True Love And Homegrown Tomatoes

During one of my annual visits to see him and his devoted fourth wife in Florida, my godfather taught me to put sliced tomatoes on buttered toast. "A great taste sensation," Louis always said, as he did when Dorothy, just as the evening news came on, would give him a bowl of popcorn and his one officially authorized daily glass of vodka. When my mother, Louis, and I were in Miami during a newspaper strike in 1965, he shared perhaps the greatest taste sensation of all by giving his 10-year-old godson his first medium rare cheeseburger, topped with a juicy quarter-inch slice of white onion.

He and Dorothy are gone now. One of my duties while Kathy was out of town was watering and bringing in the crop from the two tomato plants she bought during a horticultural episode. We both grew up in the big city, but when she was in high school she tended vegetables in a plot provided by the Bronx Botanical Garden.

My duties also included eating them, and wow. I didn't make toast, but they were pretty snazzy (another Louis word) on Triscuits with a little bit of butter.

Just a few more of the cherry tomatoes are coming in. This too shall pass. I never have horticultural episodes, so I didn't realize, until Kathy told me, that tomato plants die. It's all got me thinking about Guy Clark's song, "Homegrown Tomatoes":

Ain't nothin' in the world that I like better
Than bacon and lettuce and homegrown tomatoes
Up in the mornin' out in the garden
Get you a ripe one don't get a hard one
Plant `em in the spring eat `em in the summer
All winter without `em's a culinary bummer
I forget all about the sweatin' and diggin'
Every time I go out and pick me a big one

Homegrown tomatoes
Homegrown tomatoes
What'd life be without homegrown tomatoes
Only two things that money can't buy
That's true love and homegrown tomatoes