“Dadda, Can You Get That Coconut?”

I didn’t think getting fired had affected me at all. Then, one morning, while I was on my planned vacation in Kauai, my daughters and I were walking back to our condo when my oldest saw coconuts dangling from the tree outside our unit.

She looked at it for a while, then turned to me and said, “Dadda, can you get that coconut?”

I talk about coconuts a lot.

Around the time I turned fourteen, my grandfather would pick me up at six in the morning every Saturday, and we would drive an hour to his farm. Once there, he would check with his foreman, and they would walk around the property, checking fences, fruit trees, irrigation lines, and cows.

I was always close behind, walking with them, taking it all in.

At the end of the walk, which usually took two to three hours, my grandpa would produce a sleeve of two Galletas Festival or Festival Cookies. These cookies were the Colombian version of Oreos, but instead of being a chocolate sandwich cookie with a creme filling in between two chocolate wafers, they were vanilla wafers covering a strawberry creme filling. Then he would send the foreman to get us coconuts, which he brought back and hacked open with his machete.

Nothing is sweeter than the water and meat from a recently picked coconut.

This is why I buy a coconut every chance I get.

It’s a cheap, nostalgic reminder of a time in my life I cherish.

Noticed how I said “buy” and not “climb on a tree, get a coconut, and cut it open.”

I had never opened a coconut in my life.

And that’s when the feelings from getting fired ambushed me.

When my daughter asked, “Dadda, can you get that coconut?” I looked at her expecting eyes and thought, “I might not be able to hold on to my job even when I’m good at it, I might not be able to play office politics, and I might not be able to kiss the ass of people who expect it but don’t deserve it; but, goddamn it if I can’t get my daughter a coconut.”

Even in Colombia, people don’t climb trees to get coconuts. They use a pair of shears attached to a very long pole and controlled by a string that helps move the shears to cut the coconuts.

But I had seen many pictures of kids in Southeast Asia climbing the trees.

In the pictures, they are never wearing shirts or flip-flops.

So, I took off my shirt, flicked my flip-flops, and determinedly walked towards the tree.

Some calculations made me believe climbing the tree was possible: it was only fourteen feet tall, which is tall but not that tall; it leaned to the side, which created a natural slope for my body to dangle from; and climbing it would take me out of my head and stop the replaying of getting fired.

But I was wrong.

Regardless of my flawless (and impulsive) quick analysis, climbing a tree is harder than it looks–and it looks really hard.

I could barely hold my hands and feet to it, so I had to lean my body against the trunk as I scratched my chest up the tree.

After getting to the top and almost slipping forty-five times, I realized the coconut was REALLY attached to the tree. It is hanging on for dear life.

It is nothing like picking a raspberry, which you can almost do telepathically.

So I started bitch slapping the coconut into submission.

I must have looked like a deranged man, but damn it, if it felt good when that little branch holding the coconut gave to my superior karate chopping technique and let go of its fruit.

I climbed down the tree with scratches all over my body, but with a sense of accomplishment I had not felt in a while, only to learn that getting a coconut is easy; opening a coconut is an adventure on its own.