Just as, in winter, I would cheerfully eat nothing but Indian pickles, plain yogurt, and rice; from July 4th through September I would, if I could, live on tomato sandwiches. It has been thus as long as I can remember.
And by "tomato sandwich" I mean: white bread, a little bit toasted; Miracle Whip, sliced tomatoes from the garden, salt. This is one of the things, like mayonnaise on baked beans, and unlike incipient osteoporosis, that I have gratefully inherited from my mother.
Have I experimented with the formula over the years?
Have I tried a sprinkle of Old Bay instead of salt? I have not.
Have I substituted regular mayonnaise for Miracle Whip? Only when I have had to.
Have I flirted with rye bread? or wheat? sourdough? Please. Fuck you. This is what I do, man. Do I make absurd suggestions about how you cocktail your drugs? I didn't think so.
However. This summer, I happen to have stopped using reg'lar old Morton's salt almost altogether. I use the big thinger of sea salt when I'm cooking, because it's easier to grab, and we use this fancy Île de Ré grey sea salt our friends brought us back from France on the table. So when I went to make my first tomato sandwich of the summer, I grabbed the salt guncha-guncher and ground the grey salt onto the tomatoes. AND DAMN.
I think that that's what opened the door. Reckless experimentation. Forty-two years old and this is the first time I've put anything on a tomato sandwich other than my teeth.
I have been making these spicy cucumber refrigerator pickles this summer, because Bob's brother Joe has been bringing us more cucumbers from his garden than even Zhou can eat, and because I've been trying to duplicate the brine formula in Smokra, the pickled okra you can buy at Whole Foods for like ten bucks a jar. Ten bucks! That's like 50 cents an okra, and I eat that stuff like if I stopped someone would swoop down on the kitchen and beat me.
You put a couple slices of those cucumbers on my tomato sandwich and stand me in front of the sink to eat it, and just don't count on me paying any attention to anything else until I'm done.
There's not much that will make me (mentally) curse a kid. I mean, someone else's kid. My own kids I curse all the time. In my head. Mostly.
But I was almost speechless with horror and rage Friday afternoon when I stepped into the backyard and saw my vegetable garden trampled and all the stakes broken off at ground level. Multiple kids had been in the backyard that afternoon, racing and playing pirate and popping the heads off dandelions. But I knew goddamn well that neither of MY children, nor their friends, had done this. All of those children can recognize a garden and know not to step in it. My own children know that if you touch my garden stakes, you have to stand in the garden and support my plants all summer as penance.
No, I knew it was the neighbors' grandchildren, who were there for a backyard barbecue. This was tricky - I don't know those kids by name, and I don't know their parents, so I don't feel like I can yell at them. So I called Big Man and Mr. Four over, pointed at the garden, started yelling.
"WHOOO did this?" I bellowed. I felt kind of good about this, in a perverse kind of way. I knew they were going to say they didn't do it, and I knew they didn't do it, so I was anticipating Being Just and Fair.
"Well, if you two didn't do it, who did?" Pointing was the response. The grandchildren, curious as to what the fuss was about, were right there.
I turned to them. In a gentler, disbelieving tone of voice, I said, "Did you guys walk on my garden? Did you break my stakes?" They knew it was a big offense because they had heard me yell at my kids.
The thing is, they were completely baffled. One of them, coming toward me to see what I was talking about, walked straight across the vegetable garden again, mashing the carrot seedlings into the ground. "No! Stop!" my boys and I yelled all together. The kid looked at us in bewilderment.
What the hell kind of upbringing creates a kid so oblivious that he will walk right over 8" seedlings planted in a line in a vegetable garden?
Later in the evening, I was out back, chatting with one of the moms, when her children kicked over the garden border and tramped right over the peas again. "Hold up! Stop!" I'm hollering, while the mother gazes on, as clueless as her kids.
On a day like this, snow on the ground, you just don't believe in plants. I don't care how many daffodil and daylily shoots I see poking up above the ground - I just can't visualize them exploding into large (ish) chlorophylly factories.
I have always been skeptical when it comes to seeds and plants and growth. You drop something the size of a dot on the ground outside, cover it with a little dirt, and a couple months later it's a plant taller than your head? Where did all that mass come from? I know it's largely water, but still. That dot sucked up all kinds of stuff from the soil and, using solar energy to power its efforts, arranged the nitrogen and carbon it found in my garden into, what, a tomato? A six-foot-tall sunflower? Weird.
I placed my seed and plant orders the other day. The catalogs are just dizzying: all the tomatos are "crack-resistant" and full of "true tomato flavor," and you can't keep straight which carrots are long, which are good for fresh eating... I can't even interpret what some of that stuff means. It took all my effort to restrain myself from building a little spreadsheet comparing the traits of all the different strains from the different companies.
The flowers are no better. It's so hard to keep in mind what part of the yard I want to put nasturtiums in, and whether I need mounding or trailing, and whether Gleam germinated better than Empress of India and which one looked so good against the stump last year.
I have a notebook, which this year finally proved its worth. The peas two years ago were amazing, but I'll be damned if I can remember if they were variety Lincoln or Little Marvel or Maestro. But two years ago I stuck a printout of the seed order in the notebook, and now I know.
This year, I ordered seeds from Pinetree Garden Seeds and plants from Territorial Seed Company. I used to order from Renee's Garden Seeds.
I only buy tomatos and peppers as plants. Lately I'm just not interested in starting seeds inside - the plants never end up as robust as I'd like, and I get dozens of them. But I can't find the chili peppers I want as plants. You can get varieties like Superchili and Thai Dragon as seeds, but I hate to set all that stuff up just to do the chilis, and nobody's selling the plants.
Monday was 70 degrees, and I spent the day in the garden ripping out last year's dead pea vines and ropes of dessicated pumpkin stalk. I found the columbine putting up tiny improbable whorls of leaves and a few baby stems of mint just barely showing above the mud by the driveway.
It's all bullshit, of course. The landscaping crew will show up in the middle of the night sometime in May and pop in full-grown plants to replace these wan survivors. And then I'll take a few pictures and pull a few weeds and wonder who's paying those landscapers.
Certain things around the house can make me catch my breath in wonder and surprise, even though it's a pretty ordinary house.
I. The other day I was morosely poking around under the giant leaves of the huge cucurbita vines that have taken over the vegetable garden and are now on the march across the yard, trying not to stab myself on the prickly stems and hoping to discern what type of useless fleshy masses they are likely to produce (squash, which nobody but me will eat; gourds, which nobody but the squirrels can eat; or pumpkins, which can at least be carved into amusing faces), and a beam of sunlight shone down on this, a pumpkin (I am pretty sure) already the size of a basketball.
I had my first tomato sandwich of the year today: a sliced Big Beef tomato on white bread with mayonnaise and salt, and I ate it standing over the sink gazing blankly at the back yard, just like every Baltimore summer since I was old enough to make my own sandwiches.
III. I was using a Sharpie to make out a grocery list this morning (honey, children's vitamins, white bread) when the kids started talking about tattoos.
"Hey, You guys want Sharpie tattoos?" You don't have to ask this twice in our house - they were all over the idea.
"Ok, I'll give you Sharpie tattoos." Mr. Four asked for a star, so I gave him your classic tattoo-museum star.
"[Big Man]? What will you have?" And he pointed at the band around my forearm, and said "I want one of those."
I drew one of the stylized Bronze Age seashells from my arm on his shoulder, and I don't know who was prouder, me or him.
