I am sick and tired of tomato sandwiches.
After my eating five in a day last week, my appetite has fallen dramatically. There’s no way I can consume this summer’s bumper crop. I can’t give them away. Everybody has all they want and more.
Tomatoes for lunch. Tomatoes for supper. I refuse to eat them at breakfast.
After struggling for years on tomato welfare, I have finally become a competent farmer — with the help of my mother. I grow them at her house where there is bountiful sunshine. It doesn’t hurt that she makes sure they have water.
I have five plants — all different varieties. Three would have been plenty.
One advertiser urged me to grow German Johnsons. I planted one of those but quickly forgot which it was.
They all taste about the same to me.
The end is in sight. The plants have about run their course. And none too soon. I’m stuffed up to here with tomatoes.

Editorial Cartoons

Some readers suspect I’m a closet liberal — not because of anything I write in this space but because of the editorial cartoon.
A fellow from Eaton’s Church Road called a few months back to say he was sick and tired of the editorial cartoon bashing good Republicans. He wondered if I was secretly part of the Mainstream Media elite ruining the country. No, I assured him, that’s President Obama’s job.
He thought the Enterprise-Record would be better without a cartoon. Similarly, in The Clemmons Courier this week, a letter writer urges me to be “fair and balanced” with the cartoon.
Last week’s cartoon had chided Mitt Romney yet again.
Nothing we do causes more complaints. Technically, we don’t “do” the cartoons. Except for Hints by Heloise that we publish in Clemmons, everything but the cartoons are locally produced. We buy the cartoons from a syndicate for five dollars a week — cheap except for the wealth of complaints they prompt.
We’re shopping around for a new five dollar cartoonist. I try to change every year, but it’s a bit of trouble. We’ve been with our present cartoonists — different in Clemmons and Davie — for about 18 months.
We’ve only had one cartoonist at a time.  One of the syndicates has a package for a handful of lesser-known cartoonists that looks interesting.
There was a time when cartoonists would lampoon anybody or anything. No more. These days, most cartoonists have polarized themselves. They embrace the labels of left or right. Indeed, the current cartoonists in both newspapers are on the left hand side of the political scale. The Eatons Church Road reader is correct. The old cartoonists, however, were both conservative.
Confession: I voted for …