There, at the far corner of High Point Produce’s booth at the Saturday Market, sat three trays of cherry tomatoes. One was filled with red, another with yellow, and the third held a seed-catalog spectrum of colors and shapes.
This was not a safe arrangement for me.
I have what may be a psychologically unhealthy fascination with tomatoes, demonstrated most Saturdays by my buying considerably more of them than several people have any reasonable prospect of eating before the next Saturday Market. Had I been capable of carrying all three trays to the car, I’m not entirely certain High Point Produce would have had any cherry tomatoes left to sell.
It’s probably connected to the same nostalgia that drives The Green Grape Report each week. Only this memory comes from tomatoes pulled from vines growing thick in the prairie muck of North Florida, where dark, primordial soil gave classic Big Boys everything they needed to become the tomatoes I still measure others against.
The vines were trellised on sticks cut from the nearby woods, with twine laced between them. Old nylon stockings were ripped into strips and used to loosely bind the plants to the twine and stakes, holding them upright without cutting into the stems as they grew heavy with tomatoes.
Now, on Saturdays, I don’t need reminding that nylons once enhanced my mother’s and grandmother’s sense of style. They also appeared rather suggestively in the Sears catalog, somewhere near the bras and underwear, on pages that were supposedly forbidden to my youthful eyes.
Now that I’m more mature, and the Sears catalog has disappeared along with any need to pretend I wasn’t looking at those pages, I’m left to follow the suggestive nature of my palate instead. So I buy as many tomatoes as I can carry and worry later about how I’ll eat them all before the next Saturday Market.
Salads, sandwiches, snacks, omelets, even off-season chili. I can usually find a place for them.
The real struggle comes at snack time, when tomatoes compete with grapes. Each has its own temperament on my taste buds, and my preference can change from one moment to the next. Sometimes I imagine them sitting on opposite shoulders, one good and one evil, except they keep switching roles just to make the decision more difficult.
So, with the pure intentions of a Stoic, I simply say “whatever” and eat the opposite of whatever I ate last. Stoicism can simplify decision-making, especially when food is involved. “What can I learn from this?” makes almost any choice easier to accept.
Even when it was the wrong one.
Often, when I’m talking with someone about my photography, the question comes up about the pictures I missed. My standard answer is, “I’ve never been angry at myself for a photo I made. I have been angry about the ones I didn’t.”
That instinct toward execution follows me through the Saturday Farmers Market.
Take the picture.
Buy the tomatoes.
As many as you can carry.
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