And taste as heavenly.
Every now and then I fall hopelessly in love. I’ve tumbled hard for a spider, a redbird who chirps relentlessly when I forget to fill his feeder and a squishy pair of flip flops. (The latter being a painful subject having found one recently in my pup’s mouth.)
But I don’t know when I have become so invested body and soul in a vegetable – or is it a fruit?
For many years like most blissfully unaware urbanites, I took what I could get from the tomatoes lining the shelves of the produce department. But those distant kin were only a foretaste of glory divine. Of all this garden business, the most wonderful surprise has been how truly glorious life can be with eight tomato bushes in your side yard.
Granted it took a while. They stayed green forever. Hanging in the midst of all that greenery in the middle of their cages.
But finally, those big boys ripened. I picked one and took it in for lunch. Big mistake. For once you taste perfection; it only breeds discontentment for all other food matter. Since that moment, my daily diet consists of many a tomato.
This includes quite the BTLO jag. I’m not referring to a merger of 1970s rock bands but my own favorite mixture of bacon, tomato, lettuce and thick slice of sweet onion. Every lunch I build a tower, sometimes adding fresh cucumbers or sliced zucchini. Then I stack everything on a white Dixie plate.
Turning a deaf ear to the sound of my clogging arteries, I’ve learned some dark truths in all this constructing. First, there is no way to have too much mayo on fresh tomato. It’s a symphony beyond all messy symphonies. When taking care of business with a tomato sandwich one thing is for sure, things get sloppy real fast. The juice and mayo drips and swirls down fingers into a big puddle on the soggy paper plate.
And one of the perks of getting older is that you don’t mind the mess of too much mayo slopped on too much tomato. Heck, once becoming one with tomato flesh, you don’t even notice it. I am like an old fellow who wanders around all summer long with greasy stains on his faded camp shirt. He’s just been eating lots of tomato sandwiches. And he’s always smiling.
I’m starting to smile a lot more myself.
If you stripped away all the bread, lettuce, bacon, onion and even cast out the mayonnaise — if all that was left was the tomato — it would be enough. I just can’t get it out of my head; the haunting fact that a sandwich made of nothing but three thick slices of tomato satisfies a woman’s appetite. (A certain woman very close to me. Who likes to eat a lot.) Not even salt improves the taste.
Makes you wonder if that fruit on the tree of knowledge might have been a tomato. Poor Eve helpless to resist its power. No, surely nothing evil could have sprung from that wonderful plant.
It had to be the mayo. Satan cast some strange magic on Eve that can only be found in a jar of whipped egg, canola oil and squirt of lemon.
Oh, that reminds me, all you coupon clippers out there…jars of evil are two for one at the grocery this week.
