Tomatoes

Tomatoes

Laura and I don’t like tomatoes. Is it genetic? Probably not. It does, however, puzzle Mom.

Mom loves tomatoes. She told me yesterday that when she was pregnant with me she craved them. Her dad would buy them for her. She learned to eat them in sections, so they didn’t drip.

I joked that maybe that’s when I got tired of them. A raised eyebrow. She’s skeptical about that one.

When the subject comes up, I tell people I don’t eat them because tomatoes are poisonous. That was a real belief. (See Why the Tomato Was Feared in Europe for More Than 200 Years.) No one ever gets it. The usual reaction is “No, they aren’t.” Sigh.

When I was growing up, we usually had tomato slices at dinner. When we lived in Logan we put sugar on them. After Mom married Carroll and we moved to Mantua, no more sugar. He was a food fascist. We could put salt on them or eat them plain. Nothing else. He ate his with salt and pepper. That boy put salt and pepper on just about everything, even his buttermilk and cottage cheese.

So, I stopped eating tomatoes. Mostly.

When we lived in Las Vegas, there are no bees to pollinate tomatoes. Mom still planted them. It was my job to go out with a little paintbrush and gently brush the flowers in order to pollinate them. Also my job to pull off the tomato worms. (I never thought about it before. Where did tomato worms come from in an area and climate where people don’t grow tomatoes?)

Talking yesterday, Mom wondered if I remember whether Evonne liked tomatoes. Most certainly, she did. The reason I remember is that when Evonne married Danny they clashed on the right way to make stew. Danny thought stew was supposed have a gravy base. Evonne thought it was supposed to have a tomato base.

And that reminds me of another piece of my childhood. Every year Mom would put up I don’t know how many bushels of stewed tomatoes. Aunt Betty did the same. I suppose those tomatoes went into quite a few different dishes through the year, but the I remember is stew. I don’t know the recipe but I’m pretty sure it must have started with “Put two quarters of stewed tomatoes in a sauce pan.”

I was happy enough to leave the family stew recipe and tomatoes behind when I left home. Evonne dug in for tradition.

St. Mark’s Lutheran

St. Mark’s Lutheran

I was sad to hear St. Mark’s Lutheran Church in Provo has closed. Or, not exactly closed but the property is sold, there are houses where the church used to be, and the congregation is now meeting at some event center up north. A casualty of being a religious minority in Utah Valley.

This was the church where my sisters Evonne and Linda got married, where their children and grandchildren were baptized, the church Evonne attended her whole adult life, where she belonged to Altar Guild, and where she taught Vacation Bible School.

The pastor I remember is Bruce Jeske. I’m godfather to my two nephews, so I had to meet with him before their baptisms. My sisters liked him but he came across to me as adversarial. Maybe because by then I was Episcopalian rather than Lutheran. When you’re a minority you probably don’t like defections.

Then too, St. Mark’s was Missouri Synod. We had a whole history of not being Missouri Synod. Too conservative.

We were Augustana Synod in Brigham City, Utah. They were the Swedish church. Then they joined with other churches to form the Lutheran Church in America (LCA) in 1962. In Las Vegas we had to drive across town to an LCA church even though an American Lutheran Church (ALC) church was closer. But in Grand Junction we had to go to an ALC church because that was the only choice. That’s where I was confirmed.

The particular flavor of Lutheran mattered because my (step) dad was a Freemason. The more conservative kinds of Lutheran didn’t allow that.

Back in Utah, in Orem-Provo the only choice was Missouri Synod. Even more conservative. They went their own way even after the 1988 merger of the ALC and LCA into the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.

Update March 10, 2023: I’ve heard the St. Mark’s congregation is still meeting, now in a building in Lindon. I don’t know what happened. Maybe the membership dropped to the point they couldn’t afford to maintain the church building any longer.

This article explains perfectly why my family was Republican two generations ago, but Democratic now.

This article explains perfectly why my family was Republican two generations ago, but Democratic now.

This article explains perfectly why my family was Republican two generations ago, but Democratic now. One of the oddest things to me is that so many people I know, people who lived through these changes, have no concept of the Big Picture.

http://weeklysift.com/2012/12/03/a-short-history-of-white-racism-in-the-two-party-system///cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js