Of tomatoes and learning

I was eighteen when I left home for university, a young eighteen.  Having grown up in the country, when I arrived at university in the city, I had never ridden a city bus, been in a taxi, lived in apartment or even eaten Chinese food.  Everything was brand new to me.  

While at school, I made friends with an older student in my Greek literature class.  Looking back, she probably wasn’t even as old as I am now but, at the time, she was a mature student.  Christina, whose nickname was Soula, was Greek by heritage and soon became a close and trusted friend, despite our age difference.  It was through Soula that I had my first taste of a cuisine from a culture other than my own.  I suppose I ate spaghetti and lasagna as a child but I would hardly typify those samplings as Italian food and so Soula’s Greek food had the feel of the exotic to me.  I can remember distinctly my apartment at school and how we would, late in the afternoon, after classes had finished, return to my kitchen and prepare garlicky pork roasts or simple chicken soups, flavoured with lemon and fresh eggs whipped into them.  In particular, I remember the tomatoes.  

Regularly, Soula would turn up with a bag of bursting ripe, red tomatoes from her garden, a firm, cool cucumber, a sweet red onion.  Into a large bowl, we would chop them up, the tomatoes spilling their juices across the bottom of the bowl.  With some olives, oil, cheese and seasoning, we would let this salad sit in the sun on the counter by the fridge and let the juices marinate.  Salt would tease more juice from the tomatoes till the bottom half of the salad was swimming.  We would carry the whole bowl into my front living room, where we would sit often sit on my plush green shag carpet, forgoing the luxuries of my hand-me-down orange couch without legs.  We would break apart a large loaf of crusty bread and, each of us armed with a fork, would enjoy the salad directly from the bowl.  

When we could reach it, we would dip chunks of bread into the tomato juices, soaking up the summer sun and the reflected sun of the Aegean that nourished the olives and the oregano, lifting these delicious morsels to our mouths, tomato juice running down our arms.  We would eat the whole bowl this way, talking about virtues of the Aeneid or the differences between Doric or Corinthian columns.  All my memories of both my degrees seem to be framed around food.  And here I have come full circle.  My instruction manual on InDesign has arrived and thinking about tomatoes reminded me that I am able to learn when I put my mind to it.  And when I am motivated knowing that at the end, there will be a good meal waiting.  I better run, time to prepare dinner.