Things I Love

Homegrown tomatoes. I love them. All kinds. Heirlooms, beefsteaks, superstars, Better Boys, Burmese sours, Cherokee purples, double-Ds, you name it.

A tomato is a magical thing. A love story in nutritional form. A tomato connects you with real life in a way nothing else can.

I want them room temperature. Sliced thick. Salted and peppered. Or placed onto a slab of soft white Bunny Bread, coated with enough Duke’s mayonnaise to suffocate a small woodland creature. Eaten as a sandwich.

Also, chocolate. Love it. We went to Spain recently, and there is chocolate everywhere. They sell it at every tienda, mercado, and café. I even bought chocolate once at the police station.

Since being home, I’ve developed a crippling addiction to cocoa. I’m plowing through a bar of chocolate every day or so. My wife sincerely believes that I would be easy to kidnap because I take chocolate from strangers.

Likewise, I love my dogs. I have three. Thelma Lou (bloodhound), Otis Campbell (alleged Labrador), and Marigold (American coonhound). They are not well-behaved dogs, mind you.

Whenever company comes over to our house, for example, within seconds our dogs have coerced them into throwing balls and playing tug-of-war with various chew toys that resemble deceased hamsters. After only minutes in our home, many of our visitors suddenly remember urgent dental appointments.

And I love water. Big bodies of water. I love the lake, the Gulf, the rivers, whatever. I need water in my life.

American music. The old stuff. Fiddle tunes. Folk ballads. Old school R&B, when bands still had horn sections. And classic country before grown men wore glitter jeans. Old hymns.

I’m crazy about hymns. They hold a power over me I cannot shake. Why don’t we write spiritual songs like this anymore?

Many of the historic spirituals are pure poetry. Whereas today’s church music contains four lyrics, a lead guitar hook, and a dance break.

Even so, when you read the text of the old hymns, it’s like reading Robert Burns:

“Here I raise my Ebenezer;

“Hither by thy help I'm come;

“And I hope, by thy good pleasure,

“Safely to arrive at home…”

Also. I love my wife. Nobody has ever believed in me the way she has. Nobody ever had reason to. Nobody expected much out of me in this life, and for the most part, they have not been disappointed.

But somehow, Jamie Richburg Martin could see through me. She understood me. We’ve been married 22 years, and I still can’t believe it’s been so long.

It feels like only yesterday that I stood at the altar, wearing a rented tux that smelled like someone else’s b.o fumes, and trousers that ended up giving me a groinal rash.

While standing at that altar with her, I knew that this was the beginning of the rest of my life. The beginning of my spiritual development. The beginning of a decades-long crisis of perpetually trying to figure out what the hell is for dinner.

So anyway, I bring all this up because this morning when I woke, all I saw were horrible things. The news networks featured journalists all chewing the same depressing cud. My social media feed was chock-full of hateful political rants from whack-jobs I don’t even know.

Every headline features global tragedy. Every internet video is clickbait. Everyone wants your money. Everyone wants to scare you. Fear, fear, fear. Buy, buy, buy.

But you know what you’ll never read on social media? You know what you’ll never see on your newsfeed? Real life.

No, to experience this mysterious and wonderful gift of reality, you must power down your phone, shut off the 24-hour talking heads, quit reading internet articles written by vary pore riters like this one, and breathe.

Maybe make a list of things you love, count them one by one, immerse yourself in these things, and never let them go. And then, when you are finally ready to experience the fullness of joy…

Eat a homegrown tomato.