There’s no way either of us could have known that this summer would be the end of our thirty-year tradition, but, looking back, it sure seems like he did. When I called him to ask him if the tomatoes were ready yet and, if not when he thought they would be, he didn’t make his usual comfortably vague forecast. Instead, he said, “I never know until the mornin’ of if that’s gonna be the day.” When I got out to his house after making the six-hour overnight drive that the years had put between us, he didn’t greet me at the door with a stack of tomato crates as tall as him like he usually did. Instead, he asked me to come inside and sit for a piece, and we talked about my dad and his son for almost an hour. Every now and then he’d say something about seeing him again soon. I guess he’s always said stuff like that, but not as often as he did that morning.
Every year we got the same crowd at our tomato stand. That was by design. My grandfather had his stand set up on a road that got replaced a few decades ago by a bigger road. The bigger road was available too, but he chose this one instead. He always tells that part as the setup, and then he follows it up with a Robert Frost joke that most don’t get. Those same folks came to our little tomato stand every year because his tomatoes were so good, but that wasn’t the only reason they came: they also came to argue with my grandfather about politics.
You see: my grandfather was the only liberal in town. I don’t know how to explain why it was that way, but it’s true. He wasn’t any richer or poorer than the others. He hadn’t traveled any more or any less. He had Republican relations and conservative cousins, so it wasn’t genetics. It wasn’t rebellion or stubbornness either; neither quality was in his personality at all. Whenever I asked him for an explanation, he’d say that he didn’t have one and that he had always just felt that way. Whatever the reason, I was a firsthand witness to a display of his very liberal politics every summer at that tomato stand. All those customers lived in the same little town and went to the same little church with him, so they could have argued on at least a weekly basis if they had wanted to. But they saved it up for the tomato sales because the tomato sale arguments were a tradition.
Up until this summer, this is how the day would go: things would be slow for the first few hours with maybe a car or two stopping by and a grumbled complaint about the president (or a “Thank God for” so-and-so if he was a Republican). By noon, there’d be several cars parked over on the other side of the road and a dozen people crowded around the stand. It wasn’t because they were showing up faster. It was because they weren’t leaving. It was a sight to see when my grandfather got going. I’ll fail if I try to describe his mannerisms during all this, so I’ll just say that he looked like some sort of mad combination of an auctioneer and a ringmaster.
I won’t say that he won every argument because sometimes he’d be having five arguments at once and one or two would get a default judgment against him, but I will say that he always got his point across. He wouldn’t let them get away with anything either because he always remembered what they had said last year or the year before. He was sharp—all the way up until the end. When Biden winced at that first debate and then pulled Kellyanne Conway’s name out of his head, it reminded me of my grandfather. He never forgot, and he’d let them know the year and the time of day that they had said it. When it started getting dark and the tomatoes ran out, the customers would walk back to their cars smiling, not because they thought they had got the best of him, but because everybody had played their roles the right way and it had been a good time. Nobody’s mind was ever changed by it.
When we got set up this summer, I told my grandfather that I didn’t think I could take the politics this year. I had gotten so worn down by the mean-spiritedness and cruelty of it that I didn’t have the strength to care anymore. I know he heard me, but he didn’t say anything. He just nodded. It seemed like the customers had heard me, too. They’d make a joke or two about politics, but they’d steer clear of any of the touchy subjects. They all wore masks, used our hand sanitizer (externally only), and kept their social distance, too, and they didn’t complain about it. I kept anxiously waiting for someone to say, “Thank God for” so-and-so, but nobody ever did. They didn’t want to argue this year. I even watched one old guy take off his red baseball cap and throw it back in his pickup before walking over.
When the last car of the day drove up, we were already packing up the empty crates and counting the beers we’d buy that night with our earnings. I knew who it was before he even opened the door because nobody else in town could afford that nice of a car. He owns the service station out by the bigger road. He had inherited it in the spring from his dad. The two of them had been coming all thirty years ever since he and I were kids. My grandfather shouted that he was too late because the last tomato had been sold, but he shook his head and kept walking toward us.
When he got over to us, he reached out to shake my grandfather’s hand, and they almost did before we all remembered the times we were living in. Like all the others, he was embarrassed. While they were catching each other up on local gossip, he kept looking down and shrugging his shoulders. After a while he changed the subject: “It’s like they don’t care about him.”
My grandfather knew who—and what—he was talking about. “I’ve been telling you for thirty years that they don’t give a damn about nobody but them and their kin, and some of ‘em don’t even give a damn about their kin.”
“I guess I just never noticed it until they went after my dad. It’s like they were calling him weak from dying of it, or else calling our whole family a bunch of liars for making up that that’s what killed him.”
“He wasn’t a person to them anymore. He was an argument.”
“I guess you’re gonna say that they’ve been doing this for a while now to the Blacks and the gays.”
“…and the Mexicans and the Muslims. I could stand here all night listin’ ‘em off.”
He was looking up, like he was trying to see the words that he needed in his brain. “How come you felt it when it was aimed at people you didn’t even know?”
“I don’t know. I just kinda imagine how I’d feel if they were throwin’ that mess at me, and it hurts me to think about.”
“How have you listened to that stuff from people like me for all these years and not let it break you. I can’t even watch the news anymore, and you come out here every year and raise hell with us.”
My grandfather paused for several seconds, and then I swear he stopped looking at that man, and he turned and looked right at me and said, “You gotta be vulnerable, but not fragile.”