The Tomato King

Last year, Mac said he wasn't going to plant so many tomatoes.  This was after our tomatoes were like zucchini in that we couldn't  give them away.  I canned and froze tomatoes and wrapped green ones in newspaper and stored them in the pantry.  We were eating tomatoes at Thanksgiving.  He grows some really great ones in these things he call "growtainers".  They hold two plants each.   He has four of them.  The tomatoes get to be softball and bigger size.  They make great sink sandwiches.  He has the makings for  four more of these growtainers out there.  Okay, so that's eight tomato plants already bearing.  But wait!  He has nearly an acre  planted in melons, beans,  Armendian melons (a great cucumber), eggplant and peppers...we have strawberries (still putting on fruit)  and YES we have TOMATOES.  There are Celebrity,  Mortgage Lifter (three different varieties) and lord knows what else.  He even  has some grafting stock to try grafting.  Like we don't have enough already.    I saw this little marvel  of a gadget on The Price is Right.  It was called a Tomato Press.  Okay, so lots of you already knew about this thing, but I didn't.  So that weekend, I used it for the second time.  I put on a big pan of boiling water and started blanching the  baskets and baskets of tomatoes that were sitting on every available space in the kitchen and dining room.  I just plopped the tomatoes, skin and all, into the hopper and started turning the handle.  Out poured lovely tomato sauce.  I put the skin and seed  back through and got more juice...I worked for nearly three hours and ended up with ten quarts of lovely tomato's for use in sauces of  all kinds.  And it made a pretty good juice, too.    Last year, it went like this: I had just spent two hours watering the garden.  I  watered the fruit trees and all the tomatoes, the  Strawberries and the eggplant. I watered the peppers (bell and HOT) and the flowers even got some attention for a change.  Done  with the front, I turned the hose over to Mac and came inside for a cup of coffee!   Mac was down in the big garden watering .  I went down to take him a cold drink and he was shaking his head.  "What's up?" I asked him.  He looked around at the 80+ Tomato plants (including the three he had planted on Saturday) and said "I'm not going to plant so many tomatoes next year."   I  nodded wisely, but a mental eye roll was what was going on in my head.  Yep, I've heard that before!  Right  now, at this very  second he is going through a box of seeds he saved from last year.  They are tomato seeds.  I give up.

On Reading THE BOOK THIEF

Power outages are a pain...and due to a bit of ice during the night, we had a countywide outage. 

awakened at about 4 a.m. and noticed that the fan was not running.  Getting up to check the 

clock, I immediately crawled back in my warm bed before it became a cold bed.  I didn't have long

to wait.  At 6:30 I got up and still no power.  Fetching the torch (flashlight) I went looking for my

Kindle.  I am half way through The Book Thief, and this was the perfect opportunity to get deep

into the other half.  I haven't seen the movie, which I understand is very good, but I often refuse 

to see the movie before reading the book.  Hollywood never does the book proud.  I remember  

once after reading Dean Koontz's The Watchers for the third time going to see the movie.  The

only thing vaguely familiar was the beautiful Golden Retriever.  What a waste of money.

So as I am reading The Book Thief, I noticed something.  My face was in turmoil.  It couldn't smile,

it wouldn't hold even a hint of a smile.  I stopped to think back on other favorite books and going

down the list in my mind realized that most books have humor in them, even if the books are not

intended to be funny.  It makes a nice break in the book from the terror or the haunting or

whatever the nature of the book might be.  Humor is definitely not the nature of The Book Thief. 

The nature of this book is not really fear either.  The nature of this book is Doldrums...because that

is where you are from page one onward.  The Holocaust is the main thrust of the book, but even

in The Diary of Anne Frank you smile on occasion and are even able to laugh out loud.  But not

here.  I hope I am not putting you off reading this spell binding  book because that is exactly what

it is, spell binding.  I find my self putting off the last few pages hating to come to the end of it

Because I know I will  never want to read it again,

The Ugly Tattoo

I was talking online to my granddaughter Arianna yesterday.  She loves school, and for that I am grateful.  I loved school, too.  I attended many of them during my schoolyears and  even once went to school in a skating rink (our school in Savannah had burned to the ground).  Arianna told me that they are reading To Kill a Mockingbird in English Lit and how much she is enjoying it.  I asked her if she had read The Diary of Anne Frank and she said no.  I was shocked, as it was required reading in my class at Our Lady of Victory in Washington, DC.  It was not, however, how I first learned of the Holocaust. 
I was twelve years old and we lived in Cleveland, Ohio.  Our neighbors 2 doors down were the Silvers.  I was friends with their daughter Regina and frequently was a guest in their home.  We played card games with Mrs Silver and it was she who taught us to play Rummy 500.  One day when I was there Dr. Silver came home and was so excited he was actully shouting as he came in the door, yelling for "Mama".  "Mama Mama, are you here?"  He ruffled mine and Gina's hair as he rushed by us, looking for his wife.  He called her "Mama" and she called him "Papa".  His voice was filled with excitement and something I only identified as justification years later.  I heard the name Eichman mentioned and that he had been captured by the Israeli's Mossad and was now being held for trial.  Mrs Silver came in and sat down with a whoomph on the feather sofa between Gina and me.  She turned her wrist over and gently stroked the numbers and letters inked permenently there on that pale skin.  Gina had told me some time ago that her parents had been in the Concentration Camp Treblinka and had been freed at the end of the war by American troops.
There were many war criminals to be held up to public scrutiny and put on trial at Nuremburg but many still who escaped justice.  One of them was Otto Adolph Eichmann.  And that was what was causing all the excitement in the Silver household.  This cruel man had finally been found in South America and was going to finally face the victims who were still living and hopefully pay the price for ones who did not.  My eyes kept going to the tattoo on Mrs Silver's wrist.  She took my hand and laid my fingers on the ugly block of ink.  "Never again we pray..." she whispered.
When we moved to DC one of the books we were required to read was "The Diary of Anne Frank" and I was mesmerized because finally I understood a bit of what the Silvers had been through.  A very little bit, but I would learn more as I grew up.  I was haunted by that turned wrist and the anguish in the eyes of a friend's mother.  Here is a short history of one of the cruelest men to ever draw breath...Otto Adolf Eichmann was a German Nazi SS-Obersturmbannführer and one of the major organisers of the Holocaust. Eichmann was charged by SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich with facilitating and managing the logistics of mass deportation of Jews to ghettos and extermination camps in German-occupied Eastern Europe during World War II. In 1960, he was captured in Argentina by the Mossad, Israel's intelligence service. Following a widely publicised trial in Israel, he was found guilty of war crimes and hanged in 1962.
Last week was the 70th anniversary of the discovery and freeing of the prisoners left alive in the camps of Auschwitz, Treblinka, camps to numerous to list here.  Lest we forget...