Monday, June 23, 2008
Summer means big, red tomatoes
Ben Beagle
The aging, semi-hysterical retired reporter rides shotgun with the greatest station wagon driver of them all down the rocky road of life. Mondays and Wednesdays, steady as she goes.
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This is for all of you clowns out there who are singing those songs about summer being a good time. You know, those crazy, lazy days of summer and garbage like that.
Well, that's fine. That is, if you like to get heatstroke when you walk 30 yards to the mailbox and find some strange outfit called Big Sonic Buster has charged $4.99 on your credit card.
And you know snow will be falling again before you settle up with Big Sonic Buster. I don't know how Big Sonic Buster got on my credit card, but I probably did something wrong on my aged computer. Hot weather probably.
Sucker for a good tomato
But somewhere, great big, toothy, red tomatoes will be growing unless the vines get heatstroke and wither away.
I tried raising tomatoes like that several times and the results made some of my best friends suggest that I get counseling.
The vines got so big that I was afraid they might harm me. As in "The Attack of the Tomato Vines," starring Bennie Beagle and Catherine Zeta-Jones.
The tomatoes on these vines looked, and tasted, like off-yellow golf balls. But the vines were magnificent.
And all of the men who like summer and have the nerve to go the dentist in cargo shorts told me that I hadn't "suckered" the vines and thus the energy of the plants went into the vines as opposed to the tomatoes.
And I said I didn't know how to "sucker" tomato vines, and they laughed and went to sunbathe around the pool and eat these really great tomato sandwiches with a whole lot of mayonnaise. And maybe a slice of Bermuda onion or even some cheddar cheese.
Move it, lady
And then, when you go to the dentist in your wrinkled cargo shorts, some lady fills out her medical questionnaire while standing at the reception desk. Meanwhile, three sweating old men in wrinkled cargo shorts wait to sign in and fill out the form on clipboards while seated decently in the waiting room.
These old men -- although of the Old School -- probably thought about beating this lady about the head and shoulders.
This was after this nice lady finished cleaning my teeth and this cruel chair trapped me with this hostile arm it has.
And I hoped that a chair might have also trapped the lady who thinks she rules the world. I like to think that, in wholesome cold weather, the lady wouldn't have been that rude. And the chair would have let me go my own way.
Certainly, there wouldn't have been a whole lot of old geezers in cargo shorts hanging around.
