situation. She surprises me by saying, “You flip off the belly button, and if it’s yellow inside, it’s good.” I think this can’t be true, but I do admire the creative word choice. Warming to the subject, she says she’ll look it up on her phone.

I spot the produce guy a few steps away and catch his eye and ask him the same question. He tells me that all of my avocados are good for tonight! I beam, and the aforementioned woman comes over and shows me a video on the subject. I’ll share it with you here, in case you don’t know what you’re doing in the produce aisle either.

When I get home, my wife says, “Good job, Honey, these are perfect.”
“Oh, good, just lucky I guess!”

Click here to watch a video on how to pick an avocado.