Guy Clark sings that there are “only two things that money can’t buy — and that’s true love and home-grown tomatoes.” Growing up, I was never the tomato fan that Guy was. My grandmother would set a plate in front of me, the plate that offered the noxious fruit disguised as a vegetable. “MeMe (pronounced Mimi), you know I don’t like tomatoes.” I didn’t try to conceal my exasperation. MeMe was (pardon the vegetable pun) always cool as a cucumber. She’d remove the plate and say, “Oh, you still don’t?”
Our little play went on this way for years. Every time I’d visit her at her home in Huntsville, Alabama, we’d recite the same script like rehearsed actors. Only, I was always perturbed by it, and I’m ashamed to admit, bratty about it. “You know I have never liked tomatoes and I won’t ever like them.” MeMe would give me a little should shrug and say:
“Well, someday you will.”
For many years when I was growing up, I thought my grandfather was a professional farmer. It’s true that at one time in his life he had been one. But I thought he was still a farmer because whenever we visited my grandparents, my grandfather worked in his garden with such diligence (getting up at 4am) that I thought it was still a paying job for him. He grew luscious, beefy vegetables that he had tilled and toiled cared for over hours and hours. It was some of the fruits of his labor that my grandmother would serve me: a fresh, bright red, home-grown sliced tomato.
I had always hated tomatoes. There was so much to dislike: the odd smell, the slimy texture, a weird, acidic taste. It felt like a personal affront that my grandmother acted like she didn’t know about my disdain. Time and again I had told her that I did not like tomatoes. Not on a bus or with a guy named Gus or on a bench or with a wrench… I would never like tomatoes.
Until one day I did.
I wish I could say the day I liked tomatoes is etched in my brain as a big life event. It should have been, I guess. But one day, probably in my early 20’s, I simply liked them. Not just that I could stand them. But I actually liked them! When I was pregnant with my first child, I even craved them so much that I’d stand over the sink and eat one like an apple.
This story isn’t about how I went from not liking tomatoes to liking them. It’s about the woman who had supreme patience with me. MeMe taught me so many lessons, and I didn’t realize it at the time. Even in her tomato crusade, she was teaching me.
I learned to try new things.
Not that a tomato was “new,” but if I all of a sudden liked tomatoes when I’d hated them for so long, what wonders, culinary and beyond, might be awaiting me behind all kinds of mystical doors?
Just because I had certain beliefs/thoughts/feelings now, that doesn’t mean I would remain that way.
All those years instead of my catty retorts, I could have told MeMe, “you know, I still don’t like tomatoes now, but who knows what the future might hold?” Maybe I could have have been open to the possibility of being a tomato-phile instead of stubbornly planting a proverbial foot in the ground and being close-minded. Now my aim is to be more open-minded about all sorts of things.
She never forced her way on me. She simply offered it.
MeMe’s calm nature was amazing. She never chided me for my saucy attitude; she never even acknowledged it. Her reaction to me was always one of matter-of-fact tenderness. There was no schedule or agenda. I could come to my liking on my own time on my own terms. But she consistently gave me the option.
MeMe always had faith in me; she always believed in me.
MeMe kept offering me the tomato because she didn’t want me to miss out on the sublime goodness of it; the perfect sweetness of the in-season, sliced and salted home-grown beauty. She knew I’d eventually come to like them. I think of her in her small kitchen with the knotty pine cabinets, rubbing her hands on a tea towel. Her faith in the knowledge that someday, I’d come around. She was always that way about everything. Always believing in the goodness of people, always resting in the assurance that whatever they might be mixed up in now, why, they’d come around. Don’t we all want someone like that in our corner? Someone who has faith, simple and inexplicable faith, that we are good and we are going to be okay.
I went to visit MeMe in her independent living high-rise apartment some time after I’d had my first child. He was around three or so, and he sat with her on the sofa.
“MeMe, guess what? You’re never going to believe it! I actually love tomatoes now!”
True to form, MeMe didn’t get overly excited. She offered a tiny should shrug and said,