When you think “vending machine,” the image that comes to your mind is most likely a six foot tall, refrigerated monster with an illuminated panel. An illuminated plastic panel, enticing you with larger than life images to purchase chilled beverages, may be the brightest light in a dark hallway. You’ll have the impulse to check your wallet for a crisp dollar, but maybe it’s a model that takes swiped credit cards.
Now think of something completely different, from a completely different time. I don’t mean the revolving, plexiglass columns filled with questionable sandwiches, pints of 2% milk, or the perplexing packaged, hard boiled egg. I don’t mean the often astonishing Japanese vending machines that offer heated canned coffee or items you would not expect from a vending machine. I don’t even mean those wall mounted, never stocked boxes in the women’s lavatory of old government buildings.
I want you to think about the Fruit-O-Matic.
The Fruit-O-Matic! More steampunk apple dispensing machines existed before the manufacture of the short, utilitarian model that stood apart in the courtyard of my high school, and slicker machines exist now, but the Fruit-O-Matic did what it said on the box, no more, no less. Drop a quarter in and get your choice of an apple -- usually a green Granny Smith -- or an orange. The fruit was always fresh, always good.
Someone tended that old box. Was it the cafeteria staff? Was an outside vendor allowed on school campus? I never knew. For all I know, that fruit vending machine was magic. It had a philosophical poetry (apple vs. orange) and an incongruous humor (no candy bars, only sweet fruit). Positioned far from both the snack window and the cafeteria, against a wall and away from routes of traffic, it was an overlooked wallflower at the school dance of everyday.
It was the only place on or close to campus to get something to eat after school hours in the short time between my last class and my drama rehearsal. I became very fond of the Fruit-O-Matic and the stroll across the quadrangle. Usually, I chose an apple, crunching into it as I returned to the Little Theater.
Sometimes, the best memories are the little ones.
. . .
A weekly delivery of fruit comes to my workplace. Apples, bananas, pears that no one seems to want, grapes, and pluots -- depending on the time of year. Rarely do we get citrus, though last winter it was satsuma mandarins for weeks, until they languished as badly as the pears. Because this not the region for oranges, it seems that my fruit choice has become both more automatic and already made for me.
