Everything Matters! and Jellybean Tomatoes

Don and Gary's backyard holds miracle after miracle. The praying mantis, stock-still on a plant leaf that's exactly the same shade of green. Don's little chapel of a greenhouse with its pepper plants and lemon tree. And the tomato wall -- a construction of plumbing pipe and wooden poles that holds a prodigious number of tomato plants. "I want this," I say over and over, like a child and Gary laughs. "This just about killed us" he says about the backyard, their weed-free, purple-flowered, blue-sky haven of a backyard. Don carries a large basket and carefully snips the tomatoes free of the wall, filling a bag for me. "Try this," he says, holding out the tiniest tomato I've ever seen. "I call these jellybean tomatoes because they're so sweet."

Somehow this fits in with Ron Currie's novel "Everything Matters!" Junior, who knows from the time he is born that a comet will hit the earth and destroy it, somehow manages to screw up his entire life. Heartache after heartache and I become more and more angry as he loses the love of his life, loses his mother to drinking, his brother to drugs. I read and scowl and keep reading. And then, when I'm about to lose patience and throw the book to the ground, a shift again. A moment of grace, of starting over.

This passage won't reverberate unless you read the book -- or maybe it will matter, because everything matters in the end:

"You wish they understood, as you do, that there is no escape and never was, that from the moment two cells combined to become one they were doomed. You wish they understood that there is joy in this fact, greater joy and love in this last moment than they experienced in their entire lives."

copyright 2009 Ann Krueger Spivack