Never On Sunday

Uh oh. The apples are beginning to turn.

That didn’t take long. We picked them just two weeks ago at one of those self-pick orchards, along with sundry seasonal items, like our Halloween pumpkin. The apples aren’t rotten, exactly, but you can see black spots around the stems of a few, and you can see the discoloration lying under the skin where gentle bruises struck.

An old adage holds that “one rotten apple spoils the barrel.” I suppose that can happen, a single, damaged apple going rotten where the flesh is gouged open—maybe attracting insects which will burrow into the fresher apples, maybe generating heat as it rots, maybe just spoiling so far before it’s caught that it actually rots to the point of contact with another apple. But to my experience, apples picked together, or bought together in the grocery, tend to go pretty much uniformly. Oh, some few show signs of spoilage first, but others show signs before the first is so far gone as to be said to cause the rest to go. Apples—barrels of apples—spoil, and whatever causes one to go generally causes them all to go. Another bit of folk wisdom, like watched kettles and lightning strikes, that doesn’t stand up to observation.

Curiously, the falseness of the adage may make its use more literally true. When hard evidence of torture in Abu Grahib came to light, it was blamed on only “a few bad apples.” The metaphor was improperly employed to suggest that the problem was small, localized, anomalous. The rest of the adage was forgotten. Had anyone stopped to consider its entirety, it would imply that those bad apples had spoiled the barrel, that is, the rest of the staff, maybe the CIA and military detention staff generally. An even more thoughtful observer would have noticed that bad apples don’t spoil the barrel, but rather that the barrel spoils on its own, and tends to go all at once, whether or not you find and remove the most rotten of apples first.