Tomatoes

Its sort of amazing to me when someone isn't willing to share.  If I remember childhood right, it was basically grownups forcing kids to share everything constantly until they graduated and moved out.  You shared your gifts with your brother at Christmas, your cake with your friends on your birthday, you sent your toys off to Goodwill in the spring, you shared your candy with the little kids at Halloween.  You never wanted to, but the entire kid calendar was pegged to sharing, so you shared.  You shared because it was the only way to keep the adults out of your hair.  That's the social contract: you are made to share as a child, so that sharing will be second-nature by the time you're an adult.  You need the entire society to reenforce this concept because, of course, sharing sucks.

If you didn't share, you'd still have all your candy and cake, and 100% use of your toys.  You'd want for nothing, and good thing, too--anything you DID want for, no one would share with you.  The reason we teach kids to share even though it sucks is that you get something better than you give with sharing.  You don't get all the junk you want, but you do end up with a community you can live in.  You wind up with a bunch of people leaning on a lifetime of parental bullying to get each other to pitch-in just enough to keep society from falling apart.

Henry doesn't want to share.  It doesn't take long to figure out that sharing is a drag.  So now I find myself on the other end of the contract.  Now I'm the one hectoring him to share his tomatoes with his buddy Harrison when they come to our garden, and not to bogart Harrison's tomatoes when we go to theirs.  For now I'm lucky though.  Henry only speaks about a dozen words, and none of them is "Why?"

There's a list of thirty gardeners at our garden patch who have donated produce to the food bank.  Henry and I are number twenty-nine.  "Why Dad?  Why I gotta share?"  Henry will learn to share through the ritual forcing of his mom and I, every day, for the next two decades.  He's going to ask us why he has to a lot.  Getting us a heck of a lot higher on that list might not make sharing easy for me to explain, as this muddy post attests, but at least it might give me one leg to stand on.  

I shouldn't say that Henry NEVER likes to share.  When we were at the garden with little Harrison and his dad, the boys were pretty sweet to each other.  Harrison gave Henry some of his cherry tomatoes, and Henry responded by petting Harrison's head, the nice way we taught him on the dog.  Then he let Harrison take the tomatoes back, and laid his head on Harrison's leg, to get patted on the ear.  These boys... they're some good boys.

Tomato
Solanum lycopersicum
Family solanaceae (nightshade)


Tomatoes are related to a lot of dangerous plants like henbane, deadly nightshade, and even the potato, which can make people terribly sick.  After it was first brought to Europe from Mexico (having originated in the Andes), its poisonous cousins and what was considered a rancid smell led the founder of taxonomy, Carl Linnaeus, to name the fearsome plant "lycopersicum": wolf peach. Thus began a checkered history that led finally to the tomato becoming "the most popular garden vegetable in the world" according to a website I found that doesn't site sources.

You say "tomato", I say "wolf peach".

--Tim 8/29/11