A peach of a story (not mythology)

Years ago I hosted an old friend who never quite got Carolina on his mind. He married here, at a historic inn in Hillsborough, even lived inside the Raleigh Beltline, but he and his bride went back to his native California before any of their progeny could boast of being Tarheel born.
I shouldn’t have been surprised at my friend’s detachment from the gifts of the Pine State. Brad defines the phlegmatic type. Unemotional doesn’t describe him. Enthusiasm, for Brad, is only a temporary daemonic inhabitation.
But I couldn’t help being surprised, even disappointed, when he and his five-year old son were visiting from California. I offered him a peach from the Farmer’s Market, one that I had bought the day before, approaching the peak of ripeness.
“When will they be ready to eat?” someone at the Pee Dee stand had asked.
“Tomorrow,” pronounced the kind lady who transferred my peaches from basket to plastic. “Look at those, sir,” she said, beaming like a waiter at a four-star restaurant holding out a two-and-a-half pound lobster.
“How’s the peach?” I asked. Brad’s lips were glistening. The flesh of the peach was bright yellow-orange. He had to suck on the fruit to keep the juice from pooling in his palm.
“All right,” he allowed.
All right? It was, I wanted to inform him, a freestone Winblo, developed at NC State University, the best variety of eating peach I have ever tasted, miles better than any peach I’d ever had growing up with him in the San Francisco Bay Area. With the zeal of a convert I wanted to demand what devil had put scales on his taste buds. But like a good host, I held my tongue, and let it taste a Winblo to salve my spirit.
The peach episode set the tone for the visit, and my frustration. He refused a peach on Sunday afternoon because he had had two the day before (Imagine! Three peaches in two days!). Then at dinner he quietly put away three cobs of sweet Fantasia corn, corn that had been pulled perhaps 36 hours before.
“Give me nine,” I had said to the pretty woman standing next to the corn-laden trailer at the Farmer’s Market.
“For the same price, you can have fourteen,” she said. “We’re running a special today.”
“I don’t think we’ll eat that many.”
“That’s all right. They’ll keep, and you can give the extras to your neighbors.”
I came home, somehow, with seventeen ears. I shucked seven and gave them to the neighbors. They said, with some urgency, “We’ll eat them tonight.”
Not even the ugly but delicious dollar a pound tomatoes (the best at the Farmer’s Market, bar none) prompted a peep out of him. Without a word, he consumed roast-beef-and-tomato sandwiches the entire visit, and took two more sandwiches with him on the plane.
But Brad didn’t leave me completely unsatisfied. As in the old chestnut about the Soviet woman who toured all the splendors of America and was completely unimpressed—except with the supermarkets, where she broke down in awe-filled tears—Brad cracked a teeny bit, just once.
“Yeah,” he said, leaning over the bowl of peaches on the kitchen counter, “Sharon [Brad's wife] sometimes wonders whether we made the right choice going back to California.”
Brad comes from old-time Californians, folk with land in Sonoma County, wine country. His ancestral summer home has an apple orchard with fruit that tastes like it comes from the Land of Life and Death, and confers immortality to the eater.
Many people, when they hear I come from California, say, "Why do you live out here?"
It's the peaches.