My uncle Charley was a gardener. He grew vegetables and he was a really good at it. Charlie entered the county fair every year. One summer I remember he won first prize for having the best tomatoes in the whole county. They gave him a blue ribbon and a check for $25. Uncle Charley had that check framed and he hung it on the wall under a photo of his tomatoes in a little basket. Above the photo he displayed the blue ribbon in a shaddow box.
My uncle Roger was a truck farmer. No, that's not somebody that grows trucks. That's what we called farmers that grow vegetables and truck them out to stores. One of the crops uncle Roger grew was tomatoes. When he saw uncle Charlie's check and photograph with the blue ribbon, I saw a funny smile cross uncle Roger's face.
Later that summer I was at uncle Roger's house for haying time. Walking through his kitchen, I saw something that brought a smile to my face too. On the wall, there was a photograph of a truck load of tomatoes, there was a note scrawled on a blue scrap of paper hanging above the picture. The hastily written note just said "Nice tomaters!" Below the photo there was a Xerox copy of a check for a little over $7,000 (Uncle Roger had cashed the real check.)
"It's not how much you make per tomato, it's how much you take to the bank!"
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