Thomas Landis

Tom Landis could talk to anyone, anywhere, about anything.

Swapping stories with strangers at the bar. Shooting the breeze on the back porch. Chatting up the retailers at the Watchung Square Mall. Tom had a knack for making friends everywhere he went.

The gift of gab, his mom called it. “He should have been a car salesman,” his wife of 32 years, Rose Slack-Landis, remembers his brothers saying.

A few years after moving into Rose’s childhood home in North Plainfield, N.J., Tom took up a solitary hobby. Gardening.

You could find Tom in his vegetable garden every day. He watered it before going to work and in the afternoon when he returned. He planted tomatoes and eggplant, broccoli and lettuce, cucumbers and, once, zucchini.

Most of all, he planted peppers. Italian sweet peppers. Habaneros. Jalapeños. Maybe seven or eight different varieties altogether. They were the key ingredient of the hot wings he made for New York Giants games and picnics, the ones his friends craved. He would bake or grill the wings, then dip them in homemade hot sauce and put them back on the heat to finish cooking — setting aside a few plain wings for Rose.

The garden, meanwhile, had become a point of pride.

“Come over, come check out the garden,” he would tell friends.

But the work of a garden is never finished. The last tomato crop wasn’t very good; the fruit were yellow-orange and mushy. Tom had planned to redo the garden this year, to put up a different fence to keep the bunnies from nibbling at the plants.

When Tom entered the hospital on March 25, his cell phone kept ringing as the news of his worsening condition spread from one friend to another. He called Rose and told her to make a post on Facebook, letting everybody know that he was having difficulty talking, difficulty breathing. He ended up keeping his phone turned off most of the time, switching it on only to call Rose for a few minutes each morning.

On April 1, Tom’s doctor called Rose. Tom, who had been placed on a ventilator the day before, had taken a turn for the worse overnight.

Rose got to see him one last time, peering through the glass window of his hospital room. She called their children Nicole, Ryan and Jonathon, to say their goodbyes over video chat.

He died later that afternoon. He was 60 years old.

Rose doesn’t plan to replant the garden without Tom. She might do a tomato plant or two, but nothing more. “I don’t have the green thumb like he had,” she said. Some lettuce has grown back this spring. Some peppers are still left, drying out.

The house in North Plainfield is more quiet now. It’s just Rose, her daughter Nicole and the dogs. Her son Jonathon, who lives in Utah, came to visit on Monday. People say he talks just like his dad.

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