At Random for July 3, 2009
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“Here, nature and life follow a pattern that has gone so far out of style that it gets rejected in the editorial offices,” the great Russian author Anton Chekhov once wrote in a letter to a friend. It was Chekhov’s way of letting people know that what happened around his household wouldn’t be counted as news anywhere else.
I’ve been thinking about Chekhov on recent summer evenings when my wife returns from the backyard to offer her daily Tomato Report. It’s a brief account, often delivered with the urgency of a broadcaster announcing a trial verdict, of how our two homely tomato vines are faring this season.
Tomato news is in no danger of replacing Bernie Madoff or Michael Jackson in this month’s media circus, although I often find the intrigues of home horticulture more interesting than the latest financial scandal or celebrity death.
If the news, an industry in which I’ve had an enjoyable career, is a constant study in what’s fleeting, the cycle of seasons I follow in the garden usefully reminds me of what endures.
Tomato talk is a long tradition for me. As a youngster, I often eavesdropped on Sunday afternoons as my father’s conversations with his siblings turned to tomato vines, pole beans or the relative health of bell peppers and squash. The farm where my father’s people had grown up was no longer in business, but he and many of his brothers and sisters continued to keep their hands in the soil through backyard gardens.
As a 10 year-old, I was not greatly scintillated by my elders’ gossip about the virtues of raised beds and routine irrigation, or the merits of a fertilizer known only by what seemed to be a strange military code, 8-8-8.
I wondered how so many adults could chatter for so long about gardens when the world seemed strained by so many urgencies — Watergate, inflation, an energy shortage, bloodshed in the Middle East.
But this summer, as I pause from each day’s headlines to follow the progress of our garden, I understand why I’ve come to value tomato talk, and why my father liked it, too. The news, by necessity, is often touched by peril, but tomato talk is about promise and possibility.
Reports from this summer’s tomato patch, like dispatches from any garden, have been mixed. Our vines are surprisingly leggy, despite a windfall of new sunlight from the loss of an old sweetgum tree. With evil ingenuity, birds have ravaged two of our tomatoes just as they were blushing into ripeness.
But the vines are heavy with fruit, and the bamboo stakes that hold them toward the summer sun seem a gallant banner of what is best about the season.
I cannot wait to get home today and sit at the dining room table, waiting for my wife to bring the next Tomato Report to the door.
Advocate editorial writer Danny Heitman contributes “At Random” to the People section each Friday.
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