There are days when each seconds passes by like a brick to your head. You feel each one deeply, deep beneath the skin and it crawls all over you before making way for the next approaching second. The seconds click through an old fashioned clock with a thud and no matter what you preoccupy yourself with, they continue to drone and thud too slowly. In an office, these days are all too common. The days where a surprise passage of time in the positive direction happens are rare. All too often, the clock skirts back on minutes when you’re not watching closely enough.
One day at work, as I was trying to kill time by seeing how far I could shoot a staple out of the stapler, the office mail guy came to my desk with a giant smile on his face. “Got a package for you,” he said as he pushed an object towards me that looked like a petrified football. Within a second or two of examining it, I determined my original assment wasn’t far off. In my hands I held a coconut with a mailing label slapped on it.
“I bet you didn’t know they could send ‘em like that,” the mail guy said.
No, I thought, I didn’t know you could send ‘em like that. I didn’t know boxes and envelopes were superfluous and that objects only needed a mailing label and correct postage to be shipped around the country. I’m sure I would have figured this out eventually if I was in the business of shipping coconuts or had a desire to find out how little was required to get one object from place to place, but I wasn’t. At no point in my life had I seen a ranom object on the ground and thought, ‘I bet I could get that to Missouri with the simple application of postage.’
Thankfully, my father does see things such as coconuts as objects longing for postage. While on a trip to Puerto Rico, my father felt compelled to send me something as a way to say, ‘thinking of you.’ He had scoffed at the souvenir shops and the handcrafted mementos because of one rule my father has always lived by: exchanging money for an object makes it worthless. Paying for four snow tires was a complete waste of money, but if he found one floating in a lake you’d better believe that he’d grab it and hope to find three more in a similar fashion. Likewise, when he searched for the perfect gift for me, he couldn’t help but be attracted to a coconut that had fallen from a tree.
“Well, are you going to open it?” the mail guy asked, as if opening a coconut was as easy as finding the “tear here” tab. I informed him that, basically, the only way to open a coconut was to hack the outer shell with a machete, rip out the hard inside and crack it with some sort of hammer. He didn’t seem to believe me and suggested I try stepping on it. Later in the day, other people came by my desk to offer their suggestions on how to open it.
“Throw it against the wall,” said my co-worker Michelle. When I told her a coconut lodged in the wall might be difficult to explain, she grabbed it started to bang it on my desk.
“Stab it!” said another co-worker. I looked around my desk. My “stabbing” options were limited to a stapler and a three hole punch. “You sure you’re not thinking of an egg?” I asked her.
“Drop it out of the window,” suggested the receptionist. While her idea made sense—a five story fall would crack the coconut – I aimed to avoid anything that might put me on the cover of the Post as “The Coconut Killer!”
After an hour or two, I thought I had heard the worst of the ideas, but the person sitting in an adjacent cube waited till no one else was around and whispered, “Just stick a straw in it.”
“Sorry,” I said, “real life isn’t a cartoon.” My co-worker snorted, as if I were the one completely disreagarding physics.
Later in the day, Michelle came back to my desk to hold the coconut. “I just feel compelled to hold it,” she said. She rotated it slowly, as if she were hoping to find a place she could start to peel it like an orange. “Did you know this coconut was from Vermont?” she asked. I looked at the mailing label and discovered, that, yes, the coconut had been sent from Vermont, not Puerto Rico as I had originally thought.
“Why did you think this is from Puerto Rico,” Michelle asked. “It clearly says it was shipped from Vermont.” Before ruining Michelle’s belief that Vermont is the type of place where coconuts originate from, I reached for the phone to call my dad.
My dad confirmed that yes, while the coconut was from Puerto Rico, it had been shipped from Vermont. Oh, and it was almost certainly illegal to do so. Somehow the security officer at the airport saw no reason to search my father’s bag when he told them it contained prohibited items such as, “two coconuts, a half dozen limes, some oranges, a couple tomatoes and some lemongrass root.”
“Those laws are just in place to find out who is a liar and who tells the truth,” my father said.
I mentioned to my dad that while I appreciated the sentiment behind him shipping a coconut to me, I wasn’t going to be able to open it and would probably just throw it out after a few days. “I figured you wouldn’t be able to open that thing,” he said. To me, a coconut he knew I was too lazy or weak to open hurt as much as if he had sent me a bag of dog poo with a card in it that said, “You disappoint me.”
I was now more determined than ever to open the coconut. Nothing could stop me. While I knew there were numerous ways to open a coconut, I made the proclamation I would only use objects found around the office. Suddenly the entire office broke free of their gray, zombie like states and rallied around me and my pursuit. Co-workers brought me water and offered to take turns sawing the outer edge with scissors. I was focused. After a few hours, three pairs of broken scissors and a dirty look from the office manager I’d only accomplished creating a small pile of coconut sawdust. I wasn’t any closer to cracking the coconut. My patience soon gave over to rage and the use of blunt force on various objects, but nothing got me closer to the coconut’s insides. I decided it was time to give up when I strongly considered sticking the coconut in the microwave to just see what happened.
The rest of the day there was a steady stream of people coming by to see the coconut and laugh at my lack of success. Their laughter didn’t bother me as much as my father’s, who I’m sure was quite delighted by the thought of my unsuccessful attempts to split open a coconut against my monitor.
Even today I fantasize about opening the coconut. It rests on a different desk in a different office with different co-workers offering similar suggestions on how to open a coconut that had become rotten on the inside years ago. While I believe my father’s intentions were to embarrass me at my office, there are times when I wonder if he sent it hoping it would become a beacon of my personality, a sign there was something of interest underneath the hard shell of oxford shirts, slacks and shined loafers. Regardelss of his intentions, I smile when people ask me why I have a coconut with a mailing label on it percheched on my desk. I also smile when I imagine the look on my father’s face when the mailman delivered the homeless person I sent wearing nothing but a mailing label and correct postage.
