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Soon after my family relocated to the Boston area in 1983, a mall opened a few blocks from where we lived. It was, for many years, the premier mall for miles and miles around. People would take the bus in from Cambridge just to shop, it was that awesome.

It was glorious to live so close to the mall. About once a week we'd go and have dinner in the food court and let me assure you, there's no better place in the world for a picky eater to dine. All of those choices! Taco Bell! McDonald's! There was even a Souper Salad which had the greatest salad bar I'd ever seen, so great that it provided enough incentive for me to want to eat a salad, which is no easy feat when it comes to the palate of a nine year old. That was where we discovered the preservatives they spray on lettuce was what was making my dad sick everytime we ate there, which was useful knowledge 15 years later when I started getting sick from grocery store salad bars. Fun and educational!

The other reason it was great to live near the mall was the bookstore. We're all avid readers in my family so a trip to the mall always included a stop at Waldenbooks. I didn't think a bookstore could get any better, until I discovered WordsWorth (R.I.P.) in Harvard Square, but for a while it was the greatest bookstore on the face of the Earth.

There are three specific sections I gravitated to over the course of my relationship with the store. Working backwards, the last was the Sweet Valley High collection, which eventually evolved to also include the Sweet Valley Twins and Sweet Valley Jr. High collections. The second was the Nancy Drew section, and the first was the Berenstain Bears.

I loved the Berenstain Bears. There was always a sense of great anticipation whenever I approached the revolving racks that housed the collection of stories. Would there be a book there that I hadn't yet read, or would they all be stories I already had? I read a lot of them before I outgrew them, although looking back on it, I don't think I ever actually owned a lot of them. I must have sat on the floor and read them all in the bookstore. Anyway, the individual stories have long since merged into a big mushy ball of fuzzy non-descriptness in my memory.

Except for one.

The moral of this particular story was never judge a book by its cover. To demonstrate this point, Mama Bear cut into two apples. The first looked like it had been around the block a few times, but when she cut into it, it proved to be a perfectly fine apple. The second one was a model apple that most apples only wish they could look like. When Mama Bear cut into it, it was wormy. I picked up on the purpose of the symbolism of those apples straight away, but the importance of the message was soon over-shadowed by a much bigger question: how did Mama Bear know the good-looking apple was wormy? That seemed at the time like it would have been a pretty good skill to pass on to the readers, especially those who really liked apples.

Since that day, every single time I've cut into an apple (Including the one I cut into last night which is what inspired me to finally write all of this down.), I think about that story and wonder if this is going to be the day I discover a wormy apple.