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Hunker Down with Kes

And You Think Gasoline Is Expensive!

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I’m not much for buying things on the side of the road. Cathy insisted. She wanted some fresh home-grown tomatoes. I got to thinking about a good BLT with just the right amount of mayonnaise. And I hadn’t had a baloney and tomato sandwich in years...

A quick snapshot of me and Leon and David Mark flashed through my mind; how we used to go out behind the house and pull the biggest, red-est, ripest tomatoes right off the vine. We’d salt them right there in the garden using one of those small miniature shakers the Morton Salt Company were selling at the time. You talk about delicious!

Maybe this wasn’t such a bad idea after all.

I slowed and pulled into the roadside stand advertising “Peaches, Cantaloupes, Watermelons and Vine Ripe Tomatoes.” Cathy, as you may suspect, doesn’t bother to carry any cash.

“How much do you need?”

“Oh, ten dollars will be plenty.”

I handed her the money and did some quick calculating; ten dollars worth of tomatoes... Good golly, I jumped out of the van and hurried to the back. I slid the suitcases, two pair of running shoes and a Seth Thomas No. 4 Fashion clock I’d picked up on this trip to the front to clear some space for our purchase. Ten dollars worth may be more than we had room for...

Cathy came back to the car with one small sack in her hand, “They really look scrumptious and look how big they are!”

I was a little confused as I perused the fairly large (I’ve seen bigger) and decently ripe tomato. “Where are the rest of them? I thought we were buying ten dollars worth.”

“We did.”

“How many do you have in that sack?”

“Five.”

Another quick snapshot jumped into my head. This one was of Mrs. Clella Mae Carter. She taught the higher math classes at McKenzie High School when I was tending to the vine ripe tomatoes in our garden. I did some major long division ciphering and came up with the sobering fact that I’d just paid two dollar a piece for five “fair to middling” tomatoes!

Listen, two dollars would buy a pair of shoes when I was a kid. Two dollars would buy five hamburgers at the City Café. Two dollars would buy 40 packs of baseball cards at Pat Houston’s Grocery. I would have to work at the Swimming Pool for four blistering hot hours to earn two dollars...

I went back to the snapshot of me and my brothers eating in the garden back home. Before Leon finished his first tomato, he’d throw it at me. Of course, I had to retaliate by throwing what was left of mine at David.

We’d pull another ripe one, salt it down, take a few bites and then throw it at the nearest unsuspecting brother. Pretty soon we forgot about eating them, we just pulled one off and flung it at each other.

The point is...the tomatoes weren’t worth much. We had six rows of the things! Many of’em would “go bad” before we could eat them. I know farmers who would turn their hogs loose in the garden to “finish off” what the family couldn’t eat, can or sell.

The only time I thought of tomatoes as a “cash” crop is when Leon had the brilliant idea to gather up a large burlap sack full of them and go door to door peddling them off on the neighbors. We lugged our load down the road to Mrs. Brooks’ house. As we were walking up on the porch I got to looking over the row after row of tomatoes in that big garden between the house and their cotton field.

I didn’t say nothing because Leon was the brains of the outfit; but how are we gonna sell something to anyone who has more of it than we do? To my everlasting surprise Mrs. Brooks gave us a quarter for “however many” we wanted to give her. Leon handed her the whole bag!

And we all went home thinking we’d just completed the greatest bargain of all time!

It never crossed our minds that if we had just kept all the tomatoes that we had eaten, thrown at each other, stepped on or sold to Mrs. Brooks, we would be millionaires one day!

I had a BLT just as soon as we got to the house! And I enjoyed a baloney and tomato sandwich for breakfast the next morning. It was so good, I had one more for dessert.

I’m not saying that any single one tomato is worth two dollars. Not by any stretch of the imagination. But I’m telling you, these came close.

And I guess there is a bright side here. The tomatoes didn’t take up much room on the ride home...

Respectfully,
Kes