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Color Changes
By Milt Abel | September 21, 2010
| September 21, 2010Color Changes
By the second week of September my wife announced she was setting aside the food section of the newspaper because it contained several green tomato recipes. That meant those pages weren’t to be recycled or used as a painting drop cloth, there was information inside to be used, and used soon -just the kind of thing Dr. Frankenstein might do with the obituaries.
There was resignation in her voice, the same tone you’d hear from a parent upon learning their child’s test scores foretold a life of manual labor. When she said, “it has recipes for green tomatoes we’ll probably need to use,” it could have just as easily been, “we ought to buy some sturdy boots and heavy duty gloves for the boy.”
She was surrendering to the likelihood that our tomatoes were never going to be red, not without paint. It has been only a moderately warm summer in Portland with occasional overcast days. That season followed a mostly wet and occasionally sunny spring. So our tomatoes were late to be planted, late to bloom fruit, and probably too late to ripen: beings as most likely, Fall will be prompt. Usually we can enjoy a harvest by mid august; and through the month of September BLT’s and caprese salads are rotated frequently into the household menu. But this year the tomatoes are staying green well into the second half of September and that means they aren’t going to blush, no matter how embarrassingly we expose them.
I got some exposure of my own for the second half of September. I took the stage of the Jewel of the Seas for their welcome aboard show September 18th. I was flown into Boston September 17th to overnight before joining the ship, and I stayed at the Radisson, which was right near the Boston Commons and the theater district. A well kept hotel that gave me a room with two queen-size beds that both had ‘sleep number’ adjustment control devices for each side of the bed. I could set four different firmnesses in my one room. I had the resources to recreate an episode from Goldielocks (undoubtedly a blonde) and the Three Bears with an extra bed to boot. I once wrote a joke about sleep-number beds and hotels that I’m not sure if I’ve ever given an airing in front of an audience…
“I stayed at a hotel last night that had a sleep-number adjustable bed and I think I discovered my sleep number… it must be 666 -because I slept like Hell!”
(maybe the reason I haven’t tried this yet is obvious to you too)
The Jewel’s first stop was Portland, Maine. A lovely town that has many telltale signs of its seafaring past, the most most poignant being the several ‘widow’s walks’ that adorned some of the larger, older homes scattered on the Eastern end of old town. The area is called Munjoy Hill because of it gradual elevation, and is topped with a striking 1869 church, the Church of the Immaculate Conception, (the building and funding of this church was probably a bit more sordid). “Widow’s walk’ is a term taught to me by my mother; it relates to a place to pace along the roof, usually bordered by iron work, where fishermen’s wives could watch for ships to come in from sea, or not.
I spent the morning walking through lovely shops in old town and then went for a five mile jog in the afternoon along Black Cove Park. There’s a 3 1/2 mile trail encircling Munjoy Hill and part of Old Town and it allows for nice views of the ocean and Black Cove. Part of the route leads past the city’s water treatment plant, and when your breathing heavy from running, sucking in as much air as you can, even if it smells of sewage; passing a water treatment plant is no treat.
Several of the houses in the Munjoy Hill neighborhood had air-conditioners sticking from their windows. The official start of Fall was only a few days away, and the day I was there was just warm enough to go without a jacket, but the air-conditioners told me this portland had a summer that might have turned our tomatoes red -might. The cruise was highlighted as a Fall Colors cruise, but so far I had not seen green leaves turned to splash of reds and golden browns that I expected. I do expect, that when my wife hears how beautiful Portland Maine was, and Bar Harbor even more so, she might turn colors the other way; from redheaded Irish fair, golden and freckled, to a bit green with envy.
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