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.

This Is Not A Love Song

There was a time when I would have gone to see No Country for Old Men at the movies with friends. Or by myself. Or as part of a class in college.

And perhaps I'd think about it, talk it over with people.

The fact is, I'm intrigued by it.

For one, I love Cohen Brothers movies. Raising Arizona remains one of the funniest movies I've seen of all time.

But I've also heard how violent it is, even from people who watch violent movies.

I was so intrigued that I watched the first five minutes of it - just enough to watch to young Sheriff (so young, apparently, that he doesn't put his detainee in the prison, he leaves him sitting behind him, so he can't see him) get snuffed in under 20 seconds.

And then I took the movie out.

I'm done with these movies.

I don't know about you, but I have a ton of hatred in my heart. There's bad guys I want to see strung up by their thumbs... And not just the bad guys you'd think of, but those politicians, businessmen, and rulers who lie and cost people their lives financially or physically.

Watching a mass murderer doesn't mean anything to me, except that I'm watching an aberration of society. Fact is, I don't really care to have a look at how Hitler became the colossal madman he'd become.

I just had to start asking myself, "Why"?

When there's so much work to be done in the world, with famine, hatred, intolerance, and disease, it seems myopic to stare at these glaring man made errors in a darkened movie theater.

I know I'm sounding a hell of a lot like those Sally Do Gooders I used to abhor so much in high school and college. But I'm able to admit I'm wrong. There's some art for art's sake, which doesn't make much sense to the cognizant, thinking person.

Maybe this in fact is a great Cohen Brothers flick. And all I have to do is make it through "strong graphic violence" to get to it. But I'm not going to do it. I've seen torture scenes, then had to listen to the description of how we treat men in Guatanamo Bay. Or how the Japanese treated Asian Comfort Women. When I hear such stories, of how humans brutalize one another, it breaks my heart for all of humankind. At that point I don't know if we are above dogs, bears, or even the lowest of the animal kingdom. At that point we have debased ourselves, we've lost control of what someone has given us which could only be called a soul.

There are better, higher things to do than watch this movie. Lest we all forget that this is entertainment.

I would suggest to you that instead you listen instead to Father Boyle, who lifts up men from streets of violence and gives them something so much more.

That's here.

And I bid you goodnight.

Insert Sad Face

It's funny, I've been a writer forever and a gardener for so few years, that it's odd I spend so many waking hours thinking about the latter.

And how working with the soil just a few hours a week can change your viewpoint.

I was having a discussion with my brother a few months ago who turns out to be a "man is not the cause of global warming" person (or just being a naysayer to irk me). Being smarter than me by a long shot he can rattle off all sorts of facts he's read and remembers at his finger tips.

I'm not good at arguing. And I am woefully slow. But when the US government's own Environmental Protection Agency (who has been heavily influenced by an anti-environmental Bush presidency) puts out this Q&A on their site,

Q: Are human activities responsible for the warming climate?
A: Careful measurements have confirmed that greenhouse gas emissions are increasing and that human activities (principally, the burning of fossil fuels and changes in land use) are the primary cause. Human activities have caused the atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane to be higher today than at any point during the last 650,000 years. Scientists agree it is very likely that most of the global average warming since the mid-20th century is due to human-induced increases in greenhouse gases, rather than to natural causes.

After our own government doing so much to negate such statements for the last many years, how can this not move you to get on board,?

My wife had this brilliantly simple (but not simplistic) thought:

If I'm right, and human influence is heating up the earth and potentially going to kill us all, then cutting back on carbon emissions may save us.

If you're right and the pollution we toss into the air isn't doing anything to warm the earth and we cut back, we'll just have cleaner air.

Not really a loss.

When you put it down to that simple statement, it sort of makes sense, doesn't it?

Mind Weeds

I remember years ago listening to this Zen Buddhist monk speak about mind weeds.

I love that he chose an expression so rooted to the earth to explain a simple, pervasive phenomenon.

Everyone knows what mind is and even the person who has spent their life in Manhattan knows what weeds mean to farmers.

The funny thing for me is how intertwined these two can become when gardening. I go out to the yard to take care of things on a Saturday and suddenly all I can see is weeds.

And my mind starts whirling, "Where am I going to start?", "Look at this mess, how the hell did I ever think I was going to tackle this without a gardener?"

I should take a moment to remind you (and myself) that most people who talk to me about my yard think it's beautiful. They don't see the weed patches the way I do. Or, if they do, they mean little to them in the big picture.

But I am so caught up in these weeds because they mean something to me, they actually set off many different parts of my mind. This dandelion over here says that I'm lazy. That volunteer fennel tells everyone I'm sloppy. This huge patch of grass tells the whole world that I have no idea what the hell I'm doing out here.

It's inescapable, actually. Well, almost. I've learned only over the last month or so, that two cups of coffee before working in the yard is one cup too much for me.

Wendy's perfect solution was to only concentrate on one little patch of weeds at a time and tackle them.

Bird by bird, Anne Lamott might say.

Your Lucky Day

August 10, 2008

Roses blooming again (even though I never feed them. Benign neglect?) Tomatoes finally coming in. Eggplants blooming. Lantana, as ever, blooming its blooming head off. Fennel gone to seed.

Ah, the fennel gone to seed.

Talk to any naturalist or ranger in Southern California and they'll tell you, fennel is one of the scourges of the Southwest. It's a weed, that's for sure. It grows in vacant lots, along disturbed roadsides, and anywhere the soil has been broken up to let it get a toehold.

When I tell them at the native plant centers that I have some in my yard (most likely volunteers), they almost always tell me to rip it out. I don't, for my own reasons, I'll get to in a bit. But what I do is, before it goes to seed to feed the birds and thus spread into other disturbed places, I cut it back and put it in the compost bin.

Ryan and I took our trimmers out yesterday to bring down and stood beside the 10 foot plants. Butterflies and bees were buzzing around the flowers and, as every time we cut them back (twice a year? three times?) they are covered with ladybugs.

I'm talking hundreds.

So it's a bit of a dilemma when we stand out there with our trimmers. Sure fennel is a heinous weed, but here it is producing the number one natural control of pests in my yard. It's always hard for Ryan because he thinks not only is fennel cool looking, it attracts all these wonderful insects.

He's right (though really you do have to cut them down to the ground or they get a bit ratty mid-summer), so we we make it our duty to cut them down, but to try to save as many of the beneficial bugs as we can.

So yesterday Abby, Ryan, and I took our places. Ryan was the fennel chopper ("Timber!!!"), I caught each as they fell down, and Abby was in charge of relocating as many ladybugs as she could to neighboring plants. It was a nice little set up, actually, as Abby has wont to play imaginative games while Ryan and I are working in the yard ("Okay, Dad, you're the gardener and I'm your daughter who is just going to school.")

We chopped them all down (and thus exposing a really ugly and weedy patch of the yard, unfortunately), put the pieces into our green yard waste bin and left the lid open for the ladybugs to fly away away, hopefully, to our yard.

I don't think anyone who has read my take on gardening, or even the title of my blog, believes I think gardening is easy. It's physically hard and sometimes frustrating work. So why have it as a hobby? Why indeed.

Our Saturdays are free(ish). Wendy, my wife is at work until 2 or 3, and I'm in charge of a 6 and 8 year old. I did my years of staying inside and playing Thomas the Tank engine, or racing outside to do my work while someone was napping. I needed something that was close to home and was actually interactive with my family (Wendy pointed out, rightly so, television and movies aren't really interactive.)

So here it is, something close to home, that teaches my kids about the natural world around them, and something that allows me help bring back a little patch of ground to a sort of balance.

And, of course, there's moments like these ladybugs.

Who can deny such a wonderful moment such as this?

No one indeed.

Bike It

Matillijas popping like mad. Love-in-a-Mist flowering and becoming seed pods. Corn coming in. Roses out our ears.

The big news, the wind. Earlier in the week we were in the mid-90s downtown, unheard of in this season. Now the northern wind seems to have picked up (and man is it picking up, the trees are swirling like mad) and is driving everything back to a reasonable 70s.

I'm on Day 8 of biking to work, with a brief drive in on Monday.

How is it? Surprisingly good.

I'd spent so much time ruminating (which I'm sure comes as no surprise to anyone who knows me) about how I'd get myself and the kids the 6 miles to their school and me 4 more miles to my work without using a car. The grand fact is, unless I want to take the bus and 1 1/2 hours to get there, it's not going to work.

There, I said it. IT'S NOT GOING TO WORK, PEOPLE!

There was a fellow who suggested on his Website taking kids in a trailer. Hey, fella, the trailer company, that is the company who manufactures the trailer to carry children, doesn't recommend taking them on streets. Why? Because your kids are eye level with the bumper of cars like the Toyota Tercel. And pretty much under the tires of anything the size of an SUV.

It's not going to work. As hard as that was to tell myself.

But I digress.

Fact is, I can haul the kids into work (which is sort of a three-fer with fuel, right?), then take the bike off the back of my car, and ride the rest of the way to work.

Now I'm not saying I'll do it every day. If I can eke out one or two days a week, that'll be good.

The reason? Well, it's manifold. (That's weird, isn't that a weird word?) a) saving gas b) getting exercise c) getting outdoors

I really don't enjoy driving cars, and I really don't enjoy traffic. I don't really even like it on the bike, as a matter of fact. But I do like riding a bike. And I love, love, love being outside. Which is how the hell I became a gardener in the first place. Trading the inside Saturday chores for the outside Saturday chores.

I do not know why I have biophilia (that is, love of the outdoors) or why I love stuff that people do under their own power, but it has fascinated me since I was a kid.

Well, here I am, 42 years old and enjoying the heck out of it.

Who'd have thought?

All The Best Things

I have an amazing tendency to put things off. Like buying mutual funds for instance. After researching them on the Web and settling for the advice that Motley Fool was offering, I went to the library Web site to get an interlibrary loan on one of their books. Which led me to an Amazon review of it, which essentially ripped its pages out and threw them on the ground. Then ignited them.

Which, ironically, was very pleasant for me, because I was back at Square One, which is much more enjoyable than reading about mutual funds.

This led me to order Mutual Funds for Dummies from the library, which is now gathering dust on my nightstand. And now I'm blogging instead of reading about mutual funds. Do you see how this intricate system helps me prepare for my retirement? See? Oh, consider yourself lucky that you didn't hitch yourself to this star. Honey, we're 67, and it's time for the Trailer Park!

Which leads me to those pictures of my yard I promised several months ago. Before I had a camera. Or could hook it up to the computer. Or get around to reading the instructions.

Lucky star indeed.

Working Backward

My mother writes to me that it's snowing outside in Nebraska. That sneaky Midwestern weather.

We're having our spring and a quick weekend into summer, with temperatures in the mid 90s in most of the city.

Here comes spring.

I'm still figuring out what Microsoft Vista has done to not recognize my camera anymore, so you'll have to do with this picture of a Joshua Tree Ryan took during our yearly camping trip to the park.

Everything is in bloom in our garden, the lavenders, California poppies, irises (both Dutch and Siberian), all the rose bushes, the Catalina Island tree poppy, alyssum, snapdragons... it makes you realize why all the gardeners wait for spring.

Having spent last weekend out in the desert, this weekend was (mostly) devoted to trimming the rapidly growing grass and installing shelves into the kids' bedroom closet.

The grass always makes me think. For one, I kind of love grass and sure enough when I was thinking about it while mowing a young, tattooed couple walked by and the woman sniffed the air. "I know", I said, "It smells like summer." And it does for me. And nothing feels like a better accomplishment than mowing a fresh carpet of grass.

The sad fact is, what lies beneath the surface. Yes, I'm going eco Nazi on all of you. I can't lie and say that I don't live in a Mediterranean climate, I do. I can't tell anyone who has watched Chinatown all the way through that the fight to bring water to this dusty little town led more than one person to their early grave. I know, I know. But I'm not preaching, I'm just trying to be realistic. I love the grass, but it's not really grass anyone uses. It's that sad little area between the sidewalk and the street. The area officially owned by the city yet maintained by the homeowner (as we discovered when our tree needed to be cut down because it was breaking the sidewalk and our main sewage line). It makes a convenient walkway for people avoiding the onslaught of matillija poppies when they come into bloom and reach over the sidewalk.

I mean, it's a waste.

I dutifully mow it once a week, trim it every other week, water it two to three times a week during the hot season, and fertilize it with a nice organic fertilizer a couple times a year.

And thus my working title, "Working Backward".

I left the Midwest with a snooty Easterner's attitude. I was going to move to the city where people understood more my way of thinking. Probably true, as I might be more of an outcast there than here. But there were a lot of things, homey things, I thought were ridiculous, which have only made sense to me in the last ten years.

Like what? Can you believe canning? Making homemade cookies. Garden tomatoes. Feeding songbirds. Using your ingenuity to make due when you can't have what you crave.

That last one is the kicker. Yes, making due. I think of the people of the past and how we've found their garbage in piles and deduce what kind of people they were. I'm guessing they'd be the kind of people who wouldn't be able to stop vomiting when they saw the sort of excesses in which our society lived.

Lawn is an excess. And, crazily, it's part of a landscaping dream spread to my dry little corner of the country by people living in "it's raining even when it's dry" England.

The 50's were about moving forward, conquering nature. But I think we've figured out that's not exactly working the way we envisioned, with flying cars and... what the hell did the People of the Future eat?

I'm willing to say I've gone too far on some things. I don't need to be able to go to Paris tomorrow on a jet. That's a nicety.

I mean, hell, we've got a pretty cush life here, if you look around. I can go home to Nebraska every year, which was not always the case. I can afford to call my family and spend tons of time on the phone with them for dollars, not hundreds of dollars, as it was when I was growing up. I don't have to dry my laundry in the freezing winter down in the basement, as my grandmother did.

We've got it very nice, and maybe that sometimes makes me feel a wee bit guilty when I think (or I hear about in church) all those people have nothing. I mean, I've got more than a wonderful wife and two kids, I've got a roof over my head, a decent job, and a car to get me back and forth to work. Heck, my kids are going to a better school than I did growing up.

And the grass? The grass in comparison, isn't even a nicety, it's kind of this bad-tempered friend at a dinner party who keeps eating everyone else's dinner.

I'll keep you posted on how this goes.

High Hopes, We've Got High Hopes

Roses trimmed. Lettuces out of their cups and into the garden. Broccoli sprouting. Pregnant squirrel raiding all bird feeders (save the hummingbird's). California poppies blooming, blooming, blooming.

And, god love him, the Golden Cat Bee (a Carpenter Bee? We're not sure) has returned himself for the Spring.

Summer cannot be too far away.

When I worked for The Walt Disney Company one day I was reading a newsletter missive from the then CEO, Michael Eisner that I've kept with me for awhile.

He said something like this, "Being Disney, we are expected by the public and our customers to have higher standards. Thus we get a lot of criticism when we fail to meet those expectations."

Many non-practicing religious people think of practicing religious folks as hypocritical.
"How can they claim to worship God when they won't welcome homosexuals into their churches? Or bad mouth each other as soon as they get into the parking lot".

And though they have a point, I believe thoughtful Jews, Christians, Muslims, and Buddhists keep those points in their minds during their days. And to stand off to the side and pretend to have no opinion on anything is a bit ludicrous. You can say you're not perfect, but choosing to do nothing about it is a bit like wishing you could save money, but spending your paycheck every week. You're basically never going to hit any goals.

The same applies to trying to be "green", I believe. I've got a friend who is a bit "greener than thou". She does a lot for the environment, she gives freely of her money to worthwhile causes, she's rid poisons from her house (and thus our landfills), cuts back on utility, water, and energy costs, and has made her landscaping business as green as they get. But, unfortunately, she's not quick at making friends because she's a bit of a bull in a china shop. When you say you've switched to Method Cleaners, she tells you she mixes her own Soap and Baking Soda Cleaner and dresses you down for going to the store and buying another bottle.

She's a bit like Frank Lloyd Wright, who insisted everyone who he built a house for use the furniture he built, which, it turned out was incredibly uncomfortable. Sure enough, when they paid him off, they threw it into storage and got furniture that made sense.

Frank Lloyd Wright never understood how to convince people without throttling them around the throat. If he'd made a stunning argument why his furniture made sense, maybe everyone wouldn't have chopped it into firewood when the going got rough.

Yes, there are high standards with going green. And yes, it's hard when there's so much bad news facing you every day telling you that what we've become, especially we Americans, are wasteful, polluting nightmares hellbent on destroying their home.

So the stakes are high, but does that mean you should badmouth your friend who drives to and from work alone in her Chevy Suburban? I don't think so.

We used to sing a hymn in church when I was a kid, "They will know we are Christians by our love." What made it so special to me was its proof in the pudding type of thought. People who get Christ's message need to strive to love one another, even though what you actually feel sometimes is intense hatred.

Maybe one day people will look at our little, old stupid Jetta and wonder, "How the heck does a family of four get along without an SUV?" Maybe they'll ask us why we don't use pesticides in our garden. Or, better, ask how they can stop using them in their garden.

Yes, maybe I'm a bit of a coward. But I don't see the point of telling my neighbor his gas lawnmower, ever minute its in use, is the same as 5 cars idling at a stoplight (which is when they're polluting at their maximum) and that's why I chose an electric one. He'll probably think, "Damn, what an ass." Then speak to me less frequently and think, "What an ecofreak!" every time I'm dumping old eggshells into my rosebush soil.

At that point, I've certainly turned myself into an ecofreak.

An environmentalist group could probably come into my house and gasp at the amazing array of plastic, PVC, and use of chlorine. But I would hope they'd be above that.

We've got hard enough work to do as is, without criticizing each other on the methods we're using to get there.

And, don't you know, there's people like Rush Limbaugh out there who'd love to see us fail miserably.

Which is sad, because if the world goes to hell, someone's going to try to eat that man.

Golden Hour

The poppies are up. Bound to be the best time for the garden. Broccoli in (and already attacked by the snails) as well as Golden Lights Swiss Chard and some mesclun type lettuces Ryan and I raised from seed.

I don't know if it's from the weekend we mostly spent at home (true, I went to bed Sunday thinking, Hey, I haven't left my front yard today), but today feels, what? Vast. Vast, upon coming home.

I think it's a feeling we regular folk don't have very often, this sense of glorious opportunity in front of our evening. Often, when my inner mind is complaining about the dishes I'm doing at night, knowing I have another hour worth of bookwork out at the computer, I think of the single moms, and how insanely taxed they must feel all the time. I cannot imagine what it's like to go this route alone and on half the money.

But today, or tonight rather, exactly the opposite. My office is finally clean. A bamboo palm the kids and I picked up from a Plant Yard Sale for $10 brightens up the corner, and there are a few bills to go through, but they can wait for this post.

Spring in so many ways signals beginning for gardeners. The dreams you have looking through catalogs, the hopes as the seedlings come to life in little rooms lit merely by grow lights. The season mimics the life of the young. Before we had responsibilities, when everything rolled ahead of us like a carpet of grass.

Maybe it's just the memories of an aging man. Or of someone who had the privilege to dream. But the days begin to creep up on all us adults where the dreaming stops and the hard work of doing and being busy begin.

Raising children is harder, far harder, than gardening. And it's hard to stop and think, If I don't stop and try to enjoy some of these moments, they'll be gone soon.

Sometimes I'm worried that my writing at home has dwindled to nearly zero after so many years in front of the computer screen or writing pad. But sleeping in the next room is my real work and what I'm aiming at giving the world. It's scary, yes. But very important.

Where am I going with this post? Hell, I wish I knew.

Let's leave it at being happy at the res of the evening being ahead of me.

Good night.

Manic Sunday

You know you can tell people that January is different when you live in a Mediterranean climate, but you really have to see it to believe it.

Which is why I give to you the picture on the right - taken sometime in mid January.

The good news? It was warm enough to be wearing t-shirts and shorts.

The bad? Those leaves didn't just pile themselves up like that.

Living here and doing your own gardening is like owning a house anywhere, everything is your responsibility all year long. Which gives new meaning to the word "Winter interest".

It wasn't such a manic Sunday today, and I'm sure everyone now is cozied up to their TVs with popcorn in hand watching the latest Academy Awards. We had a party to attend but Ryan woke up sick with a fever. Again. Two weeks ago he and Abby missed their whole week of school (with me working at home) because of the flu that's been going around. Wendy caught it, too.

It took a whole week to catch up to me and put me into the shivers for two days, and I'd just begun to hope we'd all turned a corner.

Nope.

It's a mystery to me. Ryan was just up yesterday playing soccer and helping with dig free mulch from the City Free Mulch Giveaway.

Which, in itself is hilarious. We'd been waiting forever for a mulch giveaway that was closer to our house and were excited when I got a flyer announcing a new location. Less that 3 miles from our place. Ryan, Abby and I set out in the car with two shovels, gloves and two of those enormous storage containers [one which would weigh more than 70 pounds when I was done filling it. Smart move with my back]. We had trouble locating it and I told Abby to look for a brown sign and Ryan to look for a gate with someone posted out front. Then we saw we were headed down a one way street. "Wait, this can't be right," I started to protest, but then I saw it. Right there at the end of the street in a light-industrial area, mulch piled about 8 feet high with a sign behind it [already graffiti'd] Free Mulch Giveaway. I don't know which was more hilarious, us standing on that steaming pile of mulch, or the guys walking around us going down to the toxic LA River to fish.

So, not so manic. Just rerouted Sunday. Which is not bad, just takes some adjusting.

The rain was on and off today. Finished the leftover chores from yesterday: the cat box needing emptying and the compost taken out.

Oh, ordinary day.

Tonight, fewer than five miles from here, people are walking down a red carpet, flashbulbs are popping, and microphones are stuck in the faces of actors and directors who will voice their opinions to their adoring fans worldwide.

Oh, but I believe the opinions elsewhere, among those watching, are much more valuable. Take it from a guy who worked those trenches for 7+ years and still lives close to that world.

"The common man's opinion" I say is a diamond in the rough.

Like a mulch pile in the middle of the city on a dead end block.

Hardship

What, you were expecting a funny title like: "Roses are Red, My Violets Aren't Blu-ming?" Surely that's got to be somewhere on the blogosphere somewhere....

Rains a comin', they say, but I haven't seen it yet. When it comes, it's supposed to come gangbusters.

I'm backdating a bit, because I'd meant to write about this, but hadn't had time during the holidays.

The second Saturday in December I was opening the windows to let some sun in, inching by our Christmas tree when I saw a mess outside the window. My Mom once told me an ice storm had hit Eastern Nebraska before the leaves had time to fall; the ice collected on the full trees and pulled entire hundreds of pounds branches to the ground, closing streets, downing power lines...

This wasn't that, but in some ways it was as hard to take.

As I looked out the front window I could see that half my lion's tail, 4 feet high and 6 feet across, had been ripped in half, the bed of irises all trampled, ditto the daylillies and fennel. The lantana had been ripped to the side and newspapers, the sex ones distributed for free around the city, lay on the ground making a bed.

My first thought was, "Oh my god, I don't want Ryan to see this."

And I didn't let him for a bit. I went out and assessed the damage.

It was hard to tell exactly what happened, but it looked like a homeless person who was either extremely drunk or just out of their mind, had repeatedly rammed a shopping cart or something like it into the butterfly bush, making some sort of hole. They ripped out 7 fennel plants and strewn them everywhere, and any other plant he or she could get hold of.

The last sign of them, beside the bed of papers and cardboard, was a black trail of wheel marks headed down the street and my daylillies all over the road, flattened by countless cars who'd passed over them in the night and early morning.

Ryan made it out of the house and started asking questions. "What's going on, Dad?" I had him go inside, get into his work clothes and get our gloves. I brought the yard trimmings can and tools over to the site.

It was hard to separate. Here nature hadn't taken its toll, but a human had purposely done this to my yard. All our hard work just ripped out by its roots and crushed. It felt as if someone had punched us in the gut and laughed.

But they hadn't. This wasn't a malicious act by sullen teens out to prove they aren't piano keys, this was an act by someone who didn't know better. Someone whose life was so much worse than ours. Who obviously didn't have anyone to care for them or love them. A man or woman who didn't even have a place to sleep and saw the world as hostile and hateful.

Ryan, Abby, and I had just volunteered (for the first time) at a homeless shelter the weekend before and we'd seen how down on their luck many of these folks are. Somehow that act helped me see through this one.

When Ryan came out he was... well, devastated. "How could someone do this?" He was also angry. He wanted to call the police and tell them to find this awful person who crushed all our work.

I explained to him what I thought happened, and tried to explain we should feel sorry for this person, as hard as it is, because we had this wonderful yard that would grow back, and a house and pillows to lay our heads on, and we had each other. This person probably didn't even have anyone to love them, to tell them goodnight when they go to bed every night.

It worked for a bit. He cleaned up near the daylillies, then suggested calling the police again. Got himself together then ran to the front porch. I didn't know for a few moments where he'd gone, but I sensed that he wasn't doing okay with it.

I set my rake on a bush and went up to the porch, where he was sitting, crying.

I put my arm around him and explained again. I told him I didn't quite understand, either. I didn't explain alcohol, drugs, or mental imbalance, but I don't think I needed to. I don't think it helped me understand. The heart of the matter was that this person didn't know what he or she was doing and we, thank god, have each other - and that is worth more than anything we own.

He was at least able to get up and begin to work again, still not totally grasping the point, which is understandable. I mean, he's in 2nd grade, Pokemon is in his grasp, but we're struggling with explanations of racism, segregation, and the Civil War.

We put up a little mock fence, just to tell the person, should they come back, (as I explained to Ryan and Abby), "This isn't a place to sleep. Please go find a shelter like the one we were just in."

I convinced Ryan we didn't need to arm the fence.

Like I said, the points are slow going with him sometimes.

Bring Me Your Huddled Masses (Friday, Bloody Friday)

Ryan's zucchini finally producing (though he insists on picking them small and bringing them in beaming). Another rush from of flowers from the roses. Newly planted Cleveland Sage shooting up new leaves (probably one of the best smelling plants in the California chaparral).

Up early today to wash dishes, get in a much-needed meditation, and get onto the blog before everyone in the house gets up. The temptation to be drawn into the LA Times has been averted, perhaps the calming energy from the meditation let me pull myself away.

Why is it so often we want to do what is easy after contemplating what is good, but harder? After all, when the easy is over, so many times we think, "Why didn't I do the other?"

It's probably the ease of those tasks that draws us to them.

I will head out into the garden again today, gently, as my back is still out - keeping me up for a good part of the night, but others, oh, the others, will already be heading home after standing in line for the 4am JCPenney post-Thanksgiving sale.

I'm going to try not to step on toes now, because a few people near and dear to my heart go once a year to shop on Black Friday when stores open their doors early and lure people through "loss leaders" or items marked below cost to generate a feeding frenzy.

And that's what it reminds me of, a feeding frenzy.

But not, sadly enough, for food to live on. It's for, once again, consumable goods that will be forgotten in years to come. The latest video game for the kids, the pair of earrings for the girlfriend, etc., etc. I do know people on strict budgets who use this day to try to make their Christmas lists fit their income, but it seems to me very backward. And that's probably not a surprise, considering what a contrarian I am.

When I was a kid Sears used to put out what they called their "Wish Book" which was full of toys, furniture, earrings, etc. Stuff people would hopefully wish for. I spent hours, I mean hours, looking at it until all the pages were dogeared from all that incessant, OCD-like turning.

I understand want, I am a victim or want, but in retrospect I realize how very wrong I was. Just as Jesus never stood in front of his apostles and told them which way to vote (the Son of God wasn't much into politics), I can't imagine Him telling Peter what to buy Paul for Hanukkah.

You'll hear no such advice from the Buddha, Mohamed, Moses, or really, the corner preacher.

Because it's of little importance in the scheme of things.

I agree with the expression Giving is More Important than Receiving, but it gets a little convoluted when you start making lists of all your Wants and handing it out to people. And, unlike the frontier woman who needs a new pot to cook her family's meals in or one nice dress to wear to church on Sunday, we're incredibly rich people, even if we're on a strict budget and trying to make ends meet.

I hate to inform the US of A, but a Wii system means little in the scheme of things. It can't educate, love, express gratitude, or even try to save the planet. It is an entertainment system, something that takes us out of our lives and distracts us a little while. Like alcohol without all the negative implications.

I'm not suggesting that everyone go home and write poetry to their loved ones this holiday season, because I too will be buying gifts just the same as you, but that seeing something like Black Friday is a portrait of how bad it all can get and hopefully will help remind ourselves that blatant consumerism can get incredibly obscene.

The reason the prophets didn't mention it, nor is it mentioned on the pulpit, is because it is a colossal lie, we think we need things that we don't because: we want to be more attractive; we want to be more entertained; we want to keep up with our friends, business associates, and neighbors...

Consumerism is a fact of our life, and I'm not going to change such a fact in my post for me or anyone reading, but I think what smarter people than us are saying is for us to shift our focus, to be thankful for what we already have and pass blessings on to those in real need.

I had trouble being thankful yesterday and I don't really know why, because I am so very, very, very blessed... but with an unsteady mind, many times it's hard to focus on those things that give you joy. I stepped outside the house, sat down on the steps and started to pick a few weeds from the garden, just alone, sitting under the toyon tree and doing nothing but picking.

A neighbor stopped by, Ryan came to see me, the sun shone on my face, I petted a dog, the day was warm, the house finches came by for food, and I was calm again. Not thankful yet, but calm.

I considered it the road to thankfulness, right here, in silence, and later, meeting with friends who had spent all day cooking so we could share a meal together.

There is your grace, there is that which holy people are speaking.

You may not know this, but the ads for many 4am post-Thanksgiving sales, if they are plain and not glossy paper, may be placed out in the garden, covered with fallen leaves, and used as mulch to deter unwanted weeds from popping up.

Which is where I am headed right now.



(photo byJef Poskanzer)

Please Don't Read!

Unless, like me, you are fascinated with other people's frustrations.

This is not a gardening entry, this is not a cooking entry (though it is on the eve of having 50 people over at my house for an early Thanksgiving feast, which we've done for 9 years), this is just one of those long, boring kvetches about other people who have no say in my life.

Wendy has a bag from this clever, and very expensive company, called lululemon which reads on the side: "Jealousy works exactly the opposite of the way you want it to," or something to that effect.

Well, I've been having what you'd call a jealous day. Maybe it comes on the top of working hard, being busy with the kids, prepping for this function, and having my back go out. Maybe it just was lurking underneath the whole time.

While listening to NPR's podcast of Driveway Moments today I heard a voice from the past talking. It was Mitch Hurwitz, maybe known by everyone else as the creator of Arrested Development, but to me he has more personal ties than that. While I was working for the production company, Witt-Thomas-Harris, he was the golden boy I watched rise to the top. Was he a bad guy, no, no certainly. But there is something to watching someone have it so good on paper (I believe he went to Harvard and had already started and sold the Boston cookie company Chipyard that he and his brother had started in their youth), go onto better things.

There is something about looking the part, acting the part, and becoming the part. And there is something to being a middle-class, not-going-anywhere-fast person who watches that ascension.

Not that I'm saying that I was the creepy guy who lurked in the shadows fixing computers, writing scripts late at night and hurtling darts at his picture. Exactly the opposite. He and I hung out, dated the same girl, and I had him look over my scripts, he being a fledgling writer on the fast track.

Now here's the odd thing, I did not want to stay in TV. After coming home one night at 5:30 in the morning after a long (and really crappy) script rewrite, my wife broke into tears saying she didn't want to live this way. She was right. I hated almost every show on TV and I was breaking my back to entertain people I thought had very low expectations.

So Mitch is one of those people you think about when approaching your high school reunion. That person you know has become wildly successful (Emmys, anyone? 7.5 million house, sir?) and you wonder why you have not.

I have a closer friend, who went onto produce movies, TV shows, and become a household name and left all the rest of us gasping for air at the end of his unanswered phone calls.

What is this jealousy? What is it we wanted so desperately out of life that we have trouble hearing other people's good fortune?

Maybe it was because we tried ourselves and failed. Which is partly what happened with me in TV. Failing and quitting. Regardless, it still feels bad when you hear that person and instead of an old flame, who brings back old feelings, this person brings in new feelings like, "What the hell went wrong in my life that's going so incredibly right with theirs?"

Bringing me back to the golden boy. Both of these friends were set up for it. Both are talent writers who worked endlessly to get their scripts to be as incredible as they could get them. One had a prominent father in the business, the other business acumen.

I tell myself, often, that the things that really matter in life, those items I hear time and again from everyone from Jesus to the man on the street, is family, God, and happiness. Sometimes they even let happiness drop off! (The Bible's full of unhappy souls doing God's work.)

And when I was in TV, I saw second and third marriages and some of the unhappiest (yet funniest) people I've ever met. If I was going to stay there, there'd be a good chance I'd sacrifice all that I now have. (My friend's wife told us a few years ago they've teetered on the brink of divorce many times.)

So what, Mr. Jealousy? What to do with you now?

I can't explain you away and I can't drink you under the table.

I'll have to sit with you awhile, the same way I did with Forgiveness when he wouldn't let me forgive someone I believe wronged me.

Ugh.

Double ugh.

Now aren't you glad you didn't read this?

Same Old Story?

Black zucchini finally starting to fruit. California poppies sticking their tufts out of the soil. Roses back in bloom (candy striped one blossoming as I haven't seen it flower in years).

You'll have to excuse me if you've heard this story before. Is my mind getting weak? I'm not sure. I'm getting older, this much I know....

But this, my friend, is the story of how I got rid of my gardener.

When Wendy and I moved into this house lo so many years ago, we fell in love with it because it had this beautiful wild garden out front. Okay, that's sort of a lie. Wendy knew I loved the outdoors and plants and figured I would love this place and gardening.

She was, as usual, right. What she didn't think of was that the garden would be a bit much to take care of by ourselves.

One of the previous owners was a landscape architect. At some point in the distant past he had decided to take out most of his broad front lawn (the house is on the corner, pushed all the way back to the lot) and put in an array of plants he'd apparently collected from some of his paying gigs from around town, as well as some I'm guessing he'd bought at the native plant place up in the valley.

This was all beautiful to look at, but when it came time to take care of it, I think both Wendy and I realized it'd be an enormous task to do ourselves. I come from Nebraska, but knew nothing about plants that weren't growing in the wild. I didn't even know anything about the grass I had to mow every summer as a kid except that we had to water it every once in awhile instead of going off and playing with our friends.

Wendy was worse off. Both her mother and grandmother are consummate plant people and Wendy could give a hoot.

So here we were standing in front 200 or so of our favorite plants wondering what the hell we were going to do about it.

Enter Javier, well-dressed (he also sold houses) with hands roughened by years of yard work, he introduced himself as the ex-owners' gardener. We struck a deal and were happy to have him on board.

It only took us a few months to discover he mowed the yard, blew the leaves around, and left.

They call it "Mow, Blow, and Go".

We, on the other hand, were expected to do the weeding, fertilizing, watering, and, essentially, everything else.

I cataloged plants, sweated over watering systems, memorized Latin names, and so much more. Those were the crazy, freewheeling days before children and after the bar scene.

Regardless, I realized as much as I did, I'd always need Javier for his extra four hours a week with a helper to get things in order. 8 man hours! What the hell kind of garden did I get myself into? Believe me, surrounded by silence, you get to ask that question to yourself many, many times.

Last summer (2006 that is) I was listening to my wife talk about her yoga teacher. Wendy said she'd heard the woman give this interesting piece of advice to her class:

"You come here once or twice a week, that's great. But what about the rest of your week? We hire gardeners, house cleaners, car washers, dog washers, and dry cleaners to do all the physical work that our bodies need. Your paying them to do the hard stuff then coming here to pay me so you can do the hard stuff."

Maybe she wasn't the best salesman for yoga, but she had an interesting point. And I was listening. On Saturdays Wendy works and I take care of the kids. This used to involve Thomas the Tank Engine track building, reading time, long walks trying to get them to sleep, and every other activity you could think of.

As soon as they grew older, though, I noticed I could be outside with them for a good 20 minutes before they started to complain. My older son, Ryan, could last an hour.

So when they turned 7 and 4 respectively, I decided to take the plunge. Instead of staying inside (where I am all week at work) and vacuuming, dusting, and cleaning the dishes, I decided I should be outside, taking care of my yard.

I made sure I had all the equipment I needed before I actually called and spoke to Javier. This was a task in itself. I scoured Craigslist for used bargains, which, it turned out were plenty. Mostly people who said something like this in their ad, "I wanted to do my own gardening, but it turns out I'm too lazy. Get this mower for cheap."

In my choice among mowers, it was easy, according to the Union for Concerned Scientists a gas-powered lawn mower "emits as much smog-forming pollution in one hour as eight new cars traveling at 55 miles per hour."

Probably didn't know that, did you? Neither did I.

So the choice came to electric lawn mowers. (I studied the high end Brill reel mowers, but I was cautioned that unless I was going to mow every week and never take a break, don't get one.) The Neuton mower, which is cordless, seemed like a good choice, but they were expensive at $400 (they're lower now). I did want to make sure if this whole thing didn't work out, I wouldn't be staring at $700 worth of lawn equipment rusting in my garage.

I finally decided on a used electric (corded) mulching mower. I figured I could:

1. Mow quietly
2. With less pollution
3. Mulch the lawn with clippings instead of fertilizing
   

In all of these, the mower scored big. The bonus? I don't know if you mow your own lawn, but I remember having to yank the hell out of that cord every time I wanted to start the dang thing up. And you had to restart it every time you wanted to empty the bag. The electric engine starts automatically and, best of all, if people are walking by you can stop it. Not idle. Stop it completely.

Now the fact that I have very little lawn and can reach the whole dang thing within the reach of two orange extension cords has to be taken into consideration here.

And that I had to learn how NOT to run over my own electrical cord while I was mowing. That is tantamount.

Plus, the guy who sold it to me threw in a Weed Whacker/Edger for free! Hard to beat a bargain like that, huh?

The first time I did the lawn (adding an electric blower into the mix from a woman who'd recently moved to an apartment and didn't need hers) it took hours and hours, but I did it.

I called Javier and told him the news, and told him he may be hearing from me very soon in the event this whole thing didn't work out.

Oh, it's late, and this story is just half way through.

Until next time....