deadly comparisons

Every parent has faced the problem.

Your daughter comes home sobbing about how she is a failure because her friend Lizzy is an expert fencer. Or your son wanders in the dark regions because all of his friends are better cooks than he is.

Parents, wise with experience, then counsel their children with well-exercised bromides:

• "You know, honey, your friend is not as perfect as you may think. I hear she has a drinking problem." What I call the schadenfreude defense.
  
• "Don't let that stand in your way. Use it to build an alliance with her. Better an ally than a rival." The desperate act of a contestant on "The Survivor."
  
• Or my absolute favorite for a child looking intoi the dark abyss, usually voiced by a Dad: "Life isn't fair."

We all have probably been on one side of similar exchanges -- or both. Including me.

A couple months ago I was bemoaning the lack of good pizza in our area with a Canadian friend who lives in Barra de Navidad.

He smiled in that fatherly life-isn't-fair manner and offered this sage advice. "Your problem is that you are making a false comparison. You think that 'pizza' is something you eat at a pizza restaurant in Salem. It isn't. It is simply a dish that is cooked different ways in different places."

I could almost hear "We are the World" playing softly in the background.

There is wisdom in his advice. Too often we compare foods with what we have known elsewhere without finding the virtues of what is in front of us. The fact that a steak is not a Calgary steak does not mean that the Sonora steak you are eating has no appeal of its own.

I thought about that late last week when I purchased a bag of cherries at Hawaii -- for the sole reason that I like cherries.

As you can see, they were a bit on the small side and did not have much of a sugar content. I suspect they were part of the cull pick in California to let the other fruit on the tree grow. Fruit that we will probably not see here.

I could have sat there muttering that they were nothing like the five-pounds of cherries that I bought in Hood River in 1973 and then ate while driving my top-down convertible across Mt. Hood. But, I didn't. Because that was not what I was experiencing when I ate my cherries from Hawaii.

Instead, I enjoyed them for what they were -- pellets of intense cherry flavor. And that was good enough for me.

After my talk with my advice-dispensing friend about pizza, I stopped at a new Italian place near my house. Instead of expecting a Salem pizza, I decided I would deconstruct the ingredients and treat it as if it were some exotic offering I had never tasted. That was a mistake.

The crust was hard and tasteless. The cheese had that chemically-processed taste of some Mexican cheeses. The tomato sauce was almost missing. The pepperoni tasted like hot dogs -- though it was obviously trying to be pepperoni.

Taken as a whole, it was no worse than any other pizza-like dish I have tasted in Mexico, and it was no better. At least, I avoided comparing it with anything outside of Mexico.

So, sometimes the advice against comparison works. Other times, it doesn't.

What we do know, though, is that comparisons limp as much as analogies do -- which, of course, are just another type of conparisons.

And that is the reason why apples and oranges never end up in a wedding chapel together.