Everything Must Be Remade

Sometime, in the garden or washing dishes, I hold onto certain phrases and, for the life of me, I cannot get them out of my mind.

"Everything must be remade" is the one that's been on me for months now. When I look at it, what my mind is really thinking that is, I can see it's really about the world being remade.

None of this comes as a surprise since some of my immediate family and friends have remade their lives, homeschooling, devoting themselves more to religious lives, etc. Somehow I've always skirted the issue of radical change, perhaps due to my Air Force Brat upbringing and always carrying a longing to "just get along", regardless of my personal feelings. (Perhaps I'm really Asian and was adopted into my family...)

As I look at the world around me and see in so many ways, what it's become, I do in fact realize what it could be, at least from a ecologist's standpoint.

Pulitzer prize winning author Jared Diamond wrote a book called Collapse, which studies how great societies fall into ruins. That book and that title have stuck with me. Especially in these times of incredible change. Will one of the world's richest and powerful countries overextend itself and end up in ruins? Is the world, in its global economy and global pollution, heading the wrong direction?

Well, some people say that you shouldn't wish for things you don't really want, and I guess the same could be said for thinking about things you don't really want. Over the last 6 months my office has undergone massive changes and, once again, I don't know if I'm in a good leadership role for it. I got a new manager in January, which was okay, as I know her really well and she knew what I did on a day-to-day basis. But then, 3 months ago, 50% of our HQ and 30% of the offices worldwide were cut. Friends I've know for years (10 years, some of them), were given severance packages and told to clean out their desks. It was heartbreakingly awful I mean, I realize business is just a reflection of what's going on in the world, but to have it all fall down after so many years of working together was in so many ways, more than my heart could bear.

Three months later, the whole company is being reorganized and my manager now is someone across the country and I'm not quite sure what my role is in this first week of the reorganization. Sadly, lots of people are confused over the details and the unknown is making everyone frustrated and nervous.

But here it is exactly: the old way wasn't working and everything has to be remade. People who did one thing will now do another. Certain ways of doing things will have to be rethought. There will be retraining.

My old boss, who is exceptionally smart, told me that with change like this, you can either just ride the wave under the radar, or use the opportunity to do something you really love. The problem I see with this is if what I start doing what I love, if it doesn't jibe with what the company loves, I'm going to be out of a job at a terrible, terrible time. But if change was easy, or if everyone could do it, the world would look a lot different than it does now, I suppose.

We know how evolution works, correct? The environment changes and whoever is adapted best to that change flourishes. This is really no different, except that this change can be exasperating, especially for people like me, who aren't incredibly comfortable with it. But then again, it's time to say goodbye to what was and move onto the next thing. I've done it before. When we moved into this house 14 years ago, I knew little to nothing about gardening. Now I take care of hundreds of plants on a small 1/8 an acre using less water than people with 4x that acreage using no pesticides or fertilizer. It's all possible. We've learned to live with less water, use less electricity and gas, create a compost pile, go organic, invite animals into our yard to live, and grow native plants in our yard.

It's not bad.

But even though this change at work isn't like working in a garden (the aloe doesn't complain when I cut in back by a third and the squirrels don't bitch when I move their feeder), I think I can do this.

If I really want the change, I'm going to have to.

Atwater Drift

Garden log: Matillijas up, but more sparse than last year. Tomatoes already setting fruit, if you can believe it. Ryan's dream Big Max pumpkin plant (reputed to produce 75 lb pumpkins) in the ground. Love-in-a-mist blooming.


I'm sure everyone has this, you go out somewhere, the garden, shopping, bike riding, whatever, and you come up with this really terrific idea. You think about it and you're just in love with it.

Then you come home, get a drink of water, check the mail, feed the kids, whatever, and suddenly that idea is gone.

It's sad but true, even if you remember the idea, a lot of the fire behind it has disappeared.

"What the heck did I think that was so great for?"

Though there may be the case that the idea might not be so great anyway and it's probably best forgotten about.

Especially when you should be paying attention to the task at hand instead of drifting.

I'm a big drifter out in the garden. It's actually an observation I've had about writers, even garden writers, when you see the projects they're describing it's usually accompanied by a, "that's it?" feeling.

"That's the garden you've been going on and on about?"

Garden writers have a tendency to try a lot of different things, but they're essentially different people than great garden designers.

The garden writer for the Los Angeles Times, Robert Smaus, was always going over his new finds, creations, and critiques of flowers, vegetables, and the like. When I finally found his garden online I had that feeling described above. It was a very small garden with things pulled out, this set by the other, this needing weeding.

Martha Stewart Magazine it was not.

I still love Robert Smaus, and his work, but I wouldn't recommend him coming over to your house and redoing your garden. For the same reason (and more), I would tell you I'm fine bringing over bottles of wine, but probably not a trowel.

There was an amazing designer over at a nursery called Hortus years ago in Pasadena. My neighbor Dan just came over and was talking about it today and we recalled how stunning it was. I should have taken pictures, but there was a huge clock tower with the entire face made out of old farm equipment, a beautiful 1900's era steel hothouse, a working vegetable garden (I'm not kidding, the guy had a grounds crew whose job it was to tend to the plants including this veggie garden), four koi ponds... The place was magic.

It had two drawbacks. One really only pertaining to me, which was that you could pick up a beautiful little something only to turn it over and discover that it's $1,300. The other was apparently he wasn't such a great businessman. I heard one of his gardeners tell me that he owed so much money by the end that someone was yelling at him while he was at the cash register who proceeded to grab him by the collar and pull him across the counter. The owner broke free and took off down the street. And that was the last the gardener ever saw of him.

Good designer. Bad money guy.

I guess the point is you can't be good at everything. Or maybe very few people are good at everything. Or that that the old adage is true, "Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach. Those who can't teach, teach gym."

Back in the Mix

The tomatoes are in and the world is in bloom.

The gardening month has been made "interesting" due to my dealing with a walking cast and a strict order from my podiatrist not to work in the garden. So it's been a bit of teaching for both Ryan and Abby (the latter, being 6 and having a very short attention span, picking a weed or two then wandering off). I've taught Ryan how to mow the lawn without running over the power cord, which is pretty good, considering how likely an event that actually is.

Looking over the tomatoes at the heirloom-specific Tomatomania this year, I was convinced that I needed these cool pulp pots, essentially large pots made out of old pulp that can be used for a couple years, then break down in the compost. Okay, maybe I was dreaming that last part, but that was my original intention before I discovered they had none of them by the time I got there. 12 o'clock on the second day of the sale. They're pretty hot, these pots.

We bought our normal boatload of tomatoes, for us - 6 plants, and I went home wondering where the hell I was going to put all these things. Like all plants and puppies, when you get them they're so small and cute you wonder why you didn't get 20 or 30, never realizing that they will take over your home rather quickly. I've learned to limit myself (and Ryan) over the years. Which is ironic, since Ryan loves to buy plants but refuses to eat most vegetables.

I had been reading online a lot about these EarthBoxes, which are essentially containers within containers that allow you to water at the bottom and grow more in a small space than you ever dreamed possible. Well, that's what the ads say. The ads also say that they run about $55 apiece not including shipping. Which would put me in the $200 range for planting all the tomatoes I just bought (3 per box).

Why not plant in the ground, you ask? Very smart question. We've been planting in the ground and in planters for a few years now (trying interesting techniques like an inground terra cotta pot full of water to help keep the ground around the plants moist), but the problem is that you're supposed to rotate your "tomato" crop in three year cycles. Which means if I plant a tomato outside my back door this year, I'll be waiting three years until I can put another tomato plant there. I don't know about you, but I live in the middle of a rather large city. And my whole front yard is a jungle. I don't have a heck of a lot of space to plant my leggy, thirsty tomato plants.

The clever thing about container gardening is that you can put the same tomato in the same place year after year.

That's the plan anyway. Finish the season in October, dump the soil, wash out the pots, put some lettuce in, then use the same pot in the same place next year for tomatoes.

But perhaps I'm getting ahead of myself, since I have absolutely no fruit as of yet.

After reading forums about creating your own "EarthBox" and deciding, yes, they work, but I'll be damned if I'm putting one more ugly thing in my yard (ask me about my radial tires!), I went with a company called The Garden Patch.

I know, they had to search long and hard to come up with a worse name than EarthBox, but by gum I believe they nailed it.

So I sat on my chair and directed my 9-year-old son to haul around the 30+ pound bags of soil and my dear Abigail to stop listening to High School Musical 3 long enough to put at least one scoopful of dirt into the container. She actually was good enough to help me haul them, one by one, back to the back of the house and try not to squirt the hose at me. (Which went something like this: "Hmm, the directions say DO NOT GET THE FERTILIZER PACK WET BEFORE PLANTING.... Ack!!! Abby!!! Put down the hose, PUT DOWN THE HOSE!!! AHHHHH!!!!" Something like that.)

We got all the tomatoes in and the fertilizer packets stayed relatively dry.

I did not.

And I tried not to look fazed later in the day, upon going back to the garden store, when Ryan picked out a seedling for a pumpkin called Big Max.

Would you laugh when I told you that it supposedly grows pumpkins up to 75 pounds?

Yeah, I wonder where that's going to go...

The End of Violence

I walked the children to the car this morning, as I do each weekday, and they got in the car and we drove away.

Nothing new, nothing different.

Which is what I had planned.

What they didn't see was the pool of blood on the sidewalk that was there last night, right in front of my car, from where a 21-year old man lie, bleeding to death out of his femoral artery, where he was shot, just minutes before.

But that probably makes sense.

I don't know what to tell them and I don't know exactly how to share this with others, or get it out of my head in the light of day.

We've already talked about it, Wendy, my neighbors, the police, and we even joked about it and went to bed and slept soundly, but the fact remains, the kid was shot 100 feet from my front garden and bleeding to death while the bad guys drove off.

The kids were asleep last night when I heard what sounded like a large firework outside my front window. I was doing dishes and it didn't sound like a gun, because I've heard gunfire before and it's always muffled, as its usually far away. This sounded like a firecracker. But then there was shouting and I could see, from my dining room window, a 20-something kid with a shaved head and white tee shirt scuffling with someone else. I didn't see the someone else. But there was shouting and I figured out pretty quick that someone shot a gun, so called 911.

I explained the whole thing to the woman on the phone, play-by-play. A black truck (an Avalanche, which I didn't know at the time) was pulling away from the scene. The shaved head kid was on a cell phone and limping and seemed to have a red splotch covering his white tee shirt on the right side. I figured he was the one hit.

There was also a red SUV, which looked like an Isuzu Rodeo, that was there and stopped during most of this, before heading down the street. I kept telling the woman on 911 that the black truck was still there, had come back, and if the police would get there immediately, they could catch them. I think she was trying to take down everything I was saying. (but the weird thing was, she put me on with paramedics afterward, who already had a call in).

I ran to the living room, still talking to 911, and turned off the lights, trying to get a good look at the kids and see if I could get the license plate of the black truck, which had turned around and was now heading out.

I ran out to tell Wendy what'd happened and by the time I came back in, the police car was pulling up. I ran out the door and saw the kid I thought was shot just had a red graphic on his shirt, but there was someone lying on the ground down the street. The kid on the phone kept yelling, "My friend, they shot my friend."

The police were everywhere. They kept pulling up. I directed the fire engines down to where the kid was and the two others were wandering around, trying to catch their breath. The neighbors all started coming out of their houses and we started gathering in little groups. I asked the guys if they were okay, did they need anything. No.

The kid was lying right outside my neighbor's house and the paramedics were hooking him up to an IV, stripping off his bloody clothes, and getting him onto the gurney. One of the other kids was vomiting into the gutter, from exhaustion?

These were young Armenian kids driving a car well out of my price range. What were they doing in our neighborhood? What the hell happened? They told the cops they were visiting a friend's girlfriend, but they didn't buy it any more than we did. The cops pointed out that there was broken jewelry, a hat on the ground that didn't belong to these kids, and other stuff that showed this was really a fight, and they would guess, probably with something to do with drugs.

There's still really only one kid we know on our block who sells drugs, Andrew, and he's been selling them for 10+ years. He walked by while everyone was standing there, but I don't think he'd be stupid enough to do that if his customers were just getting shot. Wouldn't they finger him?

Our neighbor told us one of the other kids, the shooters, had run into his back yard for a few minutes, which prompted him to call the police. The car apparently came back around picked up that kid and they took off.

While talking to all our neighbors a policeman came up and asked us if we'd stand outside yellow tape. We all looked up and realized they had cordoned off the area we were standing. I didn't know what to do. It was kind of like being kicked out of the party, so to speak.

The cops came to our door, talked to us some more, and we learned the red SUV I saw was stopped and they were witnesses, if you can believe it. They saw everything and then drove away. So I may have done my good deed (imagine how surprised they were when the cops pulled them over as they were driving and asked if they just witnessed a shooting).

The kid who was shot, it turned out, was bleeding to death, and flat lined on his way to the hospital. He was brought back and they said if he died, the detectives would be back asap.

He must still be alive, because we didn't see them.

Around 10:30 I realized there was a pool of blood in front of my neighbor's house. Her lights were on and I knocked and asked if I could borrow her hose. I didn't want my kids to see all the blood. Or the blood to stain the sidewalk, to remind us what'd happened there.

So we talked a bit while I washed.

And the conversation moved away from this and onto that, her termite infestation, her aunt, who'd recently passed away, my kids...

It seemed so normal, though I was watching blood, which looked so black in the light, down the sidewalk and into the sewer.

I don't know if the two can't coexist in my brain, or if I'm so over it that I don't want to think about this.

The second can't be true, because I can't stop thinking about it, but I'm not sure I know how to handle the anger and pain. It's been a long couple months - with layoffs at the office, my foot in a walking cast, and tons of work to catch up on (which is to be expected when there are layoffs).

In the light of day, I walked my children to the car and let them in. We passed by the elements of the fight I didn't see in the night. Someone had been pushed into the irises. There were torn tree branches.

As I opened the door for them to get in, only I could see the bloody footprints which were out of my hose's reach last night. The boy had run up and down the street bleeding, and at 7 in the morning, you could still see the bloody tracks leading up the street.

I grew up in Nebraska, where in a lot of ways, it's more violent in everyday life than here (there's a special breed of men who lurk in bars drinking and looking for their next fight), but seeing this - it's just so harsh, so close, and I want to protect my children from it so badly.

What Have You Done to Save the Earth Today?

It sounds ridiculous, when you put it that way, doesn't it? But it's a phrase I play in my mind, over and over again, like a CD that skips right where you put your dirty thumbprint.

I realize many people who, like me, are into causes for the earth have a tendency to be a little bit of downers. But don't blame the cause. If we weren't here, we'd be downers about the state of the economy, the state of religion, or the state of the prisons in America. Thankfully many of us are here, so you can poke fun of us in a big group.

But getting back to my original point. I find life sometimes boring. And depressing. Why? Because that's just me, damn it. Here I am. I've been like this since I was 15, maybe before. And yes, I find doing the dishes just as damn boring as most. I hate doing the dishes. I don't really like doing the laundry, either. And, by God, if I was alive during the pioneer days, I'm sure I'd hate shoeing horses, plowing, and killing chickens for dinner. Even though I've read many Zen Buddhist monks expound the wonders of doing the dishes and calming the mind, it's never really made sense to me.

Which is why the mantra above, What have you done to save the Earth today?, makes so much sense to me. Okay, maybe I'm overly melodramatic. Or incredibly pathetic. But putting those things together in my mind makes me feel good about the trail I'm leaving behind. Which is something you can't say when you go through a 12-pack by yourself watching TV all Saturday. (Or really, going through it while you're camping, either.)

Those little damn things - they may not even make you feel all that good. Like taking all the leaves last Sunday, mulching them up, then putting them back on the yard as mulch. It took a lot of time. I sweated and sweated and sweated. (Right here is where the doctor of your choice says, "Well, that's exactly what you're supposed to be doing. Not sitting inside reading a book!") And I sort of liked it. But that's not the point. I don't have to like it. The same way I don't have to necessarily like having to go to work every day. But it's related to the rest of your life, and beyond your life. In the case of both of those, they are legacies I leave for my children (who will benefit from me working and me working in the yard.)

Much of life is boring. I 've heard people complaining about it in school, church, home, work... And the funny thing about a practice like meditation, which we've all heard is so wonderful, secret, and inspiring, is how boring the actual act itself is. You don't sit up and say, "I'm inspired!" The opposite! You're calming down your wild mind, with all its crazy ideas like how you'd love to make $1B by becoming a wind power entrepreneur to why the heck people spend money on slot machines. And there's the rub: by smoothing out your mind, you are doing the same thing, leaving a legacy, the history you leave as you interact with everyone and everything around you.

It's tricky, right? And sort of stupid sounding, if you don't think it out. I understand that. Believe me, I understand that.

But it's important to keep these things in mind when we lower our thermostats and put on a sweater, choose to walk to the library instead of driving (even though it'll take 20 more minutes out of your day), or the myriad of things we do which are perceived by many, even ourselves, as taking too long, too hard, seemingly not worth the extra effort.

What did we do to save the Earth today? Well, we just talked about it. And hopefully we'll go away with something to do, in the right frame of mind.

Light It Up

As I said, always a strange season for me. But then again, all the seasons are strange, this one is always crazy busy. If I'd known how much busier I'd get throwing kids into the equation for this holiday season... Well, I wouldn't have changed a damn thing, but I might have paused and reflected for something like 10 more minutes.

I fulfilled my family duties last Sunday and actually got on a borrowed 20' ladder and stuck lights on my house. Yes, I know, hard to believe. I've been trying to talk my family out of wanting them for years with arguments like, "Do you want our house to end up looking like the house across the street?" (which turned out to be rather poor, as it's got every Christmas decoration available strewn across it and thus is a child's dream) and "Do you know what it costs to run those little lights for a month (poor argument, too as I have no idea, either. It could cost a nickel).

Hard to believe Ryan, a 9-year old boy, and I actually pulled the whole thing off. We went to the requisite Big Box Hardware store and stood for those stunned few minutes while surrounded by the myriad of lights (or myriad lights, if you prefer) only the Big Box Stores can offer.

Well, except of course, the ones I wanted. The white mini lights with the white cord.

But we were here. And, apparently, few other people in the aisle. Which as we all know from past holiday shopping experiences, is a good thing.

A guy started talking to me when I was looking for the white lights - telling me he hadn't had to put lights up for years, since his divorce, and now that he and his fiance were living together here he was back buying decorations.

You know, I never divulge stuff like that on aisle 23, or any aisle in department stores. In fact, it took me a long time to tell my therapist I wanted to leave my girlfriend.

Regardless, this was a really nice guy, and it turned out, a heck of a source of information on Christmas lights. He knew stuff about lengths, timers, cords, all that stuff and really sounded down-to-earth about it. Before I hear you complain, "How could he NOT sound down-to-earth, they're Christmas lights", I'd like to remind you Martha Stewart bought 7 large houses explaining to us a variety of things that we should know and that should be easy, things like pie crusts. So hearing someone say, "Ah, they say 3 sets, but really 4 won't matter much if you string them together", was really reassuring.

I hoped for the best with this guy's new fiancee. I mean, he started giving advice to the woman behind me. When I went to go check out the LED lights, I got advice from that woman, too (was it his advice passed on or her own advice? At this point I didn't care. I needed everything I could to get me up that 20 foot ladder.)

We bought under $50 worth of lights and said No to the animated deer that pretends to eat your flowers (which is funny, I'm guessing, only if you don't have real deer eating your begonias on a regular basis).

I explained to Ryan the plan and, if you can believe it, he was really good about the whole thing. He got down off the roof when I told him to, he reached over the side and did not slide down the saltillo tiles onto the sidewalk, really it was a banner day. We did have problems with him wiggling the ladder for some reason while I was 18 feet up and (I felt) really close to crashing through our plate glass front window.

When Wendy came home, she was more than surprised - she let out a, "Gorgeous".

Now this is a woman who never lets out that sort of sentiment and we'd done it, we'd moved her with miniature Christmas lights hung all across our Spanish style 1927 casa, which is a beautiful thing.

I'm going to try to hold that moment close as long as I can.

For I know when January 7th comes, I'm going to back on that roof with the shaky ladder.

Not Playing Possum

November and December are without a doubt my busiest months, both at home and at work.

We host an annual Early Thanksgiving, which has blossomed into a sit down potuck dinner for 70 which is almost immediately followed by a party I throw at work for 200, then for staff at work for 80.

On top of that we throw all the rest of the holiday craziness, kids plays, Wendy and Ryan's birthdays, Halloween, Thanksgiving, and a trip back to Nebraska for the Christmas holidays.

By the time I get back to the Midwest, honestly, all I want to do is collapse in a chair.

This was the weekend after our enormous potluck. So it was supposed to be the weekend we put the house back in order. Which would have been fine if we hadn't had house guests for the Thanksgiving vacation.

Happily, it's our favorite family, and that makes all the difference in the world.

Unfortunately, today meant a lot of putting stuff back, cleaning, and getting our world back in a little bit of order before the week starts.

Wendy had asked me to grab our big metal bucket out back to be used as Woodstock's nest in the school Charlie Brown Christmas play (Abby is playing Woodstock). You know, the last thing I expected to see when I lifted it up was an incredibly angry mother opossum baring her teeth at me. Ryan was behind me and I jumped and pushed him back into the garage. He had no idea what happened. He thought there was a skunk underneath there. Nope, just an angry opossum.

After going back with a large poker and being greeted once again by those bared teeth, I decided it wasn't the brightest idea in the world to take on a possibly rabid varmint in my back yard. (The coach of Ryan's soccer team just picked up a snake last week, only to discover it was a baby rattle snake, which also has a venomous bite.)

When I came in to tell Wendy her response was, "Wow, really." Then a pause. "Well I guess your turning the yard into a nature sanctuary is really starting to work."

Damn her eyes.