Bing Cherries and a Grapefruit Seed

Driving through Germany in a rented car, Mother and I were attacked by a barrage of enormous, noisy hail. Those chunks of ice bounced and pounded, and I was mesmerized. Not so Mother. Said she, "We better decide right now how big these hailstones are. If we don't, they'll be the size of cantaloupes by the time we get back home." They were smaller than cantaloupes, grapefruit, or lemons. They were bigger than peas, pearl onions, or grapes. Those hailstones were the size of Bing cherries. They were the size of Bing cherries when we got back home, and over the years they never got any bigger. Or smaller.

When I was in third grade, I had a pet goldfish. He was black, and I named him Blackie. We fed him the recommended amount of Styrofoam fish food flakes, and once a week we changed the water in his bowl. We put Blackie in a Mason jar full of water, dumped the dirty water, and washed his pebble carpeting. After being washed, the pebbles were put on a newspaper so putting them back would be easier. We then returned the pebbles, refilled the bowl, and when all the pebbles had settled we returned Blackie to his home. One morning, my father filled the bowl with clean water and transferred Blackie to the bowl. Oops! He'd forgotten the pebbles. I caught my father in the act of pouring in the pebbles while Blackie tried to avoid being stoned. "You'll kill him!," I shrieked, giving my father such a scare that he dumped all the pebbles all at once into the bowl on top of poor Blackie. "You've killed him!," I shrieked.
Blackie, however, survived.

The next morning a bloated Blackie was floating on the water's surface. Again I shrieked, "See. You killed him." My father would not admit guilt, but he was curious about the cause of death. What had done poor Blackie in? My father put a clean newspaper on the kitchen counter. He removed Blackie from his bowl with a slotted spoon and hauled out the biggest, sharpest butcher knife we owned. To determine the cause of death, my father performed an autopsy. Was the cause of death determined? It was. Blackie had not been stoned to death. So much for my accusations. He had swallowed a grapefruit seed, a big one. Somehow the seed had got mixed up with his pebbles. When I scared my poor father out of his wits, he dumped the pebbles in all at once so he didn't notice the seed. At the time it was determined that both father and daughter were guilty of involuntary fish slaughter. The father forgot the pebbles; the daughter shrieked. That verdict was arrived at on the spot and has remained on the books ever since.

In my household, Bing cherries and grapefruit seeds were symbols of accuracy.