I don’t like coconut, in pretty much any form. Not in Mounds or Almond Joy, not dyed green and posing as easter grass on cupcakes, not as milk, not as oil. I avoided suntan lotion for years because I assumed it all smelled like Hawaiian Tropic tanning oil and was only educated otherwise after we moved to Florida and I got sun poisoning after falling asleep outdoors one afternoon.

I remember my grandfather bought a coconut on a whim one time. It sat on his workbench in their garage for several years, just gathering dust into its hairy self and occasionally falling on someone’s foot. Finally I asked for permission to see what was inside and took a hammer to it. I learned later that the coconut innards are supposed to mold and rot, but this thing was just sort of mummified with a big hollow space in the middle. And it was a struggle to get it apart; I think along with the hammer I ended up needing a chisel.

I only have one favorable coconut story. When the kid was small, we went to New York to meet up with my dad, who was there for some Egypt thing or another. We went to a game at the … what, the new-old Yankee stadium, the one that went away in 2008. We ate a lot of nice dinners. And we went to see Spamalot on Broadway, which we all enjoyed immensely. We raised that kid right; he’d already memorized the Holy Grail and knew quite a few Flying Circus sketches. He also had indulgent family members, so when his grandpa bought him a killer bunny puppet, I didn’t feel too bad about also buying him a fake coconut shell split in half and tied together with red yarn. The kid clopped from the theater to some nearby diner for early dinner; we wandered in with probably half the matinee audience.

Our waiter was lovely. He asked if we enjoyed the show, he took our orders, he was attentive to and not exasperated by my picky eater kid who wanted a burger with just the meat and the bun and NOTHING ELSE. As he was wrapping up with the usual “I’ll get that in for you right away,” Thomas picked up his coconuts and started clopping again. I was about to tell him to knock it off when I looked up and saw the waiter prancing away, one hand up in front of him, the other behind his back, like the best Graham Chapman King Arthur you ever saw. Thomas was over the moon, and that guy got a tip that was probably double our bill.

And that is the one and only time I ever liked coconuts. And it wasn’t even a real coconut.