Last night I dreamed I was at the beach with my kids. We saw a food shack with its menu painted on a board in front, and one item on the menu was a “Tomato Rahway.” “Do you know Tomato Rahways?” I asked my kids in the dream. “We had them when I was little. It’s an open-faced grilled cheese sandwich with a slice of tomato under the cheese.”
I was briefly awake in the middle of the night after that dream, and I marveled at how my subconscious was able to dredge up the memory of Tomato Rahways after perhaps forty years of not thinking that phrase even once.
When I woke up for real this morning, the first thing I did was a Google search for [tomato rahway]. 1 It doesn’t exist, at least according to the Internet, and it now appears my brain conjured out of whole cloth not only the phrase “Tomato Rahway” and the association with a very specific food item that I probably never even saw let alone ate, but also the idea, like a cherry on top, that it was an old childhood memory, which apparently it wasn’t.
What the hell, brain?
Anyway, I officially proclaim that the name for an open-faced grilled-cheese sandwich with a slice of tomato is now “Tomato Rahway.”
- In the process, I stumbled onto a Googlewhack for [“tomato rahway” -plum], which links to this. [↩]