Receipts. Metro tickets from cities I don’t live in anymore. Museum stubs. Notes I wrote to myself in a hurry and was absolutely convinced I’d remember later. Book collectors might call that errata—the leftover bits, the marginalia, the small human debris that gathers around books and lives.
Every once in a while, something slips out and reminds me who I was when I put it there.
Recently, what fell out was a drawing on a hotel notepad, probably from some long-ago vacation. One of the kids had drawn it—no title, no explanation, just a shape and a few lines. I didn’t hesitate.
It was a tomato.
Of course it was.
You might not see a tomato. You might see a heart. Or an apple. Or a planet. Or something I haven’t thought of at all. And honestly, that’s where the whole thing gets interesting.
You say tuh-MAY-to, I say tuh-MAH-to.
A child’s drawing, a tomato (of course it is), and a reminder that how we see things matters.
Read the story—and see what you see. (And get the T…).
Because what struck me wasn’t just the drawing—it was how quickly I trusted my own reading of it, and how little I felt the need to defend that reading. There was a time when ambiguity made me uncomfortable, when my instinct was to go find out what something was supposed to mean. What the answer was. What the consensus might be.
But art doesn’t really thrive on consensus.
Sometimes meaning isn’t a single destination we’re all meant to arrive at. Sometimes it’s more like a crossroads. The poem, the painting, the song—especially the song—offers something, and each of us brings our own weather to it. Our histories, our moods, our memories, our blind spots. None of that disqualifies the experience. It completes it.
I once heard an artist respond to a question about meaning by saying, essentially, Why are you asking me? Ask yourself. The longer I live with that idea, the more generous it feels. Not evasive—generous. An invitation to stay curious about your own response, and just as curious about someone else’s.
That’s what errata really are, I think. Not mistakes, but evidence. Proof that people pass through things differently, leave different traces behind. A subway ticket can mean routine to one person and escape to another. A child’s drawing can be obvious—or mysterious—or both at once.
So when we put that tomato on a T-shirt, it felt less like a statement and more like an open question. It’s a tomato—or maybe it isn’t. You say tuh-MAY-to, I say tuh-MAH-to. You say puh-TAY-to, I say puh-TAH-to.
So maybe you make your point—and then make a little space.
If you’d like, you can get your own. Think of it as a wearable Rorschach: an answer you carry with you, a question you don’t rush to settle. Say what you see. Stay curious when someone else sees something else.
That’s not confusion. That’s the point.
Enjoy.
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