This is about tomatoes

And other things too. But mostly tomatoes.

Just past ripe early girl tomatoes, on the smaller side, dry-farmed of course, sliced into thick discs and layered on top of whitefish salad, spread atop a toasted onion bagel, quartered.

I have been eating my favorite breakfast these last few weeks.

When my teeth shear through it, the tomato flesh bursts apart, a rush of sweet summer fruit as the delicate skins rupture. The salty, creamy mix of smoked fish, mayonnaise and vinegar offsets the fresh juice. All of it soaks into the bagel itself, a dense, chewy thing flecked with poppy seeds, jammy bits of onion holding onto the shiny boiled crust.

I am never more present than this.

I'm taking a drawing class again, the same class I took earlier this year but for the second time (a drawing class that our instructor tells us is not a drawing class, and therefore we are not making drawings, despite the product of our class time together looking exactly like things that anyone not in the class would readily call drawings, though we aren't supposed to be creating products either). Sometimes during class, and especially during these initial weeks, the instructor asks us: on a scale of 1-10, how present are we?

I'm usually a 4-6 in class. Less that my mind is wandering, more that I have an alert awareness of the ways that I'm still trying to understand what I'm doing, still comparing myself to other people in the class, not trying to make drawings but still hoping later that one of these non-drawings looks enough like a Good Drawing that I will take a photo of it and post it to a secret Instagram account. It's different this time around, but I recognize the sameness too. The same struggle of being present.

When I'm eating this tomato whitefish onion bagel, it's 10s across the board. I am present in the moment and experiencing it fully. It's perfection.

It tastes like sunshine salivating. It feels like every part of my mouth is active and alive. Words feel wholly inadequate and trite. I am Remy from Ratatouille describing the jazz of flavor combinations to his brother Emil.

This time last year I was recovering from my first COVID infection. It had caused me to miss a much-anticipated vacation to Maui. A friend and I were meant to arrive on August 8th to stay in Kihei, a place just half an hour down the coast from Lahaina, where a year later to the day, wildfires gave way to massive loss and destruction.

My bout with COVID that round was thankfully mild, and most symptoms resolved within a week. The thing that didn't come back quickly was smell and taste. I felt fine. I was testing negative. But everything I ate tasted like nothing. I was terrified to talk about it, to acknowledge that it was happening. I didn't know what I would do if it didn't come back at all.

I made myself one bagel during that time, hoping that despite my inability to taste anything else this one would be an exception. It was not. Without the familiar and loved ability to perceive all of the flavors in that bite, the texture of the slimy tomato, the oiliness of the whitefish, and the clumps of bagel bread were nauseating. I tried to will memory into play, thinking that scent recall could help. It didn't.

Eventually the taste came back, but the tomatoes were gone. The season had passed.

When the plastic white crates appeared at the farmer's market earlier this summer, I couldn't wait. The early girls were piled high up, the tops of them peeking out over the sides, visible from a few stalls away as I approached. And it has been a glorious season so far. I've been trying to write about these tomatoes and these breakfasts for weeks and I finally feel like I know how to talk about them with you.

But it feels like we're nearing the end of the season again. It's been hot in San Francisco, far too hot, and even in my normally cool, basement-adjacent apartment, my weekly ration of tomatoes goes bad before the end of the week. I'm not used to storing them in the fridge, where they become grainy and strange.

This past Sunday, the crate was only about half full, and many of the tomatoes were too ripe, far easier to bruise and prick as we picked through them. There's only so much we can do to hold onto this moment, before the holding on itself pulls presence away.

I wonder what comes next. The way my life looks right now is a wild cry from how it looked last year. I suspect by this time next year it will look even wilder.