🎲 Random Story

During World War II, I came home on leave early one September. It was time to put peaches in bottles to preserve them for winter. My beloved mother-in-law called an old friend, George B. Andrus, of Holladay in this valley. The conversation on the telephone was brief: “George, do you have any peaches for sale?” mother asked.

Patriarch Andrus answered, “I have a few, but they are not very good.”

I volunteered to drive Mother Wright to pick up the peaches. When we arrived she said, “George, where are your peaches?”

Brother Andrus opened his garage door, and I saw bushel baskets filled with large golden fruit with red kisses from sun ripening. Each basket was filled so full that when I lifted them into the trunk of the car some of the luscious peaches on top of the piled basket rolled off and bruised. Brother Andrus immediately replaced them with other perfect fruit.

On the way home I said to Mother Wright, “What did he mean when he said his fruit was not very good?”

She answered, “If you knew George Andrus, you would know that any fruit he would put on the market would be good and that he would give more than full value.”

I wondered what the fruit would have been like if George had said it was good. Brother Andrus’s self-imposed expectations led him to go beyond what we expected of him in his dealings with us.