The Pineapple Story

In May 1980, the Godby High School Drama Club was having a Hawaiian style end-of-school-year banquet and all members were expected to bring something to eat. The day of the party, I drove to the  grocery store intending to ask for something "Hawaiian" to cook for the dinner, but a flash afternoon thunderstorm and an unusually deep puddle on Old Bainbridge Road ("A Canopy Road") stranded me and the 1973 blue AMC Hornet I was driving for almost 2 hours.

No cell phones back then. When I was able to start the car again, I was out of time to cook anything for the banquet. I went to Albertsons on North Monroe Street and bought something probably more tropical than Hawaiian for the banquet -- a pineapple. My pineapple served as a centerpiece for the main banquet table and I took it home after the party. To this day I don't know why I put it in the freezer, but it was absolutely essential to the rest of the story that I did.

A few weeks later, Godby's class of 1980 graduated in Tully Gym at Florida State University. My bowling buddies Chris and Steve were graduating, and although I was in the next year's graduating class, we were all the same age. We still are. I removed the pineapple from the freezer and put it in a paper lunch sack and after the commencement ceremony I gave the pineapple to Chris.

Chris and Steve invited me to come with them and Phil to the class graduation party at the beach and we left directly from Tully Gym and had a great time in the car talking and laughing -- all the way to Perry, Florida. Perry was about twice as far and in a different direction than our intended destination, Bald Point, one of the nearest beaches to Tallahassee. I'm glad I wasn't driving, or I would still be hearing about it. Someone took a wrong turn.

By the time we finally reached the beach, we had been in the car for over two hours for a 30-minute drive to the beach. I suppose if the trip had been less eventful, we might not have been mischievous enough to name Chris' pineapple Phred and connive to sneak up on the partiers from behind a dune on the beach and toss Phred into the bonfire. Since Chris was the varsity baseball player among us, he earned the privilege of hurling Phred the Pineapple into the fire. I believe he overshot by a tad.

Chris and Steve and Phil and I hung out with the crowd for an hour or so, then piled into the car and drove back -- to Perry. We corrected course and by the time they dropped me off at home first, it was getting light, and I had school and final exams the next day!

The next year after I graduated, also in Tully Gym, Chris brought me a pineapple in a paper sack.

Fast forward to my sister Matthea's graduation in 1986 from Rickards High School in the Tallahassee Leon County Civic Center. Her grade point average was the highest in the class, but since she graduated a year early, she was ineligible to be class valedictorian.

Matthea sat in the center of the second row of students from the stage with the National Honor Society members, so she was one of the earliest students to walk across the stage to receive her diploma and handshakes from attending school faculty and county and state school board representatives. I had a long wait.

It was my long-held belief that anyone can get away with just about anything during the singing of the National Anthem, and it was my intention to test and extend that theorem to a high school alma mater. For my sister, of course.

After all the seniors had crossed the stage and returned to their seats on the main floor of the Civic Center, a few words were said by the next speaker and then everyone rose to sing Rickards' alma mater. A string section from the band accompanied the students' voices.

As the music and singing began, I took a pineapple from a paper bag and cradled it with my arm. I walked down the stairs from where I had been sitting and climbed over the railing of the Civic Center and walked  out onto the main floor and strode purposefully towards the second row of seats in front of the stage. I held my gaze forward and steady. As the students were all standing, it was easy for me to walk through the second row in front of the students and then I stood next to Matthea and handed her the pineapple. At this time she did not know of my pineapple adventures years earlier.

"Mitch, what are you DOING here?" was Matthea's shocked response. 

"Shhh, keep looking forward!" I whispered as loudly as I could to be heard over the singing.

I smiled widely as everyone on stage and in the arena was looking at Matthea with her pineapple and me.

The alma mater droned on another minute. Matthea didn't know the words by heart and was reading from the program, so I was able to figure out where we were so I could give myself a bit of a head start.

I left Matthea with the pineapple and returned to my seat the way I arrived, just as the music stopped.

I tell myself to this day that if I was a 17-year-old senior graduating with honors at my high school commencement ceremony, I would want my big brother standing next to me to share the moment. And Matthea will always have that.

I tell everyone else: DON'T EVER DO THIS! There are armed guards and a much more wary public nowadays. I was lucky.

Years later when I earned a Master's degree, I received three pineapples from friends and family, including one from my sister Jennifer in Maryland via Federal Express. 

Gifts of pineapple are now a venerable family tradition for graduations and other momentous occasions.

Steve (left) received his personally couriered pineapple thirty years later in Maryland. 

  

Photo by Angie