By Bill Shein
January 29, 2009

Four years ago, the editors of this newspaper reluctantly agreed – after much arguing, manly fisticuffs, police intervention, the filing and subsequent dropping of charges, court-ordered mediation, and, ultimately, successful group-hug therapy – to let me share an unusually personal tale. 

In a column titled, “An Unlikely Love Story,” I explained, with 629 carefully chosen words, that I was in love with my Web browser’s pop-up blocker. And that I didn’t care who knew it. 

But a year later, with some embarrassment, I revealed that I had split with the pop-up blocker and was romantically involved with the comma, a punctuation mark that I loved deeply. To be sure, it was an unusual coupling, and one that raised many eyebrows in my small town. 

Then, in 2007, I shocked friends, family, and readers of the supermarket gossip rags by announcing that while the comma remained a professional colleague, my true soul mate was, in fact, my new iPod Shuffle. Yes, a man who rants daily about modern consumer capitalism had actually married a high-tech gadget from Apple. 

I thought my long search for love was over. But it wasn’t. 

Despite all best efforts, including counseling, repeated attempts to reconcile, and installation of all recommended firmware upgrades, things just didn’t work out with the iPod Shuffle. We divorced. 

It was largely my fault. I came to need and appreciate silence, and that was irreconcilable, as noise was her very reason for being. Also, what she still felt was “random play” seemed boring and routine to me, and that proved a relationship-killer. 

(No doubt I became slightly deaf to her needs. Let that be a warning to our MP3-ified youth: Keep the volume down.) 

Having failed again at love, I poured myself into work. I slept rarely and fitfully. I ate junk food and gained 600 pounds. It wasn’t healthy, but it did produce – in just a few months – four novels, sixteen short stories, an epic poem, and the Oscar-nominated screenplay for “Love in the Time of Steve Jobs,” a moving film about a sentient iPhone’s quest to, well, touch back. 

(One reviewer dubbed it “a modern-day ‘Edward Scissorhands’.”) 

But much to my surprise, love has ensnared me once more. Yes, I am again stupidly, ridiculously, hopelessly in love! This time it’s with the clementine, that delicious, tangerine-like fruit. 

She’s like no one I’ve ever met. Raised under the passionate Spanish sun, she endured a horrific sea crossing in a refrigerated container ship, but somehow retained her inner goodness. We met at a local market. She’s amazing. 

Her beeswax-coated skin glows the bright orange of a fiery, setting sun. She’s sweet, almost to a fault. Without doing anything, she nourishes my body and soul. Some days I need little else. 

I don’t mean to shock, but she slips out of her smooth-but-leathery rind with hardly a touch, like it’s the summer of 1967 and we’re in Haight-Ashbury and her name is “Freedom” or “Harmony” and together we’re reinventing the world. Today, even in mid-winter, her vitamin C protects my cellular walls and zaps any damaging free radicals that come near. If that’s not love, what is? 

Yes, she’s an unusual match for me. She’s not local or organic. Measured in food miles, she’s pure evil, shipped here from thousands of miles away. But the instant I saw her in that “Darling Clementines” wood crate, I was smitten. 

I do wonder, though, if this is lasting love or just a destructive, unhealthy addiction. After all, whenever I think we need a break, I reach for her again almost immediately. I feel like a teenager, my love bordering on obsession. As you may have discovered yourself, one clementine is never enough. 

What will happen next? I don’t know. Clementine offers me unconditional, delicious love – not to mention more than the recommended number of daily servings of antioxidant-rich fruit. Honestly, can a relationship be any healthier than that?

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Bill Shein was recently added to a U.S. Department of Agriculture “watch list.”

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The previous stories in Bill’s “Unlikely Love” series are:

An Unlikely Love Story (December 15, 2004)
Another Unlikely Love Story (December 7, 2005)
Even More Unlikely Love (March 19, 2007)