Tomatoes and Tropes

July. I pick a ripe tomato. It feels so warm in my hand. I can’t wait to put it between two slices of bread. There are many kinds of tomatoes: Beefsteak, Better Boy, Early Girl, Aunt Ruby’s German Green, Brandywine, Celebrity, Cherokee Purple, Monterosa, Mr. Stripey, Green Zebra, and on and on. 

September. I see the tomatoes are coming to their end. It is time for things to die, to decay, to fall into the earth, and rot. 

September at the fall equinox is the time to tend to the garden of eloquence where, in 1593, a plot was made for tropes to grow. There are many kinds of tropes: Metaphor, Alloiōsis, Synecdoche, Antimetabole, Apostrophe (not this ’), Paranomasia, Asyndeton, Homeoptoton, and let’s not omit Zeugma.

Tomato and trope: Either way, I have the earth on my hands.

I bring some tomatoes to work and leave them in kitchen/lounge/lunch area. “Help yourself,” I write on the back of an outdated office memo. I set it by the plate.

“This would be good tomato,” one of my colleagues tells me, “if it were uniform in shape.” He’s a physicist. He likes laws. The tomato looks like it has a nose. 

“It’s one of my heirloom tomatoes. Have you tasted them?” 

“No. But I would like them better if they looked better…more normal, like the kind you see in the grocery store. When did you pick these tomatoes?”

“Yesterday.”

“Look here.” He selects one of the most deformed-looking tomatoes and holds it up to me and show me an indentation that looks like the crack of a butt. “It looks like rot is starting here.”

We agree that he will buy his tomatoes from the grocery store, and I will seek varieties to expand human taste.

Tomorrow we will eat our sandwiches and talk about the energy of paranomasia and it is transferred and what happens to the energy of zeugma. That’s the quantum side of tropes. 

The tomatoes in the store are so uniform in size and color that you can hardly tell the difference between one tomato and another. This is convenient. Regular tomatoes can be boxed, stored, and shipped without so much as a bruise. They are predictable. Put a bunch of Mr. Stripey types in a box: Store and ship them, but the story will be very different. Some of the tomatoes will look as if they are having nosebleeds after a bad fight with Aunt Ruby’s German Green, and some will be crushed by one too many Beefsteaks. Unprofitable. 

Difference matters. Sometimes regular tomatoes taste parched, like they were irrigated from a stream bed gone dry. Heirloom tomatoes scream alien in all their differences. I like their rainbow of colors—the hues of pink, purple, red, yellow, orange, and green. Their brightness is a match for the sun. The purple ones taste so much sweeter than the pink ones of Monterosa. Sometimes less is more. The many-hued sizes provide a range of choices. I’ll have a Better Boy with my Bison burger, please.

Stranger than heirloom tomatoes are tropes. There are more types of tropes than there are types of tomatoes. Big classifications can be found online today.  

More surprises. Pay a visit to a place once called the garden of eloquence. It is where the peacock used to roam. There, tropes grow into ideas and make more ideas out of what has been grown. I go there to find a different way of seeing. Paranomasia helps me to see separation and exclusion. In the House of My Sojourn: Rhetoric, Women, and the Question of Authority, the trope of paranomasia helped me to see “telephone women” trying to make a living at the turn of the twentieth century. Were they “good” girls? Could a telephone girl be trusted to make connections between people? Medical matrons determined if the “hello girl’s” environment was proper. 

We have tomatoes to augment taste. 

We have tropes to augment sight.  

See tropes and tropes see: Time is money. It is a trope, I refuse to name, but I will tell you that it encourages you to see time as something spent. You might start wondering if your time spent in a relationship, a class, or with an old friend is profitable. You might think and wonder, is it worth it for me to be in this relationship, this class, with this person? When you ask this question, you are evaluating what you are seeing. Tropes don’t care what you think. They just help us see. 

I like varieties of tomatoes. I want to taste more. 

I want to see more. I like tropes—all of them.

Personally, I need to be able to see time in other ways. I started digging around in the garden of eloquence to discover something else, something more. What more could I see about the person I am with, or about the class I am taking, or about the idea of women in the presidency? 

If you don’t like the time is money trope, go find a trope you love. 

The sparrows have left. The tomatoes are rotting. There is no need now to advance the idea of tasting and discerning something new because the light is fading.

The shadows of the season advance. They cross the garden floor, including the bent-over vines, before touching a half-eaten tomato (enjoyed by some critter) on the far side of the fence. 

Enough. It is time for seeing. September puts a certain slant of light on things in the garden of eloquence. 

NOW #YOUCANSEEWOMENINTHEPRESIDENCY is the book I am writing. (It is the history of the “third woman”). When completed, you won’t find a discussion of tropes, but they will help you to see an idea coming into view from the past and merging with the changing climate of opinions without losing any sharpness or detail. Spoiler alert: When the third woman “shows up,” it makes everyone’s task more difficult.