Mango

I had an extraordinary mango recently. It was perfectly ripe, juicy and flavorable. I came to me in rather a roundabout way.

First, we don't buy mangos (mangoes?) as Susan isn't fond of them, and I certainly don't crave them. When visiting my dad and step-mother in Ivory Coast 10 years ago, sliced mango was offered after every meal. They are everywhere in the Ivory Coast. Susan just didn't take to them. I was more partial to the other offering, paypaya. It was less perfumey and milder.

On Friday morning, around 8:30, I heard a wailing outside our house. I looked outside and thought I could see a neighbor, an elderly Indian woman, confused and crying in the street. She was walking to the front of the house, so I retrieved my eyeglasses and opened the blinds and asked Susan to confirm that this was our neighbor. Our next door neighbor, hearing the noise, had already stepped outside to investigate. By the time I threw on some clothes, Kristin had already called the police to report what turned out to be a mugging.

Our elderly neighbor, Bibi, walking back from a shop, had been pushed down to the street and her purse taken from her. She had bruised knees and shoulders and was obviously in shock.

The police soon arrived. We got Bibi some water. Bibi's English is not so good, and the police officer, frankly, could have been more patient; I'm glad we and Kristin were there.

Bibi's two sons live on the other side of the country, and so with no spare key, I had to break into Bibi's house and open her door to let her in.

We three sat with her for a while, and she offered us each a mango by way of thanks. She seemed to be out of her shock, and had realized that while this awful event had occured, she was going to be fine.

While I'll gladly have foregone the mango for this not to have happened, it sure taught me that a good mango can be great. Remembering my time in Africa, I squeezed a little lime juice on it and that tempered the sweetness and brought the flavor around.

Mangoes are hard to eat, as they have a large, oblong pit. After I peeled it and ran my knife around it like lines of longitude and latitiude and did my best to cut the resulting chunks off the pit and onto the plate. It looked like hell but tasted delicious.

This morning I whizzed my other mango with some yogurt, OJ and squeeze of lime. What we'd call a smoothie the Indians would call a lhassee. It too was delicious.