With Memorial Day nuzzled up to the print of this column, I really felt the pressure to write with meaning. To make this one count. To be able to leave you with something other than a how-to on smoking the perfect brisket, or secret tips for planting your favorite summer fruit, the tomato.

Fortunately for you, I happen to be grossly inadequate at both. Brisket like jerky, and vines that don’t bear fruit. So I won’t be boring you with the holiday prose of how-tos. Unfortunately for me, the self induced pressure of leaving you with something of meaning still remains. Be patient, I’ll think of something.

I mention brisket and growing tomatoes because I find them both to be synonymous with summer. Memorial Day seems to segue our arrival into a much anticipated reprieve. A calming sense to our everyday, with a slower moving second hand on the clock. All of the things we southerners love are just around the bend. Patiently waiting for us to awaken them from their slumber. Gardens, the river, the beach, warm nights, cooking, and family. I can just see it, no imagination necessary.

So without further ado, I’ve found something meaningful to share with you. Patience and respect. Aside from being song titles, they are the two disciplines indubitably lacking in my brisket and tomatoes. The tomatoes required too much attention or too little. I didn’t have the patience to find a happy medium. The brisket required too much time and too much consistency, and I didn’t have the patience to allow room for either. I like to think that I can grow some of the most beautiful roses and cook with difficult French technique. But brisket and tomatoes deserve a respect and patience that I couldn’t seem to offer.

A watched pot never boils. Just like a pestered brisket doesn’t smoke, and an over-parented tomato won’t grow. The same goes for our gardens at home. Have you ever caught yourself watching your favorite ornamental, anticipating the arrival of the first bloom? It just won’t seem to arrive. Then, you wake one morning to the sweet smell of gardenia or the delicate pastel of hydrangeas and it’s as if it happened just for you, and it did.

Memorial Day is just that. A day to allow room for patience and respect. We honor and respect those that were lost in service to our country, while we miss those that aren’t here to help us do so. We have patience for those that revel and celebrate on this day, and respect for those that encounter sorrow. It’s a special day that seems as if it prepared summer just for you, and it did.

Respect is one of the first lessons I learned when apprenticing for a well known Oxford chef. I was chopping various vegetables for service and had made quite the mess of it. He calmly walked over to my station, snatched my cutting board from under me and held up the jumbled mishmash in which I had created. In a measured tone, he said, you have zero respect for your work. Have respect for what you do or don’t bother doing it.

With an about face, I flash back to a vision of expensive hand shears speared into the soil as if they were a shovel. My stepfather, and then boss, was staring at them and me with disappointment. He said these are your tools and it’s unacceptable not to take care of them. You wouldn’t stick one of your kitchen knives in the bare dirt would you? A strange image, but a clear message.

Patience is still a dance in which I’ve yet to remember all of the steps. I currently have a tomato plant growing out back in one of the old planters from last year. It’s come up from seed. A seed I didn’t plant, but one that volunteered from a rotten tomato that never came to fruition. Beneath the soil, the small seed patiently waited and decided to take matters into its own hands this year. I plan on leaving it alone and letting it grow. A respectful gesture, I’d like to think.

I believe the tomato plant would appreciate me minding my own business as well. We have a touch of bad history. It’s said that patience is a virtue, but that’s a lot of pressure for a guy like me. So If you happen to see me at the farmers’ market with a bag full of something ripe and red, respectfully keep your comments to yourself, for my virtue has withered on the vine, but hopefully it’s gone to seed.

Clay Bowen is a Columbus native who cooked professionally as a chef in fine dining for 12 years and appeared on the third season of Top Chef. He is also a licensed landscape horticulturist and is currently the general manager of a local landscaping company. Bowen writes in his free time and is working on a book about his experiences and travel.