Leggy Tomatoes Friday Night Round-Up

This may sound crazy, but I truly believe that the country’s preoccupation with Alzheimer’s Disease has had the unintended consequence of marginalizing old people. All roads lead to dementia, or that’s how it seems despite the fact that only 5% of people ages 65-74 and 13% of those 75-84 have the disease. After 85, it’s one in three. Most old people don’t get A.D. but we all walk around like symptoms in search of a disease, every lost key having a dire meaning it didn’t have forty years ago when we were carrying groceries in one arm and a toddler in the other. And that shakiness about ourselves? It invites the side-eye. And the sideline.

On that note, while we were dissecting Joe Biden’s speech and assessing his ability to go up airplane stairs without tripping, he was weaving together an historic coalition of countries to obtain the freedom of hostages held in Russian prison. He knew he could manage that kind of high-level diplomacy and probably everything else a president has to do but he got out of the way anyway. For the sake of the country, he agreed to his own marginalization. Aging – it’s so complicated.

I have been summoned to federal jury duty. There is a long list of instructions but nothing about whether I can bring a book or a sandwich. Nor is there any info on what to wear. Dress nice, I think, but not too nice, like you’re going to church with a friend with the goal of kind of merging with the pew. Mousy wear. That’s the ticket.

Our neighbor, with whom we share a driveway, has an enormous pile of empty Amazon boxes outside his back door. We have taken to calling it “Mount Mark.” We care about the boxes, but we don’t. Mostly, we don’t because our neighbor is pretty nice. Tonight, he offered us the use of his electric smoker if he could find it in his garage. The plan is to smoke a turkey next weekend. Our kids used to have wild water fights with this neighbor, so crazy that he’d dump buckets of water on them from his upstairs windows. So, I remember that when I look at the boxes although I’ll be glad when they’re gone, and he starts a new pile.

Speaking of the neighbor, he stopped giving advice about my tomato plants which are now extraordinarily tall and very leggy. There are little wee green tomatoes budding out and when one is ripe, I’m going to have some kind of harvest ceremony with chants and champagne. There is also basil which, of course, leads to a night of caprese. It is so lovely to grow a thing to eat.