We Are Sometimes Lemons

“WHEN LIFE HANDS YOU LEMONS, MAKE LEMONADE.”

You’ve seen that overworked, trite little phrase a million times haven’t you? On bumper stickers, t-shirts, and greeting cards. Plastered on a beat-up photocopy of a photocopy with some irritating little graphic and hanging on the pockmarked tack board that is screwed to the wall in the employee break area, hung there by that overly perky office mate with the truly annoying habit of saying things like “Well, now, someone’s got a case of the Mondays!” in that murderously chirpy voice that makes you want to jam pencils in your ears, or run full speed into a brick wall if only it would make them STOPPPPPP…. Yeah, I’m on it, Chirpy McMoron, here’s a big ol’ glass of bitter and sour, just for you.

“Make lemonade”. Sounds great, ha-ha, gee whiz…but totally ignores reality. The cold, uncaring reality that is life sometimes. More precisely, this platitude ignores pain. When handed lemons, make lemonade. Pffttt. Tell that to the displaced refugee living in a camp, running away from machete-wielding thugs calling themselves an “army” protecting “the rightful government”. Begging your pardon, sir, if I give you this glass of imaginary lemonade, sir, please, could you not rape my sister? Or at least not kill my parents?

Hey, Mr. Terrorist-That-Just-Blew-Up-A-Building-And-Killed-People-Who-Didn’t-Deserve-It-And-Spread-Death-And-Misery, by some chance are you thirsty? Really, really thirsty? Are you? You look thirsty. ‘Cause as the son/daughter/father/mother/sister/brother/child of those victims, by some great fortune I have come into possession of this ginormous sack of mighty fine lookin’ lemons, straight off the tree; after I wash the blood off and dress the wounds, how’s about we share a tall cool glass of the finest lemonade on God’s green earth? Nothing better to wash down the big bolus of Pain that was just rammed down my throat. And, hey, killing innocents is thirsty work.

I remember the day I was away at college, and I received a phone call from home, my dad telling me that my beloved G-maw had finally succumbed to the nasty set of cancers that had been eating away at her for months. I remember being in shock, numb to it, not being able to cry until I was actually standing in the church gazing at her casket. The scene repeated itself a few years later, this time it was my uncle, my mother’s younger brother, who had died from HIV infection. I loved both of them dearly; both of them were relatively optimistic people, somewhat accepting of the crap that life had dealt them. They knew there was nothing they could really do to stave off the inevitable.

But at no point in the downward spiral of the awful diseases that ravaged them, took their lives in such nasty fashion, could I conceive of either of them saying “Wow, this sucks, but I think I’ll make a big glass of lemonade. I may be dying but who doesn’t love a cool summer drink?”

Job loss. Car crash. Divorce. Bankruptcy. Loss of a loved one or loved ones. Sorry, mate, not making the connection to refreshment. Ask yourself: how often in life am I the squeezer or that which is being squeezed? No, ‘squeezed’ is too mild a word. ‘Squeeze’ lacks the necessary violence that is implicit here. Crushed is better. Or flattened. Smashed. Pulverized. Words that connote extreme violence or disruption; these are the ones that offer a better fit. Too often in life we are the lemons, the poor bags of juicy pulp that get mangled by circumstance and random nastiness. The result is a rind crushed into a sheet, lifeless, bereft of juice.

A smashed rind: is that what we really want to be? I think not.

If I am going to endure tremendous pain and disruption, I don’t want to be the leavings of a crushed lemon. That would be pathetic and sad. I have to believe there is something better to be had out of all the misery. Otherwise, all the pain and suffering is for naught.

A lemon rind, no. For my pain and suffering, for being trapped between the hammer and the anvil, I expect to be something better. Something better and stronger, perhaps with strongly defined edges. A scalpel or a shield or finely crafted wrought iron gate. Like this one:

With all due respect to the Hallmark crowd, lemonade is for pussies. Gimme wrought iron, instead.