The above image was on Turkey Hill's blog today.

It pisses me off. Yeah, I know, better to be pissed off than to be pissed on, but one ought not insult the memory of Lewis Grizzard.

As for the 'maters, I'll allow the late Mr. Grizzard's words to stand on their own:

Thanks to the generosity of a couple of friends, I scored some homegrown (vine ripe, if you please) tomatoes the other day with a street value of at least 7 or 8 bucks.

You can get these tomatoes only in the summertime, and if you have no garden of your own, you must have a tomato connection.

The rest of the year, one must be content with those tasteless pretenders somebody grows in a hothouse somewhere.

They lack the juice and the flavor of the summertime homegrowns to which, I freely admit, I've become addicted.

I grew up eating homegrown tomatoes from the family garden. It was only after I became an urban creature living far from the tilled soil, I realized what a blessing they had been to me as a child and how dear they are to me now.

Mama would cook green beans with new potatoes and there would be a plate of fresh tomatoes just out of the garden.

The juice from the tomatoes inevitably mixed with the green beans and even got into your corn bread. The mix was indescribably wonderful.

Of course there are other ways to eat homegrown tomatoes. I took one of my friends' offerings last week and sat down and ate it like an apple. Some of the abundant juice ran down my chin onto my shirt like it did with the tomatoes of my youth.

I can still hear Mama: "Look at your shirt, and I just took it off the line."

I get my shirts dry-cleaned now. Oh, for one more of her gentle scoldings.

I also use the tomatoes to make sandwiches. Behold, the fresh homegrown tomato sandwich.

First, you need white bread. Never use any sort of bread other than soft, fresh, white bread - hang the nutritional value - when constructing a tomato sandwich.

To use any sort of other bread is a transgression equal to putting lights in Wrigley Field and putting mushrooms on cheeseburgers.

Cover both slices of bread with mayonnaise. Salt and pepper the slices of tomatoes and then put them between the bread.

Eat quickly. The juice of the tomato slices will quickly turn the white bread into mush and you will be wearing some of your tomato sandwich.

My grandfather, Bun Word, sold some of his tomatoes on the side of the road at the little fruit and vegetable stands he ran summers in my hometown of Moreland.

One day he ran out of his own tomatoes and bought some to sell off a produce truck. A couple of Atlanta tourists stopped by.

The lady picked up a basket of tomatoes and asked my grandfather, "Are these homegrown?"

"Yes, ma'am," he said.

She bought a basket of the tomatoes. I said to my grandfather, "You didn't grow those tomatoes at home."

"Well," he replied, "they were grown at somebody's home."

My grandfather was a God-fearing, foot-washing Baptist, but I later learned it was not considered sinful nor unethical to put the shuck on Atlanta tourists.

In Atlanta they allowed liquor and strippers in various dens of iniquity.

The folks in the hinterlands were just getting even.

My boyhood friend and idol, Weyman C. Wannamaker Jr., a great American, for instance, once sold cantaloupes to city folk as Exotic Moreland Yellow-meated Midget Watermelons for an obscene profit.

This just to say be careful if you go out and try to buy homegrown tomatoes. Folks in the country still don't give the rest of us much credit for being very smart. Otherwise, we wouldn't lived crammed together like we do and spend half our day fighting traffic and eating, as some do, raw fish.

I've eaten all my tomatoes now and face a rather extensive dry- cleaning bill for the damage they did to my shirts. But it will be a pittance when I consider the ecstasy and memories they provided me.

And to think, it wasn't that long ago I felt the same way about sex.

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ice cream - Lewis Grizzard - tomato - Turkey Hill