The Incident of the Exploding Cherry Tomato
Or why sliced tomatoes are now my salad garnish of choice
Year ago, as I sat down to lunch at a weekly Rotary meeting, I had no precognition that I was minutes away from one of the most embarrassing moments of my life.
A major part of each the meeting involved sharing a meal with other Rotarians as we chat together. On this particular day, I had a woman member from my own Rotary chapter sitting at my right and a male visitor from another Rotary club sitting at my left.
We are encouraged to be especially cordial to visitors at our meetings. I was therefore talking in a lively, welcoming way to the gentleman on my left whom, as it turned out, had unwittingly drawn “the short straw of fate” by being seated so close to me.
We started with our salad course. The usual combination: a clump of pallid iceberg lettuce, a few thin, desiccated cucumber slices, and the piece de la resistance- a plump, shiny, brazen-faced cherry tomato.
With what I thought was graceful ease and sociability, I popped the tomato into my mouth, turned to the man, smiled, bit into the tomato and. . .
Oh, even all these years later, I shudder as I recall what happened next!
The treacherous tomato exploded like an illegal firecracker ( a cheery bomb?) in…
