My Sleeve Where It Should Be

“Grandpa?  What makes Hooper tomatoes so much better than all the other tomatoes?” I would often ask this of my Grandfather Don Read as he would drop off what seemed like endless buckets of Tomatoes from his Garden each year.   The Garden (yes in capital letters) looked like a farm to me even though it was nowhere near that size.  And it produced tomatoes that even to this day I remember fondly as the best tasting I have ever partaken of.   He would often respond with explanations, like the fact that they were watered once a week, or that in Hooper there was a lot against growing them and so the ones that made it was the sweetest, or sometimes he would just say that the soil was a high alkaline soil.  Some of these explanations have probably less to do with science and more to do with legend.   “There must be something in the water” is a comment I have heard from time to time standing in line at one of the many stands that pop up around Hooper Utah during the harvesting

The Disney film "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" is full of contrasting characters.  Each of the characters has flaws.  The writer of the book which was adapted into the animated classic, Victor Hugo, explores the difference between keeping God's commandments and not. The story gives us such fascinating characters as Esmeralda, the Gypsy street dancer, Phoebus the soldier, Frollo the Archdeacon of Notre Dame, and Course Quasimodo, the deformed hunchback and bell ringer of Notre Dame. So much of what we may call righteousness can quickly become distorted when the love exemplified by Christ is absent. Esmerelda by many of the citizens of Paris, including Frollo, is considered a harlot.  In one aspect, she is adored as a dancer and entertainer, but then she is despised as a witch.  Many of the reasons for the citizens to love or hate her are external.  Likely many have no real knowledge of her moral standing and only judge what they see.   What we find through the