How The Grinch Stole My Garden

I was having lunch with my workmate Ozzy yesterday and I admitted that I am a terrible gardener.

"I thought you were a great gardener!" he said.

I replied, "I like to garden, yes, but I'm really hit-or-miss at it."

The reality is, I'm a better cook than gardener. Of course, with cooking there are far fewer variables than out in the garden. Let's face it, bugs aren't going to attack your enchiladas while you turn around to cut the bread, nor will a hailstorm knock the living daylights out of your soufflé while you run to get an umbrella. Gardening, especially organic gardening faces so many, many variables. And I guess you just have to live with them.

Why did my tomato plants stop producing? Why do some of my zucchini shrivel up and die when only 3 inches long? What the heck is that ugly bug that doesn't seem to move doing on my lettuce?

Maybe I don't pay enough attention.

But maybe, after all, it doesn't matter.

What is my garden there for? It's organic, so it exists for all the insects and beasts of the world, from hummingbird to grasshopper. It's my retreat. Like you, I work, I raise kids, I get all bent out of shape by all the crap we adults have to suffer through most days. When I come home I can head into a place that is a sanctuary, someplace bigger than myself and deeply connected to where we all came from (and will return to in the end). It's a lesson to my children. Ryan and Abby are excited to see things grow, to pick the fresh tomatoes and show them proudly to their mom. On how many levels does that work? Responsibility, stewardship of the environment, hard work, time spent with Dad... that list is just endless.

So maybe it isn't about me and how great a tomato I can grow.

Perhaps, like the Grinch, the garden is about much more than we really know.

Go Ahead, Cry Yourself to Sleep

It's odd, really, how normal we all try to appear. I was just thinking this while I was out at OSH during my lunch (buying sprinklers, wouldn't you know).

I'm walking through the store and just for some reason becoming untethered. Why? I don't know. I guess I become untethered quite a bit. But maybe we all do. Maybe that's why we all need the cell phones to keep us at the ready at all times. I don't blame those people. In fact, often I want to be one of them. When I get lonely, freaked out in the world, to reach out and hear a friendly voice.

"Hey, man, how's it going? Oh, I'm just at OSH picking up sprinklers. No, the OSH down south of Pico."

But I don't. And maybe it's because I crave those moments, because that's when real magic happens. Not the kind of magic you get from TV, the movies, or Disneyland, the magic that comes from life all around us. The people who you don't know yet, who you may never know. What will they say to you? How will you interact with them?

When I lived in Venice, California all those years ago, I felt like a reporter. I was lucky enough to have my brother Jack and his high school classroom read about all my adventures in a really, really crazy, at-the-end-of-the-earth life. I don't know what I would have done without an audience, actually. Go insane? Get in more trouble than I did? Got me. That's a question for the ages, I guess. The fact is I did have a wonderful brother who was able to help me make sense of it all and bang, here I am many years later with a writing job and, better, a wonderful wife as my best friend and two children.

Is it boring? Yes, sometimes it's all colossally boring. But when we are bored is that when we reach that area where danger, Life, lurks?

What happens when you tell your trainer that you might cry during leg lifts because your mother has Alzheimer's and you just had to put her into a hospice?

There is so much fertile ground there, so much room for danger, compassion, love, curiosity, intrigue, and so much else.

I'm old enough to know those habits I use to keep myself from feeling such things (yet I do them anyway), but I don't want to add to that list. As crazy as I am, I really believe I might be much worse if I tried to pretend I was everyone else.

In my opinion, those "everyone else" people are much, much crazier. They just don't realize it. Yet.