I’ve been thinking a lot lately about taking a Vow of Poverty, which is quite a bit different than having to live, through no choice of your own, a life of destitution. I don’t have any hard figures, but I’m going to guess that there are about a hundred million times more people living in destitution than there are living under vows of poverty. Which would make those of us who are wannabe poverty vowees a fairly privileged class of people, as if we didn’t know that already.

That would be the difference between dumpster diving for sport vs. dumpster diving for your next meal when you haven’t had one in the past four days.

The Vow of Poverty is usually something you do if you are part of some religious order, for example if you are a nun or a monk. And it’s usually part of a three-for-one deal where you also get to take vows of celibacy and obedience. As much as I have been toying with the idea of the V.O.P. ever since I signed up for Social Security a few years ago, the other two, the V.O.C. and the V.O.O. have never held much interest for me.

I mean, think how disappointed my wife would be if I took a vow of celibacy—I realize I may be making an unwarranted assumption there. But on the other hand, think how thrilled she’d be if I took the Vow of Obedience.

No, the Vow of Poverty is the only one of the three which suits my lifestyle and current roster of personality disorders.

Before the Second Vatican Council of 1962-5, the V.O.P. was considered primarily as a Church-sanctioned entry into a state of dependency, where you gave away all your stuff and became completely beholden to others (generally a religious community) for board and room and clothes. I’m pretty sure that would not have worked for me, because I probably could not have found a religious community that would have had me, and so would have been forced to rely on the constant generosity of family and friends, a similarly improbable bet.

But the Church loosened the rules a bit, and now the V.O.P. is a ticket to holding all things in common (albeit in a religious community of like-minded folks), more a “what was mine and what was yours is now ours” sort of thing. What communism might have been if it had been invented in heaven and not 19th century London. Or what co-housing could be if your fellow co-housers and the IRS would lighten up a bit.

Taking a Vow of Poverty in the secular world is as yet relatively uncommon from what I can tell. It’s not the same as downsizing, which is little more than going on a diet to lose several thousand pounds of your stuff, and then feeling guilty when over the next year you just gain it all back and have to rent space at U-Store-It.

And there’s no federal certification agency to ensure that you are keeping to your vow, sort of like the problem of trying to buy non-GMO food. You just have to trust what it says on the front of the package. The closest you can come to proof of sticking to your vow would be the fact that the IRS has not yet hauled you in for an audit. Call it the non-SOM (Stuff Or Money) label.

In any case, I’m not yet sure whether I want to go for the full Monty, the irrevocable Vow of Poverty. So I am looking into the ethics of doing a R.V.O.P (Revocable Vow of Poverty), which like a revocable trust, is something you can back out of as long as you are alive. It comes with most of the caché of the vow taken by nuns and monks, but like a 30-day money back guarantee, if it’s not your size or color, you don’t have to go to the grave with it.

And you could sleep worry-free every night knowing you’d never have to wake up to the dilemma that Roy Cockrum, now a former monk, faced one morning in early July, 2014 when he woke up to discover that he was holding the winning Powerball ticket in Tennessee for a $289,800,000 jackpot. “Oh dear God,” Roy must have said to himself, “what am I going to do now?”

Stuff and money. It just makes me crazy.

Tomorrow, December 3, I will indulge in a little temporary fossil-fuel-assisted climate change by boarding a jet aeroplane and sitting in it while it flies from Indiana to San Francisco. It will be a brief two-week visit with my old dad, and I expect to indulge my cravings for fresh vegetables by buying everything that fruits this time of year in the Bay Area. Yes, the Great Drought calls into question the permanent nature of that climate, but please, just sell me five pounds of tomatoes. I'm only here for two weeks. (Oddly enough, as I write this, a huge storm front is raining on much of California, raising worries about mudslides, but doing little to change the long-term levels of water in the state.)

Here in Indiana at the Grant St. Micro-Agricultural Research Station (a.k.a. my 100-square-foot front yard food garden), we had our first killing frost in late October. Dozens of green and foolishly expectant tomatoes still clung to the vines. Knowing better than they did about what was coming, I picked them and took them to the basement to ripen. They were hard and green as Granny Smith apples.

Last night, December 1, we sliced up the last of those garden tomatoes. It was a little mushy and bland, but offered just enough of the mildly piquant aromatic flavor that only a tomato can deliver to remind us of what it is to pull the red ripe fruit from the vine in the early evening of a day late in August and slice it, still warm, into the company of crisp japanese cukes, scallions, fennel and fresh mozzarella.

I will eat tomatoes this coming week in Los Altos, but back in Indiana I don't expect to eat another fresh one for what...maybe half a year? I won't buy the imports as a matter of principle and taste, and though I might be tempted by a locally greenhoused, hydroponically grown tomato, I can't really find the craving strong enuf to overcome my distaste with the idea of growing a food plant by dangling its roots in pea gravel and flooding it with a kool-aid of fertilizer and nutrients. Even if it's organic. Even if it's from a solar heated greenhouse.

Eating each food in its season is not some cerebral ideology I adopt in an effort to buy solidarity with my fellow foodies. It's simply that this far into my life I've finally realized that keen appetite and anticipation are the better part of pleasure. Call it foreplay for the palate. Last night I ate the last Indiana garden tomato. Next week I will eat a few of the last vine ripened tomatoes in a warmer climate. And this March I will plant tomato seeds in the basement, watch them sprout and raise their tiny leaves to the gro-lamps. In May I will bring those starts up from the basement, harden them off outdoors in the cool spring evenings, and then plant them in the warming soil. In late July I will pick the first of them.

I can imagine the taste. I can wait for my pleasures. I will.

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