Today a car swung into the parking lot of Roberts Crop Insurance, narrowly missing my dog and me. The woman driving it leaned to the passenger side window and shouted, "Is that Cleo??" I looked down just to be sure. Yes, it was Cleo, attached to her leash. We'd just been for a run in the flat grassy lot that separates Dr. Smith's office from the back yards of houses on Moss Drive. The woman sounded relieved. "I saw her running through the yards and I thought she'd gotten loose, so I hopped in my car to try to catch her."
Catching a whippet is a neat trick, and I found Ms. Hendren's train of thought equally elusive. "I sometimes sit with the Mennonite woman who sells tomatoes," she explained. A man comes there with Cleo." I thanked her and felt the heat-dulled wheels turning in my head to make sense of it all. She had met Cleo and Ira on one of their tomato-walks to the Mennonite produce stand.
It is almost impossible to find a good tomato in San Francisco. Overpriced heirlooms at the Ferry Building Farmer's Market look the part, but still don't have the juicy, acid-ey flavor of a hot Big Boy straight out of a Kentucky garden. So when we are in Kentucky we have tomatoes with coffee at breakfast, layer tomato with mozzarella for sandwiches at noon, and slurp up fresh-tomato pasta at night. We furtively stand at the kitchen sink and let the seedy juice trickle down our chins. We top tomato wedges with cold cottage cheese and cucumber for a cool-off snack on the side porch in mid-afternoon, and sometimes tomatoes disappear from the kitchen counter between midnight and 8 am.
A couple of days ago we found the ultimate fresh-tomato treat in John Ross' home made tomato ketchup. This glittering caviar, perfected by John's Uncle Bill, came from a family recipe. It takes an entire day to cook, beginning with twenty fresh tomatoes, pickling spice, and a bushel of sugar. By sunset the tomatoes have become a sweet treasure to be savored on crackers with cheese, heaped on a burger and bun, or licked straight from the spoon. When Uncle Bill died in the spring, his recipe attained mythic status.
Today tomatoes have almost rescued a whippet, have put Uncle Bill on the culinary walk of fame, and have outed my husband, making him famous for being the one and only person in town sufficiently heroic to brave the heat on his tomato quest.
The kharmic cycle was complete when, late this afternoon, I was again stopped in my tracks. Katie Beck was hurrying in the door of Greg's Market, but took a minute to say hi. I already knew what her first words would be.
"I saw Ira this morning," she said. "He was at the Mennonites' buying tomatoes."
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