when yer twenty-two.

It was Mrs. Lockman who introduced me to the pomegranate, and it was her, my fourth grade teacher, who led me to buy a pomegranate Sunday afternoon when I saw that they were on sale. And it was also Mrs. Lockman who taught me fifty cent words like "pandemonium" and "exasperated" so I wouldn't grow up to be one of those common people who just used "chaos" and "frustrated." I do not know why Mrs. Lockman saw fit to teach these random bits of information to fourth graders, but I remember them, and I think that is reason enough for teaching them. If I were an elementary school teacher, I would share random trivia, too, like the meaning of the word "pulchritudinous," the fact that Euler was the most published mathematician in history, and that Houdini died on Halloween. I would share them for the kids who would grow into adults like me who remembered those things and thought they were pretty neat. I would share them only with the elementary school kids, before they hit puberty and started not listening to my fascinating trivia out of spite.

But though Mrs. Lockman showed me and twenty-some other ten-year-olds a pomegranate sometime back in the early 90s, she didn't let us taste it. So I decided Sunday afternoon to complete my education in the pomegranate twelve years after I started it.

I bought one, spent a whole buck-fifty on one piece of fruit and secretly hoped that I wouldn't fall in love with the pomegranate; it was an expensive lover. I brought my pomegranate home, along with some apples, which given the right season, are cheap lovers.

But once I brought home my new fruit, I was at a loss as what to do with it. In twelve years, I had forgotten what else Mrs. Lockman had taughts us about the pomegranate. So when memory fails, then Google comes through. You eat the seeds of a pomegranate, and sometimes the juice; but be careful, it stains.

So I cut my pomegranate open (holding it away from myself in case it squirted) and carefully picked out the seeds and put them in a bowl. Then I sat down and ate the seeds sans silverware, the juice staining my fingers and mouth and chin, because I grew up in a home where it was okay to dribble a little bit.

It was good, and crunchy the way popcorn is when the kernals don't quite get popped all the way. Sweet, tart, juicy. Not so fabulous that I went out and bought out the rest of the stock at the grocery store, but good enough to pick one up when it was on sale. Good enough to buy one to show to a class of fourth graders, if I had one. Maybe even good enough to cut it open and let them stain their fingers and mouths and chins with its juice before going back to teaching them about the North Carolina Outer Banks and long division and other things they won't remember learning when they're twenty-two.