I had my first vegetable epiphany when I was 16. It was 5:45 am and I was cutting bell peppers in the kitchen of my boarding school. A crate of peppers stared ominously at me. At first I was begrudging of the chore, but then….Pepper after pepper was chopped with complete and utter fascination.

There is a whole little world going on in there. If I were a tiny garden fairy gnome I would play inside those peppers, sliding over hills and valleys, hiding behind dangling seeds. I just could not believe how it is that nature knew to make each of these vegetables exactly the same but so unique…it was mind boggling…more so to me than humans, dinosaurs or outer space….These plants that gave birth to these amazing things how does it know how to do that? ( I didn’t pay enough attention in science class) . Oh and sometimes there would be an anomaly! Great Scott! A vegetable anomaly, like a tiny pepper growing inside a grown up pepper, or a bouncy boiled egg with 2 yolks.

   I was slicing the peppers from the outside, but imagining them from the inside. Each day I looked forward to what salad bar prep I would get to do next. I enjoyed the earthy sweet smell of shredding carrots and the sheer luminosity of thinly sliced cucumbers. But nothing is so thrilling as the inside of a tomato.

   Cutting up Campari tomatoes today I remembered that feeling of awe I had when I was 16. The inside of a tomato is AMAZING! You can not tell me there is not a universe inside of there. That just moments before cutting it open…that tomato was teaming with alien activity.  I took out my camera and started taking pictures. ” I shall call this one Lungs” I said to my tomato….and the next one I named Bronchial, and Ghost bat, and Ghost bat with white hat, flaming butterfly, yellow heads on a ride, pierced ears. I started to get weird naming the insides of my tomatoes. Also kinda weird reading their insides like tea leaves. I think maybe I will start a sandwich fortune reading business. I design my Mealtime Medium Logo in my head….but drop the idea to concentrate on painting a tomato.

    I have drawn the conclusion that everything talks. Every damn thing in the universe has a message, from the bird on your path to the pebble in your shoe. We can’t possibly listen to it all, we would go crazy, that is why we can’t hear rocks…I assume.  But how nice, if for just a fleeting moment we get to see the beauty of a simple thing, magnified by our own delight.  Makes me think that everything has a fascinating story on the inside.