Missed opportunities

Yesterday we stopped at a farm stand along the highway up in the mountains. Function Junction was run by a loquacious woman as unexpected as the name of her farm. I asked about everything sold at that remote location, including the blueberries that had just disappeared from the shelves, the cherries that were gone for the year, and the raspberries that were just starting to come in.

I would rather buy produce from growers than at a store, especially when they meet my questions about pesticides with such scorn and distaste that I know the fruits are reasonably poison-free. I bought a bag of what the woman called banana potatoes, much smaller than chicken eggs, and some peaches that were as hard as any I could have found at the supermarket.

She said the peaches would last for a few weeks in the refrigerator, and that I could just take them out a couple of days before I wanted to eat them. Which struck me as strange because I have a memory — which doesn’t seem too distant — of eating fresh fruit without having to prepare for the experience two days in advance.

But there you go. If I think I will want to eat fruit in two days, I can get ready today by taking a peach out of the refrigerator. Stretch the snack out over a couple of days.

The BC fruit outlet not far from where we live is a clearinghouse for all fresh produce that comes into Kelowna, with prices often better than in any store and additional discounts for bulk sales. Even there, except for apples and pears, I expect the fruit to be a few days away from ripe when I buy it.

It is always risky to buy fruit in Canada. In Ottawa, I usually avoided buying fruit for much of the year because the kiwis and plums we got in our winter could easily have been shipped from Chile or New Zealand in another geologic epoch. Sometimes I would buy a mango in August hoping it would be ripe before the first snow.

But that was better than in Thunder Bay, where we used to plant tomatoes and bring the plants into the house before they ripened. We would hang them in the basement and pick them as they looked ready, usually the following January. I never saw a ripe tomato outside there.

There are some items that are not part of the fruity cornucopia of the Okanagan — those that come from the tropics mainly, or from year-round warm climates, such as bananas, mangoes, and oranges. When I was young, it was rare to see these out of season because the shipping took too long or was too expensive. We now expect to get them at any time of year, and not having them is a temporary inconvenience. But nobody is surprised that getting fresh fruit from halfway around the world is more of a gamble than getting it locally.

This is poles away from what I was had in mind when I sat down to write a couple of hours ago. I was actually thinking about what happened to me in the Superstore yesterday when I was returning a bag of oranges that had turned out to be all pulp and no juice. In fact, I wrote the headline for this article before I began. Most unusual.

Here’s where the headline begins to make sense.

The counter at Customer Service was full of cell phones, and the person waiting on me asked if I wanted to buy one cheap. It sounded like something you could expect to hear from a shady character who had just opened the back doors of his truck. But it turned out that the store had received a large shipment of 2015 phones that it could not sell or advertise because the models already on display were more up to date.

“We were told to discount them and get rid of them,” the rep explained “They’re all twenty-five dollars now, and we’re going to put up a sign inviting people to get them here. Nothing wrong with them except that they don’t have the same features as the new ones.”

How often does an opportunity like that fall into your lap? There were several models, including the type I got a year ago for $300. Now I could pick up one — or several — for a fraction of that.

My regular readers will not be surprised that I said no. Technology does not fascinate me enough for an offer like that to be attractive. But back in the car Catherine asked me why I hadn’t just taken one or two. I could give them away. Lots of other people would be happy to get a 2015 cell phone.

Well, that was yesterday and this is today. A gift horse stared me in the face — I get a chance to use the word “literally” her — and I didn’t think outside my usual box. I sped by it on the road (not literally), and that kind of opportunity may never come up again.

Life is full of missed opportunities, but they are rarely so obvious.