Olympic Wisdom

Tomatoes Ripening on the Vine

An old farmer stops in the midday sun to sink his teeth into a plump tomato, juice spilling down his whiskered chin, beneath a perfect broken smile.

Whenever I read a poem from Cathy’s work-in-progress collection, The Old Country, an homage to her father and to her grandparents, but also to more than them, I am reminded of that old farmer image which I often had as a boy, shaped no doubt by stories my own father shared about his youth.

We all have some old country in our blood. But “old country” doesn’t just mean some distant far off place, as much as it means a way of life that may, to varying degrees, be forgotten by some of us, but that is as much a part of who we are as our sinews and our bones.

My dad used to tell me stories about how he grew up in a neighborhood of mostly Polish and Italian immigrant families and how people from the old country kept these thriving gardens thick with tomatoes and peppers and onions.

Even though I spent every minute of my youth as averse to vegetables as you can be, I remember those stories because the gardens and the men and women who tended them were so vivid the way he told it.

I remember hearing about an old man who would eat garlic like an apple and about how my dad may have, on occasion, sampled something succulent from a garden or two, may have even been chased off for doing so.

I remember Mrs. Augostini, a woman I met once when I was a boy, a woman I can still envision, her accent thick, her hands textured with age and hard work so they looked to me as if she’d just plucked them from the garden too. I remember the way my dad’s tone would always have this implicit reverence to it whenever he mentioned the incredible food Mrs. Augostini would make with those homegrown vegetables as she put a bit of the old country into the meals she made.

Old Hands Plucked From The Garden

And I remember, to this day, the pasta e fagioli I tasted for myself that one time, the way the mixture of freshness enthralled the tongue with flavor unlike anything I’d ever known.

Please don’t make the mistake of thinking that meant I suddenly liked vegetables. Not a chance. It still took me a couple more decades before I finally came around. But those vegetables, grown in that small patch of backyard sun, with the dirt washed from their skin in that old kitchen sink, prepared the way Mrs. Augostini prepared them, I can say without hesitation I would have immersed myself in them daily.

I remember my own grandmothers, two bold, big-hearted, earthy women from two very different cultures, with very different sensibilities and tastes and passions except when it came to their families and when it came to sharing their old country roots through their food.

It seems to me that food connects us intimately to other people, to the past, and to our heritage, but also to the earth and to a part of our own nature we may not be connected to any other way.

I mention this because the focus of today’s blog post is on two young men who not only get those old country connections, but who have created a business built upon a philosophy that reflects an appreciation for much more than that, for a return of sorts not just to old country roots but to principles from long before the old country ever was.

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