Family heirlooms

What has the digital revolution done for us lately? Before you answer, would you please for the love of Poseidon, let me do so first? I think I know what's going on here. Thanks. Even though it’s nearly impossible to legally (and safely) dispose of my closet full of decrepit laptops with grotesquely swollen batteries, it is not the same thing as leaving something for the next generation. Which, might I add, is an integral part of life. Entrusting an artifact or memento to your descendants is a sign of humility and selflessness. Bestowing on them a burden, whether in the form of a decaying piece of technology or an equally volatile piece of emotional baggage, should not be the aim here.

Every family’s different in how they practice this. Some are content with leaving floppy fedoras and penny loafers – archaic souvenirs from a different time that will prove less and less useful as the years go on. Others opt for sentimentality over utility, usually a Swiss Army knife or a modest Patek Phillipe wristwatch. A vintage herringbone overcoat, while nice, doesn’t evolve to suit each subsequent epoch – unless you count a sudden influx of moths into its capacious pockets. In my family, we’ve been passing down the same item through the years. And should we pass down an album of vibrant color photographs, it’s based on a shared loved of Kodachrome, not the human subjects. 

My most precious family heirloom is a tomato, said to be pilfered from the still-smoldering field in the aftermath of the Battle of Princeton, January 3, 1777. To be fair, it’s hard to know when a battle, even one in the 18^th century, was truly over. They didn't have referees with stopwatches, yellow flags and gambling debts, ready to call the contest at a moment’s notice. Wetting their whistle to control the action and put their own mark on the proceedings. You get a sense though that things are slowing down from an absence of cannon fire and incessant drumming by the drummer boys. That latter of which could simply mean that the drummer boy is, to borrow the euphemistic language so often employed in our current illiterate century, "is no longer in the band." Nonetheless, a distant relative named Azariah or Matthias or maybe it was just Tom, got this sense. Knowing New Jersey’s strong claim to the juiciest tomatoes in the 13 colonies, he decided to abscond with a whole stalk. That was dinner. That was Tom.

For whatever reason, drunkenness, stupidity, foresight – or some combination of all three – he left one tomato for his young son, Jebediah or Jedidiah or maybe it was just Bob. Either way, the boy hated tomatoes. He thought they were quite literally the devil’s snack food, sent here from below to corrupt mankind. He had this whole theory, based on nothing concrete that it was a tomato and not an apple in the Garden of Eden. A fruit in vegetable’s clothing, he'd say. His mother, Patience or Prudence or maybe it was just Kate, agreed and wouldn’t let him eat it. But she wouldn't let him dispose of it either, lest he disturb the Prince of Darkness

So it stayed there, in a wooden box, all the way up to the present. Because unlike that herringbone overcoat, tomatoes change over time. They blush and they rot just like people. Which makes them very rather vile to keep while still maintaining healthy relationships. 

And what a two hundred and fifty year old tomato lacks in sentimentality, it more than makes up for in botulism.