Chapter Thirty: Peaches – Good or Bad? You Decide.

I wish I could undo some of the things that I have done wrong in my life. I killed a hobo with a bicycle spoke, spent some time in juvie on miscellaneous drug offenses, and this story is another one. At ten years old, our family lived in the Fisher Housing Projects in Detroit, Michigan. Yes, we were all ten years old. Every one of us. By today’s standards I guess you would call us poor.

On my way home from school one day, I took a different route through the neighborhoods. I stopped by a fenced-in yard that had a small peach tree standing in the middle. As I was looking through the fence there were about 15 large yellow and red peaches hanging from the tree and there were two lying on the ground underneath the tree. I stood there for quite some time admiring those peaches. Detroit peaches, the sweetest and juiciest that nature provides.

I began to think that the two on the ground would start to rot if they stayed there, and were probably starting to rot even now. I thought about how good it would taste to eat those two rotten peaches. So I hopped the fence. I sat down under the tree and enjoyed the sweetest, juiciest peaches I’ve ever had in my life. After I had eaten the two peaches that were actually not rotten, I thought that if I took some off the tree they wouldn’t miss them as well, so I stuffed five, six, seventeen peaches into my jacket, and I went home.

I suppose most people think as I do: if you have a good excuse for doing something, it is ok.