Friday night, at the start of the fall semester, I stood in my kitchenette—a segment of my bright Philadelphia studio—gently washing a peach. I was two years into medical school and a week into graduate school, turning a corner. First a peach, then a plum, an apple, an orange, some blackberries: whichever fruits found themselves in my fridge, plus some I had picked up on the way home. With one of several small serrated knives stolen from my family home in Los Angeles, I sliced the ingredients and jumbled them together in a clear glass bowl.
How does one make a fruit salad? It seems simple enough, but anything good can usually be made just a bit better with an idea or two. A quick internet search revealed that a sprinkle of lemon and honey would sweeten the deal. I craved cinnamon, so I added that too. I wished that I had thought to buy a kiwi to add green color, or a banana to add creamy texture, but these were lessons for next time. Ready for bed, I stored the fruit salad in my fridge until the next morning, when it would accompany me to brunch at a friend’s apartment. She, too, was making something. She baked biscuits and muffins, and made shakshuka that morning. Another friend brought treats from K’far, a popular Center City restaurant. It was a veritable feast.
There’s a metaphor somewhere here about life and fruit salad. Maybe the happiness we create is a jumble of the sweet offerings we pick up each day, assembled lovingly by our own hand and shared with those willing to taste it. Amid the hailstorm that is medical training, simple pleasures are often cast aside—cooking, cleaning, enjoying the company of loved ones. But in our lives outside the clinic walls, we are tasked with learning to create happiness, to procure joy. We can find it in the fruit salad, but also in what our friends and family bring to the table.
Maybe the fruit salad isn’t really the star of this story. It is a side plot to my experience of young womanhood—of building a life. I came to Philly to train as a physician-scientist, a journey along which I expected to learn in the classroom, in the laboratory, and on the wards, but I have learned at least as much from the life I am building. A life is built on the rhythms of the day to day, how I make my morning coffee and when I scrub my floors, but also how I find my joy, with the small apartment-sized electric grill I purchased last year or the foods I prepare in anticipation of a weekend visit to a friend.
In the end, all of the fruit salad was eaten, a successful endeavor. Two months later, I made another—this one with apples, pears, bananas, raspberries, blueberries—and trekked it to West Philly for dinner with a new friend. I don’t know what the next fruit salad will bring, but I might try a dash of rose water, a drop of sweet wine, a pinch of cardamom—ingredients that remind me of home, a place I’m building out of old and new.
Diane Rafizadeh is a CDY3 at the Perelman School of Medicine.
Image by Andy Revels, a CDY6 at the Perelman School of Medicine.
