September 24, 2006
Seeing Is Not Believing
The nights are growing colder, but days remain in the mid to upper 80s, the sun hitting you like a furnace when you stand in the Farmers’ Market at noon, as we just have. Even though it’s traditional apple season everywhere else, all varieties have virtually disappeared from our little Atwater Farmers’ Market and been replaced by plums, peaches, nectarines, and, I hate to say it, pluots.
(Oddly, after years of making fun of them, I just did a test taste of all the former and discovered I liked the pluots best. There’s always something to be said for not being quite so judgmental. Though they taste good, I still have no idea what the difference between a pluot and an aprium is, though they both seem to be a cross between a plum and apricot.)
We still try to keep the house cool naturally as much as we can. Even though we were stupid enough to put in heating and cooling before putting in insulation, we can get by especially comfortably on most fall days keeping the windows shut until 4 or so in the afternoon. On some mornings you have to open up the windows because it’s a heck of a lot warmer outside than in.
The lion’s tail and fennel are making their way back after being cut to the ground so many weeks ago. The Mexican sage is a little slower to recover, but is making the effort. Our zucchini has all but given up producing, which is okay, they’re plentiful and cheap in the market now and our Cherokee Purple tomato plant is still going gangbusters.
I don’t know if I had mentioned it before, but I tried an ancient Chinese method of irrigation a few months ago. (You thought I was going to say “ancient Chinese secret” didn’t you?) What you do is seal the bottom of an unglazed clay pot with silicone, bury it up to its lip by a few thirsty vegetable plants, fill it with water, then cover it with a pie tin. It didn’t work so well with the zucchini I planted it right next to, but the Cherokee Purple plant seems to have gotten its immense roots over there and be sucking up the water up with reckless abandon. I’m starting to believe this is one of the secrets to its success, though I do suspect that the fact that the damn tomato type has been around for over 100 years might have something to do with it.
As I’ve been saying, I’ve been thinking a lot about reality lately. I don’t know if this strikes everyone as a pertinent subject, but it’s been on my mind at least, as I deal with Marketers who deal with “the experience” of restaurants, shopping excursions, and advertisements.
Since we’ve stopped watching TV, lots of other advertisements and “experiences” have started driving me nuts.
I hope I didn’t come off as someone who is Hell Bent on Living in the Now and is trying to undo the shackles of what the Hindu people refer to as Maya, the mask of this world, because, folks, that is not me.
Do I dream ridiculous dreams? With great frequency.
It’s absolutely true that when I operate my little espresso maker I believe that I am actually more Italian than I actually am (which is one-quarter, overwhelmed by the one-half Irish. Ridiculously, I look very Irish. Just so you have this hilarious picture of an Irishman making a cappuccino with a jaunty cap on.) Ditto, when I make pasta, risotto, or lasagna, drink my red wine, and listen to The Big Night soundtrack on the kitchen CD player. Some Buddhist monk is bound to be wagging his finger somewhere. “Where are you?” he’d charge. “I’m in Vernazza, Italy, making my Penne and Broccoli Rabe overlooking the ocean, thank you very much.
And for those few short minutes (or hours, depending on the recipe), I am in Italy, right here in Atwater Village.
But I’m not, right?
That much I believe we can all agree upon.
I was talking to a coworker the other day who said he’d be spending all Sunday inside watching football. Not being a big watcher of TV, much less sports, I began wondering what the men in the world did on Saturdays and Sundays before there was televised football, baseball, basketball, and Pro Bass Fishin’.
I mean, in some ways while you are still at home when you’re watching TV on the weekend (thus fulfilling your promise to your wife to be around the children more), you really count yourself as “in”.
Which might be, after all, be the big clue about men; wanting to get away, but forever feeling the familial pull to stay put. Or maybe just us modern men. Perhaps those men of yesteryear went out fishing, hunting, or down the street with their buddies after they’d gone to church or synagogue. Maybe since the invention of Dads-Who-Pitch-In some of the dads went out to the garage to do their woodwork or fix their car, some sat down with their books and music in the den, or, some (like myself) went out in the garden among the flowers, bugs, and endless amount of nature in the middle of the city.
I’m guessing you know already that raising children involves for most a lot of staying home, so I think we’ve all figured you might as well make the best of it.
I do know, when I’m in the planning stage of gardening that I am Dreaming with a capital “D”. Lusting after the perfect tomato to thrill friends and family alike. Delighting to the imagined sound of my own faux creek in my back yard.
And even though it is Dreaming, I enjoy it immensely.
Where I find my Real Self, not surprisingly, is in the actual act of gardening. Weeding, mostly. And I guess if I asked around I’d find the same with the woodworkers and car fixers of the world, too. The closest Buddhist expression I can think of for this is “being fully present.”
Whether or not you think that’s a load of religious hooey, you can’t deny the power of everything harmonizing and quieting so beautifully that it makes you want to never leave.
Ahhh, but we must leave, right?
This is not the same as running away, (and I’m thinking having a drink to calm your nerves after a hard day’s work), this is exactly the opposite, bringing yourself to the task and having to deal with your real Self during your project.
Actually I can tell when I’m sorely out of practice in my gardening. It’s when I want to talk, write, or fantasize about gardening rather than actually doing it. Perhaps this is what makes me such a Frustrated Gardener in the first place. If the truth be known, I’m more of a writer than a gardener. (Which would explain this blog.)
As luck would have it, I run into the exact same problems writing.
I sit in front of the blank screen and my first thought (especially if the screen is blank), is to get the hell away out of there. I ask myself, “Why the hell would anyone in their right mind actually sit down and write? Isn’t drinking cappuccino at The Coffee Table more enjoyable? Hell, isn’t commuting to work 5 days a week more enjoyable?” Well, no. Easier, yes, but they’re cakewalk stuff. Like reading Cat in the Hat in 9th grade when everyone else is tackling Catcher in the Rye.
So is this false reality called dreaming bad?
Maybe not in moderation.
Which brings back my original point, if the salesmen (the marketers, advertisers, businessmen, etc.) are selling you the idea of something, say a realistic looking early twentieth century milk carrier made in China with the sticker “For decoration purpose only” on the back, and you’ve built a whole little kind of faux Kountry Kitsch house, maybe something’s going wrong.
The unfortunate fact is that those marketers tend to do this kind of stuff a lot.
The real has been replaced by the faux real which is created by someone else.
I mean, isn’t it ridiculous to get a Dream Catcher that’s been created in China, thousands of miles away from Native Americans. Especially when you live within miles of real Native Americans who make Dream Catchers?
“Our view of reality is like a map with which to negotiate the terrain of life. If the map is true and accurate, we will generally know where we are, and if we have decided where we want to go, we will generally know how to get there. If the map is false and inaccurate, we generally will be lost.”
- M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled:
True, Peck is talking about those huge lies in ourselves, but you can see where he’s going.
So we can dream away that we are in Japan or Spain, or wherever we want to be, just as long as we all realize there are quite a few people out there who are willing to sell you that dream state.
And I don’t mean a vacation package. I mean something that disconnects us from our day-to-day reality. Birth, death, pain, true love, all those things that makes life deep and true and meaningful.
When you look at a picture of a beautiful luncheon at a winery in Martha Stewart Magazine, realize that everyone in the picture knew the magazine was coming months in advance. (Which gives you quite a bit of time to get rid of the weeds.) And there was a food stylist, hair stylist, professional photographer, editor, and writer to create that dream. That dream doesn’t exist, though Martha would love you to believe it does. The kids were fighting and had trouble sitting still. Uncle Bob and Uncle Harry still aren’t talking. The duck was too dry, but everyone ate it anyway (and it photographed well). It was a little too chilly to be wearing summer dresses, but that’s what the magazine wanted everyone in.
This, my friend, is what we call a narrative.
Instead of Jack Kerouac selling you the idea of life on the road to break yourself out of yourself, Martha is selling you the idea of privilege, money, taste, and perfection. And none of it is attainable, really. But it’s hard to sell someone the idea of breaking out of themselves.
Plus, hot damn, we really like those new towels Martha’s selling at Target. Admit it.
(If you don’t think consumerism runs like blood in our veins, next time you go to a museum, check out how long people stay in the exhibit versus the museum shop. I think we have a general need to own things.)
Are these Marketers and Salesmen bad? I don’t know, they’re just trying to make a buck, and lord knows, they just go where our wallets take us anyway. They didn’t invent any of the dreaming, they just knew we were headed there anyway and decided to build a town for us.
Monday, September 25, 2006
Monday, September 11, 2006
Seeing is Believing
9.11.06
I’ve been thinking a great deal about the reality of things lately.
Many of the things we see with our own eyes are, in fact, not very real at all.
I worked in television for over 7 years, the number of shows currently running that are considered “reality TV” is astounding to me. Can it be “reality” when a camera is there? How about after a Producer decides to cut it up in the editing room so this woman is the bitch, that guy the jilted lover, and the last is the everyday underdog queen all of us long to be?
You may think you know Martha Stewart’s magazine, but you may not. It’s a patchwork of DreamWorld ideas. Women read about stirring up a pot of minestrone at the dinner table while sitting in front of their Lean Cuisines or Triscuit crackers with “alive with Cracked Pepper and Olive Oil”. How do I know that? Because I’ve seen the ads. You have, too: Newman’s Own dressings, Smart Ones dinners, Claussen Pickles, 100 Calorie Packs of Ritz Chips minis, Carnation Instant Breakfast packets...
I understand, and Martha does too. We long to be that invented person who whips up crème fraiche for a party of 16 in their 2nd home on the Vineyard.
Don’t feel bad, even Martha isn’t that person. Did you think a woman who owned a media empire would be? I’ve heard people who’ve worked with her call her house on Turkey Hill “Turkey Hell”.
So, we’ve been had. Now what?
Thanks, Tim. Thanks a hell of a lot. Fact is, I was having fun pretending to be Martha while eating my damn Lean Cuisine and I don’t need you here busting my chops.
Point taken.
Believe me, I like it no better than you. I don’t read Martha, but I sure as hell drool over seed catalogs, bike catalogs, the LA Times food section. I, too, live in LaLa Land where everything is okay because I can daydream away about taking company for a little stroll past my 10-foot tomato plants producing until well after Thanksgiving. And if that’s not daydreaming, I don’t know what the hell is.
I’d explained before (I hope) that the world is not our WYSIWYG, a Web term for What You See Is What You Get. There’s always something lying beneath. When people see my yard they may think it’s beautiful, they may think it’s a damn eyesore. (Buddhists would point out these people were only seeing their own perceptions. Happily there’s nary a Buddhist in sight.) What they probably won’t see, unless they have a trained eye or I’ve spoken with them, is that Nature has come back to my yard and I am trying to work with her, not flog her into shape with a bullwhip. My yard is full of earthworms, pill bugs, monarchs, Western Swallowtails, spiders (you have to hold your hand in front of you all summer long when walking out in the morning), hummingbirds, crickets, skunks (you can smell them), opossums, ants, flies, and a million other microscopic things that I can’t see.
Does that mean that my yard is so much better than my friend in Pasadena who has your everyday average garden and is constantly struggling with her lawn? Sadly, no. She has Praying Mantis and I’d be damned if I’ve ever seen one in the 13 years I’ve worked in this garden.
The point is, there is a reality underneath, but we may not be able to see it yet.
What the hell does that mean?
You know, I really wish I had an answer for that. But I don’t.
Maybe the message is don’t believe media conglomerates who tell you the world is one way because they are trying desperately to sell you something, or entertain the bejeezus out of you, then sell something to you while you are not paying attention.
That sounds right, doesn’t it?
I was just listening to a radio program on Local Food, which has suddenly become all the rage for some strange reason (I bet that woman who wrote about it 2 years ago is pissed off she missed the whole boat). It considers such things as a fresh strawberry in Connecticut in the middle of winter.
And they ponder, Could there be anything more absurd?
It’s “cheap” relatively to grow it in Chile, ship it in a refrigerated truck and airplane, then put it in a heated store in a little refrigerated section that advertises Fresh Strawberries on December 23rd. It takes a lot of fossil fuel and creates a lot of pollution for that little strawberry, doesn’t it? But that’s the trick! You can’t see the fossil fuel being wasted nor the pollution, all you see is that dead on ripe, luscious red strawberry, out of some sort of obscene mid-winter dream you had. And, hell, at $7 for the pint, that’s nothing!
Well, it is something, but you just have been misdirected, as the Magician’s Union might tell you.
Ignore the man behind the curtain!
(Poor little Oz, I always did feel a little sorry for him, though really, he didn’t deserve my sympathy, he made Dorothy go through hell.)
Everything we buy has some sort of impact on the rest of the world. It’s something our ancestors knew a little about that we’ve kind of forgotten. Well, the ones who didn’t build an unsustainable society in the middle of the desert then become really surprised when they found out they were due for a 100 year drought.
Okay, I’m not doing anything to alleviate your depression, am I?
Yeah, I guess I’m not.
Well, here’s a good fact, you’re probably never going to accomplish the Off the Grid, Make Your Own Clothing Out of Goat Hair dream you’ve had going on in the back of your mind. (I hope that was your dream, anyway.) If you start small enough, you can do a few things to lessen your impact. You’re still going to rationalize, we all are. That’s what we do. Hell, we live in this ultra-rich society and we’re surrounded by messaging that tells us we need a 54-inch plasma TV and we think, Hell, why not? Indeed why not. That sounds pretty damn nice, doesn’t it? Think of the Movie Nights on the big screen. Hell, as nice as it is in DreamWorld, the damn thing is still made in China and getting cheaper by the moment at the Store of the Apocalypse, Wall*Mart.
Maybe what I’m telling you is to go and pull some weeds (if it’s daylight out). Do something you’re somewhat proud of, like bringing your own bags to grocery store or not spraying all the ladybugs to get at all the aphids, then get down on your knees and weed. Because, truly, weeding is where It’s At. I do not know why. But once you’re there only 5 minutes, the man made world seems to melt away. All those ads for Hummers and the 15th installment of Pirates of the Caribbean, become refuse for that old Calgon commercial, Calgon, Take Me Away!
Weeding.
That’s what this is all about.
I’ll start tomorrow.
I’ve been thinking a great deal about the reality of things lately.
Many of the things we see with our own eyes are, in fact, not very real at all.
I worked in television for over 7 years, the number of shows currently running that are considered “reality TV” is astounding to me. Can it be “reality” when a camera is there? How about after a Producer decides to cut it up in the editing room so this woman is the bitch, that guy the jilted lover, and the last is the everyday underdog queen all of us long to be?
You may think you know Martha Stewart’s magazine, but you may not. It’s a patchwork of DreamWorld ideas. Women read about stirring up a pot of minestrone at the dinner table while sitting in front of their Lean Cuisines or Triscuit crackers with “alive with Cracked Pepper and Olive Oil”. How do I know that? Because I’ve seen the ads. You have, too: Newman’s Own dressings, Smart Ones dinners, Claussen Pickles, 100 Calorie Packs of Ritz Chips minis, Carnation Instant Breakfast packets...
I understand, and Martha does too. We long to be that invented person who whips up crème fraiche for a party of 16 in their 2nd home on the Vineyard.
Don’t feel bad, even Martha isn’t that person. Did you think a woman who owned a media empire would be? I’ve heard people who’ve worked with her call her house on Turkey Hill “Turkey Hell”.
So, we’ve been had. Now what?
Thanks, Tim. Thanks a hell of a lot. Fact is, I was having fun pretending to be Martha while eating my damn Lean Cuisine and I don’t need you here busting my chops.
Point taken.
Believe me, I like it no better than you. I don’t read Martha, but I sure as hell drool over seed catalogs, bike catalogs, the LA Times food section. I, too, live in LaLa Land where everything is okay because I can daydream away about taking company for a little stroll past my 10-foot tomato plants producing until well after Thanksgiving. And if that’s not daydreaming, I don’t know what the hell is.
I’d explained before (I hope) that the world is not our WYSIWYG, a Web term for What You See Is What You Get. There’s always something lying beneath. When people see my yard they may think it’s beautiful, they may think it’s a damn eyesore. (Buddhists would point out these people were only seeing their own perceptions. Happily there’s nary a Buddhist in sight.) What they probably won’t see, unless they have a trained eye or I’ve spoken with them, is that Nature has come back to my yard and I am trying to work with her, not flog her into shape with a bullwhip. My yard is full of earthworms, pill bugs, monarchs, Western Swallowtails, spiders (you have to hold your hand in front of you all summer long when walking out in the morning), hummingbirds, crickets, skunks (you can smell them), opossums, ants, flies, and a million other microscopic things that I can’t see.
Does that mean that my yard is so much better than my friend in Pasadena who has your everyday average garden and is constantly struggling with her lawn? Sadly, no. She has Praying Mantis and I’d be damned if I’ve ever seen one in the 13 years I’ve worked in this garden.
The point is, there is a reality underneath, but we may not be able to see it yet.
What the hell does that mean?
You know, I really wish I had an answer for that. But I don’t.
Maybe the message is don’t believe media conglomerates who tell you the world is one way because they are trying desperately to sell you something, or entertain the bejeezus out of you, then sell something to you while you are not paying attention.
That sounds right, doesn’t it?
I was just listening to a radio program on Local Food, which has suddenly become all the rage for some strange reason (I bet that woman who wrote about it 2 years ago is pissed off she missed the whole boat). It considers such things as a fresh strawberry in Connecticut in the middle of winter.
And they ponder, Could there be anything more absurd?
It’s “cheap” relatively to grow it in Chile, ship it in a refrigerated truck and airplane, then put it in a heated store in a little refrigerated section that advertises Fresh Strawberries on December 23rd. It takes a lot of fossil fuel and creates a lot of pollution for that little strawberry, doesn’t it? But that’s the trick! You can’t see the fossil fuel being wasted nor the pollution, all you see is that dead on ripe, luscious red strawberry, out of some sort of obscene mid-winter dream you had. And, hell, at $7 for the pint, that’s nothing!
Well, it is something, but you just have been misdirected, as the Magician’s Union might tell you.
Ignore the man behind the curtain!
(Poor little Oz, I always did feel a little sorry for him, though really, he didn’t deserve my sympathy, he made Dorothy go through hell.)
Everything we buy has some sort of impact on the rest of the world. It’s something our ancestors knew a little about that we’ve kind of forgotten. Well, the ones who didn’t build an unsustainable society in the middle of the desert then become really surprised when they found out they were due for a 100 year drought.
Okay, I’m not doing anything to alleviate your depression, am I?
Yeah, I guess I’m not.
Well, here’s a good fact, you’re probably never going to accomplish the Off the Grid, Make Your Own Clothing Out of Goat Hair dream you’ve had going on in the back of your mind. (I hope that was your dream, anyway.) If you start small enough, you can do a few things to lessen your impact. You’re still going to rationalize, we all are. That’s what we do. Hell, we live in this ultra-rich society and we’re surrounded by messaging that tells us we need a 54-inch plasma TV and we think, Hell, why not? Indeed why not. That sounds pretty damn nice, doesn’t it? Think of the Movie Nights on the big screen. Hell, as nice as it is in DreamWorld, the damn thing is still made in China and getting cheaper by the moment at the Store of the Apocalypse, Wall*Mart.
Maybe what I’m telling you is to go and pull some weeds (if it’s daylight out). Do something you’re somewhat proud of, like bringing your own bags to grocery store or not spraying all the ladybugs to get at all the aphids, then get down on your knees and weed. Because, truly, weeding is where It’s At. I do not know why. But once you’re there only 5 minutes, the man made world seems to melt away. All those ads for Hummers and the 15th installment of Pirates of the Caribbean, become refuse for that old Calgon commercial, Calgon, Take Me Away!
Weeding.
That’s what this is all about.
I’ll start tomorrow.
Sunday, September 10, 2006
Rock the House
The heat has let up for now, but fall is on its way with heat and that famous Mediterranean light. Matilijas mostly done blooming and ready to be cut down (as soon as there’s room in our Green Trimmings Only trash can), the fennel the same, having been cut down by Ryan last week. The California fuchsia are in full bloom along with the lion’s tail, lantana, and the fortnight lilies. The Acer tomato still continues to need water three times a week, compared with the century old heirloom Brandywine, which merely needs it once every Saturday. Another nod to the expression, If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. (Tomatoes like Brandywine were pushed out of production because they couldn’t be picked green and “ripened” in shipping like other more modern, tasteless varieties. Oh, and they can be incredibly ugly. But the taste! Oh, my god, once you’ve had one, it’s hard to ever return.)
Wendy’s and my backs are feeling the effects of putting in tons of pebbles in the back yard, those tiny pebbles sometimes referred to as gravel.
And when I say tons, I mean tons. Or tonnes. Depending on where you’re from.
We’ve been struggling with our small and mostly shady back yard for the 12 years we’ve lived here. Okay, that’s an exaggeration. There was pea gravel in the back yard when we moved in and a driveway up to a garage. We had the driveway was replaced by a flagstone path and we converted the two-car space into a studio (which then turned into a kids’ playroom, then our niece’s room, and now back to a studio) and a storage area. The gravel was nice for a while, but once Ryan was born I wanted grass.
You know, grass? You can almost see the picture of baby trying to catch the bubbles that you’re blowing while sitting on a carpet of green. Man’s biggest gardening project, the endless fight for a green, leafy lawn. You probably don’t have to go far in your imagination to see the dads yelling at the kids to stay off the work of art they’ve created. “Stop walking on it! Someone tell that dog to defecate somewhere else!”
The Japanese have their bonsai, our American control of the environment is shown in our slavish love for the shorn pasture of endless verdant green.
You probably don’t want to know the facts and figures about the water wasted (probably more so here in the Southwest than the rest of the country, we’ll take full blame), not to mention petroleum-based fertilizers, and herbicides/pesticides that kill all the intended and not-intended violators of our personal yard space (then wash down the sewer and get into our streams and oceans). Over the years of gardening I did come to recognize what a hypocrisy it is to work so closely with nature in my yard to the detriment of nature outside of the confines of my property.
But all that comes later.
I had to have grass for that baby. And if you can believe it (if you’re a gardener I’m sure you can), I spend the last 8 years trying to grow it. Does anyone spend 8 years doing anything? If you spend 8 years in college, you’d be broke and probably declared insane. Wait, I think my friend who is getting his PhD in Mythology has been going for 15 years. Still, it’s a long time to do anything.
When I first looked at our back yard and many people suggested grass I replied, “It’s just too shady.” Turned out I was right. Just took 8+ years to prove my point.
First I bought the Marathon shady mix of grass and spent days preparing the space, putting in sprinklers, laying down the topsoil, and watering three times a day. The grass came up wonderfully. It was magic. For about a month. Then it seemed the grass wasn’t getting enough of the sun it needed. It turned spindly and when you walked on it and never popped back up. It was like a lawn full of sullen teens. I mowed it, watered, fertilized, and continued to be disappointed. Over the next several summer months, it disappeared back into the dirt. Leaving it its path, well, dirt. Which was worse than the gravel I was dealing with in the first place.
Next I tried St. Augustine grass, which you may or may not know is not available in seed. I’m not sure if this is a gimmick or if it’s just too hard to have sprout, but I have to buy flats upon flats of it from my local nursery. I got the full skinny from Don at the store, bought all the right stuff (again) and was on my way.
The St. Augustine never took at all. It sat there and instead of spreading its magical tendrils across the 700 square feet it curled up and died. I don’t know much about the actual St. Augustine, but perhaps this is what he did, too. Maybe the Romans didn’t give him water and he perished. Regardless, it was sad. And my manhood was becoming serious damaged. There are a few things men in America need to know how to do and a big one of those things is to know how to grow a decent lawn. (Some others are how to make a fire and then barbecue over it and at least look like you know what the mechanic is talking about when he’s discussing the problems with your car. “It’s the manifold, it’s all gunked up.” “Uh huh, I see. Damn Chevy manifolds” must be your reply.)
I decided to bring in the big guns. I called Javier, my gardener, and had him access the problem. “It’s too dark,” he said wisely. “We’ll need to take out that tree,” he advised with little dollar signs lighting up his eyes.
So not only did I tell him to take out the tree, but to bring in sod, too.
For the unfamiliar, sod is what you get when you have more money than time. If you want someone out in Central California to grow your grass in the desert by sowing seeds, then pounding the ground with water 4 times a day, and finally scraping it and a ½ inch of soil up with some kind of industrial spatula, loading it onto a truck, and delivering it to your house, then this is the option for you. Did I say it was expensive? Like almost everything made easier, it comes at a price.
The sod looked wonderful when Javier was done. We celebrated. Sat on it. Bought a nice little table and chairs. Basked in its grassy glory. For a month or two. Then the familiar scenario played out again: the grass not getting up after being stepped on, kind of withering, then went away completely. Luckily this was after our largest party of the year, when 70 or so of our closest friends for an early Thanksgiving pot luck. (It’s all about impressing other people, isn’t it?) Javier was nice enough to come back with some more after several weeks of living with the dirt. I began to suspect he hadn’t used the brand I’d told him to, Marathon, which is some sort of patented Wunder Grass, guaranteed to grow in a cave alongside mosses. That grass also lasted exactly two months, then became mud when the winter rains blustered in.
Insert heavy sigh here.
I want to say this whole grass shindig ended around January of this year. Which would put that newborn boy I so wanted to impress with my manly grass know-how at a ripe old age of 6 and a half.
Wendy tried to explain it this way, “The kids don’t give a damn about grass. They don’t play out there.” True enough. We tried to play ball a few times back there, but 15 feet between catcher and pitcher, surrounded by 7 or so very breakable antique windows didn’t seem like the best idea. Oh yeah, and there were all the plants that kept getting pummeled by our ball, feet, or hands as we dove for to make the play.
Do you ever get the feeling you’ve watched too many movies, seen too many commercials, been subjected to so many advertisements that you’ve been convinced that’s reality? I think that’s what I had a case of here. Altered reality. But not the good kind.
We discussed everything from patios to decks to dichondera (a type of invasive “grass alternative,” whatever that means), but nothing seemed to fit the bill. Until we were on vacation and walked into a Japanese store that had a tiny little traditional house in it and outside were these beautiful black pebbles which went crunch, crunch, crunch when you walked over them. I called Wendy over and asked what she thought of them. “Perfect,” she said. And it was. I asked the woman if they sold them, she said no. She did tell me where they’d gotten them. Sort of. She was nice, anyway, as she told me in very broken English how to get to the place in Torrance which she did not know the name of. I decided I should probably wait until our next visit there before making any journeys with two kids and a wife in tow. A month later we were back and got proper directions from the owner and even the name of the company. That next Saturday Ryan, Abby, and I were smack dab in the middle of the busiest little rock shop you’ve ever seen. Dust flying everywhere, no real parking, and forklifts zooming by your car door at NASCAR speeds. I told the kids to stay close and follow me inside. Inside, by comparison, was a little oasis. The relaxed guy who helped me showed me where to look for the rocks we wanted. We went out and crunched around a bit on them. I saw another color, sort of a sandy beachy shade I liked, so I took down the names of both and went back inside.
The guy gave me an estimate for 500 square feet.
$856.
Wow.
Seemed an awful lot for a bunch of rocks. But he suggested the whole thing be 2 inches deep and it was $150 for delivery alone. We were talking 4,000 pounds of rock. Obviously not going to fit in the back of the Jetta with two kids.
I took the numbers home to Wendy, fully ready for her to tell me that’s too damn much for rocks, but I got the opposite. “Sounds great,” she said. “Let’s do it next weekend.” I realize that sometimes when I answer for Wendy in my head, I just sort of put a wig on myself and answer. Of course she said yes. She always says yes.
We discussed color. Though I was originally drawn to the black color, I believe it was due to our back yard already having a major Japanese theme. We have a stand of 45-foot giant bamboo, a running stand of bamboo, golden bamboo, and heavenly bamboo. In other words, a lot of bamboo. The problem with black rock, I figured, was twofold: one, you can see every leaf that falls on it. If you know anything about bamboo, you probably know for 365 days out of the year they drop their leaves to the ground to smother weeds and provide silica (?) as a sort of fertilizer to their roots. 366 days during a leap year. The Japanese people have a reputation of being pretty neat, and I couldn’t imagine myself out back every morning with a wooden broom, clogs, and a Vietnamese hat sweeping before going to work. I’m just not that Zen. Reason number two, black doesn’t seem to me to be the coolest surface on earth. In fact, I remember just the opposite when playing on the blacktop at school when I was young. Sometimes it would be so hot that when your feet hit it after jumping from the swings and you’d make a dent into it. These were two things I didn’t want in my back yard. So we decided on the lighter color.
(I did make the mistake of asking my fastidious neighbor, Mark, his opinion on color. He voted on the black. Mark is one of those people who has lawn furniture that he moves out of the way every morning before watering his lawn. Mark, obviously, has no children and belongs to that other traditionally neat culture: gay men.)
We decided to fill in a little more alongside the side of the house where the grass just seemed to be taking (by “taking” I mean the way hair seems to be taking on a man’s comb-over. Not exactly what everyone wants to look at). The new total for the rocks came to just over $1,000. After I ordered I thought, “Man, do I hope I didn’t make the biggest $1,000 mistake of my life.” Which is ridiculous, as I have made many, many $1,000 mistakes in my life and will probably continue to do so in the far-flung future.
Wendy and I had both taken two weeks off for summer vacation and, as usual, we’d make some plans for home improvement so we wouldn’t get bored.
We do this a lot, in fact. I remember many a Labor and Memorial Day filled with painting projects while we listened to Flashback Weekends on the alternative rock station.
Already on this “vacation” we’d hired someone to paint Wendy’s Pilates studio and hang mirrors, while Wendy and I hooked up another phone line, cleaned all the incredibly dusty (not to mention high) windows, replaced lighting fixtures, and moved the machinery back and forth. Also on the list was to move our computer out to the studio now that our niece had vacated it. And, of course, the back yard.
They said to expect the pebbles at 9:30, to which I told Wendy, “They’ll be here earlier.” Sure enough, a semi pulled up at 7 o’clock, with two 3,000 pound bags of pebbles. And yes, a 3,000 pound bag of pebbles looks about as big as you’d expect. Six feet around and 4 feet high. Let’s put it this way, two children could comfortably sit on the pebbles in the bag with sand toys and play while I took wheelbarrow full after wheelbarrow full of pebbles to the back yard. Oh yes, and the first bag had an opening just large enough to put a shovel in but not quite pull it out. I remembered my breathing techniques while trying not to curse. Remember that the children were in the other bag. I was a quarter way through when I started to think we’d made a mistake with the color. Could I return it? Could I say I was terribly, terribly wrong and would they deliver the black pebbles instead? About halfway through landscaping I realized it felt like walking through them was harder than walking on the sand at the beach. You had to slog to get that crunch crunch noise. But slogging wasn’t really what I wanted. Three-quarters of the way through, I realized it not only felt like sand, it looked a hell of a lot like sand. In fact, it started to look like one of those fake beaches they create in Nebraska so the kids won’t realize they’re thousands of miles away from the ocean. All I needed was a seagull ripping his way through a trashcan and lifeguards ripping through on ATVs to complete the scene.
But I kept working. I mean, what else was I going to do? Anyway, I know my own neuroses well enough to realize that many times in the midst of a creative project I will up and lose it. (I remember a documentary I’d watched about someone directing the Emmys and seconds before they went live he yelled, “It’ll never work! Call it off! Oh my god, what were we thinking!” took a moment, then called into his headset, “Okay, everyone, in five, four, three…” So obviously I’m not the only one who experiences such a thing.)
We filled in the spaces between our flagstones. The spaces that were supposed to grow a variety of different plants I’d purchased over the years which had become dirt spotted with the occasional moss.
I stood back and tried to enjoy my work.
Nope. Not taking.
My mind was still screaming, “You idiot!”, “Here you go, $1,000 worth of rocks!”, “Congratulations, sucker!” and the like. My mind can be very kind when it wants to be. Now was not one of those times. I kept trying to convince Wendy we should go out for a break and get some afternoon coffee. She, unlike me, was having a good time, seeing the bright side of things. “It does look beachy. Maybe we should put an umbrella over there and a bucket of sand toys.” Oh my god, woman, NO! We don’t want a beach scene here!
She was not helping quiet my mind. But then again, she wasn’t calling me an idiot as my own mind was doing. She said it’d look much better after moving the table back. We went out for a coffee break and I sat there and tried not to look forlorn. I really don’t know how some married couples manage to run a business together. As a couple Wendy and I have difficulty setting up the Christmas tree every year. I know couples who don’t even bother going with each other to the grocery store. I guess we’re ahead of some and behind a few.
I sat at the coffee shop trying to have a smile. “Yes, look,” my face was trying to say, “I’m a happy fellow! A dirty, yet happy fellow who just spent over $1,000 of his own money on rocks! See how it doesn’t bother me? I just spent $12 on coffee drinks for the family! Look at us, we’re rich, stupid people who blow money on stupid rocks!” I’m not sure I was fooling anyone except the kids.
Wasn’t it George Bush who said it takes a village to set up a back yard? Or was it Mark Twain?
Regardless, we came home and it did look a bit better. Not great mind you. But not The Worst Mistake of My Life that it looked like much earlier.
After we put the kids to bed Wendy and I slogged with our glasses of wine out to the table, lit some candles, and tried to relax. It was okay, but not great. I still had that smile of “this is not bothering me” on my face, kind of like that guy in the 1920’s who said, “Ah, what’s a little stock market crash?” right before stepping out the window.
Was this something I should have done? Absolutely. Will I get used to it. Most assuredly. Am I going to be a pain in the ass until I do?
Well, the jury is still out on that one.
I’ll let you know.
Wendy’s and my backs are feeling the effects of putting in tons of pebbles in the back yard, those tiny pebbles sometimes referred to as gravel.
And when I say tons, I mean tons. Or tonnes. Depending on where you’re from.
We’ve been struggling with our small and mostly shady back yard for the 12 years we’ve lived here. Okay, that’s an exaggeration. There was pea gravel in the back yard when we moved in and a driveway up to a garage. We had the driveway was replaced by a flagstone path and we converted the two-car space into a studio (which then turned into a kids’ playroom, then our niece’s room, and now back to a studio) and a storage area. The gravel was nice for a while, but once Ryan was born I wanted grass.
You know, grass? You can almost see the picture of baby trying to catch the bubbles that you’re blowing while sitting on a carpet of green. Man’s biggest gardening project, the endless fight for a green, leafy lawn. You probably don’t have to go far in your imagination to see the dads yelling at the kids to stay off the work of art they’ve created. “Stop walking on it! Someone tell that dog to defecate somewhere else!”
The Japanese have their bonsai, our American control of the environment is shown in our slavish love for the shorn pasture of endless verdant green.
You probably don’t want to know the facts and figures about the water wasted (probably more so here in the Southwest than the rest of the country, we’ll take full blame), not to mention petroleum-based fertilizers, and herbicides/pesticides that kill all the intended and not-intended violators of our personal yard space (then wash down the sewer and get into our streams and oceans). Over the years of gardening I did come to recognize what a hypocrisy it is to work so closely with nature in my yard to the detriment of nature outside of the confines of my property.
But all that comes later.
I had to have grass for that baby. And if you can believe it (if you’re a gardener I’m sure you can), I spend the last 8 years trying to grow it. Does anyone spend 8 years doing anything? If you spend 8 years in college, you’d be broke and probably declared insane. Wait, I think my friend who is getting his PhD in Mythology has been going for 15 years. Still, it’s a long time to do anything.
When I first looked at our back yard and many people suggested grass I replied, “It’s just too shady.” Turned out I was right. Just took 8+ years to prove my point.
First I bought the Marathon shady mix of grass and spent days preparing the space, putting in sprinklers, laying down the topsoil, and watering three times a day. The grass came up wonderfully. It was magic. For about a month. Then it seemed the grass wasn’t getting enough of the sun it needed. It turned spindly and when you walked on it and never popped back up. It was like a lawn full of sullen teens. I mowed it, watered, fertilized, and continued to be disappointed. Over the next several summer months, it disappeared back into the dirt. Leaving it its path, well, dirt. Which was worse than the gravel I was dealing with in the first place.
Next I tried St. Augustine grass, which you may or may not know is not available in seed. I’m not sure if this is a gimmick or if it’s just too hard to have sprout, but I have to buy flats upon flats of it from my local nursery. I got the full skinny from Don at the store, bought all the right stuff (again) and was on my way.
The St. Augustine never took at all. It sat there and instead of spreading its magical tendrils across the 700 square feet it curled up and died. I don’t know much about the actual St. Augustine, but perhaps this is what he did, too. Maybe the Romans didn’t give him water and he perished. Regardless, it was sad. And my manhood was becoming serious damaged. There are a few things men in America need to know how to do and a big one of those things is to know how to grow a decent lawn. (Some others are how to make a fire and then barbecue over it and at least look like you know what the mechanic is talking about when he’s discussing the problems with your car. “It’s the manifold, it’s all gunked up.” “Uh huh, I see. Damn Chevy manifolds” must be your reply.)
I decided to bring in the big guns. I called Javier, my gardener, and had him access the problem. “It’s too dark,” he said wisely. “We’ll need to take out that tree,” he advised with little dollar signs lighting up his eyes.
So not only did I tell him to take out the tree, but to bring in sod, too.
For the unfamiliar, sod is what you get when you have more money than time. If you want someone out in Central California to grow your grass in the desert by sowing seeds, then pounding the ground with water 4 times a day, and finally scraping it and a ½ inch of soil up with some kind of industrial spatula, loading it onto a truck, and delivering it to your house, then this is the option for you. Did I say it was expensive? Like almost everything made easier, it comes at a price.
The sod looked wonderful when Javier was done. We celebrated. Sat on it. Bought a nice little table and chairs. Basked in its grassy glory. For a month or two. Then the familiar scenario played out again: the grass not getting up after being stepped on, kind of withering, then went away completely. Luckily this was after our largest party of the year, when 70 or so of our closest friends for an early Thanksgiving pot luck. (It’s all about impressing other people, isn’t it?) Javier was nice enough to come back with some more after several weeks of living with the dirt. I began to suspect he hadn’t used the brand I’d told him to, Marathon, which is some sort of patented Wunder Grass, guaranteed to grow in a cave alongside mosses. That grass also lasted exactly two months, then became mud when the winter rains blustered in.
Insert heavy sigh here.
I want to say this whole grass shindig ended around January of this year. Which would put that newborn boy I so wanted to impress with my manly grass know-how at a ripe old age of 6 and a half.
Wendy tried to explain it this way, “The kids don’t give a damn about grass. They don’t play out there.” True enough. We tried to play ball a few times back there, but 15 feet between catcher and pitcher, surrounded by 7 or so very breakable antique windows didn’t seem like the best idea. Oh yeah, and there were all the plants that kept getting pummeled by our ball, feet, or hands as we dove for to make the play.
Do you ever get the feeling you’ve watched too many movies, seen too many commercials, been subjected to so many advertisements that you’ve been convinced that’s reality? I think that’s what I had a case of here. Altered reality. But not the good kind.
We discussed everything from patios to decks to dichondera (a type of invasive “grass alternative,” whatever that means), but nothing seemed to fit the bill. Until we were on vacation and walked into a Japanese store that had a tiny little traditional house in it and outside were these beautiful black pebbles which went crunch, crunch, crunch when you walked over them. I called Wendy over and asked what she thought of them. “Perfect,” she said. And it was. I asked the woman if they sold them, she said no. She did tell me where they’d gotten them. Sort of. She was nice, anyway, as she told me in very broken English how to get to the place in Torrance which she did not know the name of. I decided I should probably wait until our next visit there before making any journeys with two kids and a wife in tow. A month later we were back and got proper directions from the owner and even the name of the company. That next Saturday Ryan, Abby, and I were smack dab in the middle of the busiest little rock shop you’ve ever seen. Dust flying everywhere, no real parking, and forklifts zooming by your car door at NASCAR speeds. I told the kids to stay close and follow me inside. Inside, by comparison, was a little oasis. The relaxed guy who helped me showed me where to look for the rocks we wanted. We went out and crunched around a bit on them. I saw another color, sort of a sandy beachy shade I liked, so I took down the names of both and went back inside.
The guy gave me an estimate for 500 square feet.
$856.
Wow.
Seemed an awful lot for a bunch of rocks. But he suggested the whole thing be 2 inches deep and it was $150 for delivery alone. We were talking 4,000 pounds of rock. Obviously not going to fit in the back of the Jetta with two kids.
I took the numbers home to Wendy, fully ready for her to tell me that’s too damn much for rocks, but I got the opposite. “Sounds great,” she said. “Let’s do it next weekend.” I realize that sometimes when I answer for Wendy in my head, I just sort of put a wig on myself and answer. Of course she said yes. She always says yes.
We discussed color. Though I was originally drawn to the black color, I believe it was due to our back yard already having a major Japanese theme. We have a stand of 45-foot giant bamboo, a running stand of bamboo, golden bamboo, and heavenly bamboo. In other words, a lot of bamboo. The problem with black rock, I figured, was twofold: one, you can see every leaf that falls on it. If you know anything about bamboo, you probably know for 365 days out of the year they drop their leaves to the ground to smother weeds and provide silica (?) as a sort of fertilizer to their roots. 366 days during a leap year. The Japanese people have a reputation of being pretty neat, and I couldn’t imagine myself out back every morning with a wooden broom, clogs, and a Vietnamese hat sweeping before going to work. I’m just not that Zen. Reason number two, black doesn’t seem to me to be the coolest surface on earth. In fact, I remember just the opposite when playing on the blacktop at school when I was young. Sometimes it would be so hot that when your feet hit it after jumping from the swings and you’d make a dent into it. These were two things I didn’t want in my back yard. So we decided on the lighter color.
(I did make the mistake of asking my fastidious neighbor, Mark, his opinion on color. He voted on the black. Mark is one of those people who has lawn furniture that he moves out of the way every morning before watering his lawn. Mark, obviously, has no children and belongs to that other traditionally neat culture: gay men.)
We decided to fill in a little more alongside the side of the house where the grass just seemed to be taking (by “taking” I mean the way hair seems to be taking on a man’s comb-over. Not exactly what everyone wants to look at). The new total for the rocks came to just over $1,000. After I ordered I thought, “Man, do I hope I didn’t make the biggest $1,000 mistake of my life.” Which is ridiculous, as I have made many, many $1,000 mistakes in my life and will probably continue to do so in the far-flung future.
Wendy and I had both taken two weeks off for summer vacation and, as usual, we’d make some plans for home improvement so we wouldn’t get bored.
We do this a lot, in fact. I remember many a Labor and Memorial Day filled with painting projects while we listened to Flashback Weekends on the alternative rock station.
Already on this “vacation” we’d hired someone to paint Wendy’s Pilates studio and hang mirrors, while Wendy and I hooked up another phone line, cleaned all the incredibly dusty (not to mention high) windows, replaced lighting fixtures, and moved the machinery back and forth. Also on the list was to move our computer out to the studio now that our niece had vacated it. And, of course, the back yard.
They said to expect the pebbles at 9:30, to which I told Wendy, “They’ll be here earlier.” Sure enough, a semi pulled up at 7 o’clock, with two 3,000 pound bags of pebbles. And yes, a 3,000 pound bag of pebbles looks about as big as you’d expect. Six feet around and 4 feet high. Let’s put it this way, two children could comfortably sit on the pebbles in the bag with sand toys and play while I took wheelbarrow full after wheelbarrow full of pebbles to the back yard. Oh yes, and the first bag had an opening just large enough to put a shovel in but not quite pull it out. I remembered my breathing techniques while trying not to curse. Remember that the children were in the other bag. I was a quarter way through when I started to think we’d made a mistake with the color. Could I return it? Could I say I was terribly, terribly wrong and would they deliver the black pebbles instead? About halfway through landscaping I realized it felt like walking through them was harder than walking on the sand at the beach. You had to slog to get that crunch crunch noise. But slogging wasn’t really what I wanted. Three-quarters of the way through, I realized it not only felt like sand, it looked a hell of a lot like sand. In fact, it started to look like one of those fake beaches they create in Nebraska so the kids won’t realize they’re thousands of miles away from the ocean. All I needed was a seagull ripping his way through a trashcan and lifeguards ripping through on ATVs to complete the scene.
But I kept working. I mean, what else was I going to do? Anyway, I know my own neuroses well enough to realize that many times in the midst of a creative project I will up and lose it. (I remember a documentary I’d watched about someone directing the Emmys and seconds before they went live he yelled, “It’ll never work! Call it off! Oh my god, what were we thinking!” took a moment, then called into his headset, “Okay, everyone, in five, four, three…” So obviously I’m not the only one who experiences such a thing.)
We filled in the spaces between our flagstones. The spaces that were supposed to grow a variety of different plants I’d purchased over the years which had become dirt spotted with the occasional moss.
I stood back and tried to enjoy my work.
Nope. Not taking.
My mind was still screaming, “You idiot!”, “Here you go, $1,000 worth of rocks!”, “Congratulations, sucker!” and the like. My mind can be very kind when it wants to be. Now was not one of those times. I kept trying to convince Wendy we should go out for a break and get some afternoon coffee. She, unlike me, was having a good time, seeing the bright side of things. “It does look beachy. Maybe we should put an umbrella over there and a bucket of sand toys.” Oh my god, woman, NO! We don’t want a beach scene here!
She was not helping quiet my mind. But then again, she wasn’t calling me an idiot as my own mind was doing. She said it’d look much better after moving the table back. We went out for a coffee break and I sat there and tried not to look forlorn. I really don’t know how some married couples manage to run a business together. As a couple Wendy and I have difficulty setting up the Christmas tree every year. I know couples who don’t even bother going with each other to the grocery store. I guess we’re ahead of some and behind a few.
I sat at the coffee shop trying to have a smile. “Yes, look,” my face was trying to say, “I’m a happy fellow! A dirty, yet happy fellow who just spent over $1,000 of his own money on rocks! See how it doesn’t bother me? I just spent $12 on coffee drinks for the family! Look at us, we’re rich, stupid people who blow money on stupid rocks!” I’m not sure I was fooling anyone except the kids.
Wasn’t it George Bush who said it takes a village to set up a back yard? Or was it Mark Twain?
Regardless, we came home and it did look a bit better. Not great mind you. But not The Worst Mistake of My Life that it looked like much earlier.
After we put the kids to bed Wendy and I slogged with our glasses of wine out to the table, lit some candles, and tried to relax. It was okay, but not great. I still had that smile of “this is not bothering me” on my face, kind of like that guy in the 1920’s who said, “Ah, what’s a little stock market crash?” right before stepping out the window.
Was this something I should have done? Absolutely. Will I get used to it. Most assuredly. Am I going to be a pain in the ass until I do?
Well, the jury is still out on that one.
I’ll let you know.
Wednesday, August 16, 2006
How The Grinch Stole My Garden
I was having lunch with my workmate Ozzy yesterday and I admitted that I am a terrible gardener.
"I thought you were a great gardener!" he said.
I replied, "I like to garden, yes, but I'm really hit-or-miss at it."
The reality is, I'm a better cook than gardener. Of course, with cooking there are far fewer variables than out in the garden. Let's face it, bugs aren't going to attack your enchiladas while you turn around to cut the bread, nor will a hailstorm knock the living daylights out of your soufflé while you run to get an umbrella. Gardening, especially organic gardening faces so many, many variables. And I guess you just have to live with them.
Why did my tomato plants stop producing? Why do some of my zucchini shrivel up and die when only 3 inches long? What the heck is that ugly bug that doesn't seem to move doing on my lettuce?
Maybe I don't pay enough attention.
But maybe, after all, it doesn't matter.
What is my garden there for? It's organic, so it exists for all the insects and beasts of the world, from hummingbird to grasshopper. It's my retreat. Like you, I work, I raise kids, I get all bent out of shape by all the crap we adults have to suffer through most days. When I come home I can head into a place that is a sanctuary, someplace bigger than myself and deeply connected to where we all came from (and will return to in the end). It's a lesson to my children. Ryan and Abby are excited to see things grow, to pick the fresh tomatoes and show them proudly to their mom. On how many levels does that work? Responsibility, stewardship of the environment, hard work, time spent with Dad... that list is just endless.
So maybe it isn't about me and how great a tomato I can grow.
Perhaps, like the Grinch, the garden is about much more than we really know.
"I thought you were a great gardener!" he said.
I replied, "I like to garden, yes, but I'm really hit-or-miss at it."
The reality is, I'm a better cook than gardener. Of course, with cooking there are far fewer variables than out in the garden. Let's face it, bugs aren't going to attack your enchiladas while you turn around to cut the bread, nor will a hailstorm knock the living daylights out of your soufflé while you run to get an umbrella. Gardening, especially organic gardening faces so many, many variables. And I guess you just have to live with them.
Why did my tomato plants stop producing? Why do some of my zucchini shrivel up and die when only 3 inches long? What the heck is that ugly bug that doesn't seem to move doing on my lettuce?
Maybe I don't pay enough attention.
But maybe, after all, it doesn't matter.
What is my garden there for? It's organic, so it exists for all the insects and beasts of the world, from hummingbird to grasshopper. It's my retreat. Like you, I work, I raise kids, I get all bent out of shape by all the crap we adults have to suffer through most days. When I come home I can head into a place that is a sanctuary, someplace bigger than myself and deeply connected to where we all came from (and will return to in the end). It's a lesson to my children. Ryan and Abby are excited to see things grow, to pick the fresh tomatoes and show them proudly to their mom. On how many levels does that work? Responsibility, stewardship of the environment, hard work, time spent with Dad... that list is just endless.
So maybe it isn't about me and how great a tomato I can grow.
Perhaps, like the Grinch, the garden is about much more than we really know.
Thursday, August 10, 2006
Go Ahead, Cry Yourself to Sleep
It's odd, really, how normal we all try to appear. I was just thinking this while I was out at OSH during my lunch (buying sprinklers, wouldn't you know).
I'm walking through the store and just for some reason becoming untethered. Why? I don't know. I guess I become untethered quite a bit. But maybe we all do. Maybe that's why we all need the cell phones to keep us at the ready at all times. I don't blame those people. In fact, often I want to be one of them. When I get lonely, freaked out in the world, to reach out and hear a friendly voice.
"Hey, man, how's it going? Oh, I'm just at OSH picking up sprinklers. No, the OSH down south of Pico."
But I don't. And maybe it's because I crave those moments, because that's when real magic happens. Not the kind of magic you get from TV, the movies, or Disneyland, the magic that comes from life all around us. The people who you don't know yet, who you may never know. What will they say to you? How will you interact with them?
When I lived in Venice, California all those years ago, I felt like a reporter. I was lucky enough to have my brother Jack and his high school classroom read about all my adventures in a really, really crazy, at-the-end-of-the-earth life. I don't know what I would have done without an audience, actually. Go insane? Get in more trouble than I did? Got me. That's a question for the ages, I guess. The fact is I did have a wonderful brother who was able to help me make sense of it all and bang, here I am many years later with a writing job and, better, a wonderful wife as my best friend and two children.
Is it boring? Yes, sometimes it's all colossally boring. But when we are bored is that when we reach that area where danger, Life, lurks?
What happens when you tell your trainer that you might cry during leg lifts because your mother has Alzheimer's and you just had to put her into a hospice?
There is so much fertile ground there, so much room for danger, compassion, love, curiosity, intrigue, and so much else.
I'm old enough to know those habits I use to keep myself from feeling such things (yet I do them anyway), but I don't want to add to that list. As crazy as I am, I really believe I might be much worse if I tried to pretend I was everyone else.
In my opinion, those "everyone else" people are much, much crazier. They just don't realize it. Yet.
I'm walking through the store and just for some reason becoming untethered. Why? I don't know. I guess I become untethered quite a bit. But maybe we all do. Maybe that's why we all need the cell phones to keep us at the ready at all times. I don't blame those people. In fact, often I want to be one of them. When I get lonely, freaked out in the world, to reach out and hear a friendly voice.
"Hey, man, how's it going? Oh, I'm just at OSH picking up sprinklers. No, the OSH down south of Pico."
But I don't. And maybe it's because I crave those moments, because that's when real magic happens. Not the kind of magic you get from TV, the movies, or Disneyland, the magic that comes from life all around us. The people who you don't know yet, who you may never know. What will they say to you? How will you interact with them?
When I lived in Venice, California all those years ago, I felt like a reporter. I was lucky enough to have my brother Jack and his high school classroom read about all my adventures in a really, really crazy, at-the-end-of-the-earth life. I don't know what I would have done without an audience, actually. Go insane? Get in more trouble than I did? Got me. That's a question for the ages, I guess. The fact is I did have a wonderful brother who was able to help me make sense of it all and bang, here I am many years later with a writing job and, better, a wonderful wife as my best friend and two children.
Is it boring? Yes, sometimes it's all colossally boring. But when we are bored is that when we reach that area where danger, Life, lurks?
What happens when you tell your trainer that you might cry during leg lifts because your mother has Alzheimer's and you just had to put her into a hospice?
There is so much fertile ground there, so much room for danger, compassion, love, curiosity, intrigue, and so much else.
I'm old enough to know those habits I use to keep myself from feeling such things (yet I do them anyway), but I don't want to add to that list. As crazy as I am, I really believe I might be much worse if I tried to pretend I was everyone else.
In my opinion, those "everyone else" people are much, much crazier. They just don't realize it. Yet.
Tuesday, July 11, 2006
Shamrocks and Whiskey
I keep thinking about him, which is ridiculous, isn’t it? Since my family is so much more in tune with him going, right?
My father passed under a month ago. He was sick with cancer, not moving around so well, even when we saw him last July (before they had diagnosed him).
I raced back home to see him after spending the day before trying to get an overnight plane from Los Angeles to Omaha during their College World Series. He was alive then, and hanging on. I ended up flying into Kansas City and driving the two and a half hours, seeing a gorgeous sunrise, listening to satellite radio (jazz, classical, and indy), and drinking bad coffee all the way.
It was corny in a way, saying stuff like, “Come on, Dad, just hold on until I get there.” Right out of a movie. Yet I found myself saying it. And wishing it. Then actually convincing myself he’d be alive by the time I got to my parents’ house.
I walked in the door at 8am, wondering when we’d be going to the hospital. My Mom, reiterating what she’d assumed I’d already been told said, “Well, you know your dad passed away at 3:30. Jack’s on his way over here.” She could tell by my face that I did not know. It was news I wasn’t really prepared to hear. “Oh, sweetie, I thought someone called you.” She hugged me. But I wasn’t ready. I’m still not ready.
I keep saying, in my mind, that death is about all of us who are left behind. Dad is already gone on his great adventure, wherever that may be. But the sadness, longing, and paperwork belong to us. (Mom commented she knew why Indian women threw themselves on their husband’s funeral pyre: to avoid the mass of paperwork that follows). And yet even trying to make this brief rationalization hasn’t been much comfort. In the weeks that have followed, I’ve thought about never seeing him again. And how sad that is, that I will not hear the voice of the man who raised me again.
Maybe this ties into my not exactly being a big believer in the afterlife. To me, this is it. And, I guess, I should figure it doesn’t make a damn whether there’s an afterlife or not. When I go, it won’t make any difference, will it? If there’s a place to go, we’ll go there. If not, we won’t. What’s so profound is the hole left here.
My family is still so much to me. They have been since I was created and we relied on each other for support during all those Air Force moves. To think of my mom without my father still breaks my heart, even though my mom is good with it. Perhaps because he spent so much time in that other room for so many months. (Someone commented wryly, “He just moved a little further away.”)
My dad would think I was wasting my time with all of this. He had his bouts with sadness, and he was a big softy under a very tough exterior, but he would say enough is enough. But I’m not ready to hear that. Again. I don’t want to let go and I’m terrifically unprepared for losing a person who is such a lynchpin in my life (his word, lynchpin).
I’ve thrown myself back into work, back into the garden, back into my family, where I belong. I’ve just gotten around to exercising for the first time since his death (okay, I went for a few walks around my home town), but I long for him. That’s probably the best word to use.
I could never think what it would be like to lose a spouse when you have young children at home, or, like our neighbor, lose your 26 year-old child in warfare. My father led a good life and lived to be 70. He tried his damnedest to create a family when the one his father created was ramshackle (my grandfather was an alcoholic man-about-town. When he died and was buried in the cemetery, my grandmother said, “Well, at least now I’ll always know where he is). He strove to rise out of that, and though the alcohol didn’t elude him, he was able to do his best to be fair, send us through school, support our family even during those times we were all on the other side of the fence politically.
The flowers and letters had flooded my parents’ house, and my mother feels inundated. But what a way to be snowed under, with gifts and thoughts of love celebrating what you’ve given to the world. My mom is looking in the checkbook register and figuring out just how much he gave away every year to charity, on top of the tithe he gave to the church. It was a lot. He gave to me in need. His old car when I moved to Los Angeles. Money to help my children go to a decent school. Honestly, I feel pretty much a skinflint in comparison.
I could go on and on. And I’m sure I will in the days and weeks and months to come. I know, as everyone says, the holidays are going to be hard.
I know it will end, and the sadness will cease to seem unbearable. And everything will be normal again, without him.
I guess like most things it just takes patience and time. Two things at which most of us are abysmal.
There's a lesson here somewhere, right?
My father passed under a month ago. He was sick with cancer, not moving around so well, even when we saw him last July (before they had diagnosed him).
I raced back home to see him after spending the day before trying to get an overnight plane from Los Angeles to Omaha during their College World Series. He was alive then, and hanging on. I ended up flying into Kansas City and driving the two and a half hours, seeing a gorgeous sunrise, listening to satellite radio (jazz, classical, and indy), and drinking bad coffee all the way.
It was corny in a way, saying stuff like, “Come on, Dad, just hold on until I get there.” Right out of a movie. Yet I found myself saying it. And wishing it. Then actually convincing myself he’d be alive by the time I got to my parents’ house.
I walked in the door at 8am, wondering when we’d be going to the hospital. My Mom, reiterating what she’d assumed I’d already been told said, “Well, you know your dad passed away at 3:30. Jack’s on his way over here.” She could tell by my face that I did not know. It was news I wasn’t really prepared to hear. “Oh, sweetie, I thought someone called you.” She hugged me. But I wasn’t ready. I’m still not ready.
I keep saying, in my mind, that death is about all of us who are left behind. Dad is already gone on his great adventure, wherever that may be. But the sadness, longing, and paperwork belong to us. (Mom commented she knew why Indian women threw themselves on their husband’s funeral pyre: to avoid the mass of paperwork that follows). And yet even trying to make this brief rationalization hasn’t been much comfort. In the weeks that have followed, I’ve thought about never seeing him again. And how sad that is, that I will not hear the voice of the man who raised me again.
Maybe this ties into my not exactly being a big believer in the afterlife. To me, this is it. And, I guess, I should figure it doesn’t make a damn whether there’s an afterlife or not. When I go, it won’t make any difference, will it? If there’s a place to go, we’ll go there. If not, we won’t. What’s so profound is the hole left here.
My family is still so much to me. They have been since I was created and we relied on each other for support during all those Air Force moves. To think of my mom without my father still breaks my heart, even though my mom is good with it. Perhaps because he spent so much time in that other room for so many months. (Someone commented wryly, “He just moved a little further away.”)
My dad would think I was wasting my time with all of this. He had his bouts with sadness, and he was a big softy under a very tough exterior, but he would say enough is enough. But I’m not ready to hear that. Again. I don’t want to let go and I’m terrifically unprepared for losing a person who is such a lynchpin in my life (his word, lynchpin).
I’ve thrown myself back into work, back into the garden, back into my family, where I belong. I’ve just gotten around to exercising for the first time since his death (okay, I went for a few walks around my home town), but I long for him. That’s probably the best word to use.
I could never think what it would be like to lose a spouse when you have young children at home, or, like our neighbor, lose your 26 year-old child in warfare. My father led a good life and lived to be 70. He tried his damnedest to create a family when the one his father created was ramshackle (my grandfather was an alcoholic man-about-town. When he died and was buried in the cemetery, my grandmother said, “Well, at least now I’ll always know where he is). He strove to rise out of that, and though the alcohol didn’t elude him, he was able to do his best to be fair, send us through school, support our family even during those times we were all on the other side of the fence politically.
The flowers and letters had flooded my parents’ house, and my mother feels inundated. But what a way to be snowed under, with gifts and thoughts of love celebrating what you’ve given to the world. My mom is looking in the checkbook register and figuring out just how much he gave away every year to charity, on top of the tithe he gave to the church. It was a lot. He gave to me in need. His old car when I moved to Los Angeles. Money to help my children go to a decent school. Honestly, I feel pretty much a skinflint in comparison.
I could go on and on. And I’m sure I will in the days and weeks and months to come. I know, as everyone says, the holidays are going to be hard.
I know it will end, and the sadness will cease to seem unbearable. And everything will be normal again, without him.
I guess like most things it just takes patience and time. Two things at which most of us are abysmal.
There's a lesson here somewhere, right?
Tuesday, July 04, 2006
A Year in Atwater
7.4.06
There are times when I do feel for the guy who wrote A Year in Provence, say for instance, when my whole house is being painted on July 4th and I’m trying to live normally while eight men whistle, sing, and joke in Spanish. It’s hard work for them, so I shouldn’t complain. But it’s hard to try to act normally when there is so much going on and it’s 84 degrees in the house.
The painter, Ricardo, comes from El Salvador, and is about the friendliest painter you’d ever long to find. He jokes, his English is great, and he believes all transactions are for the customer’s sake. I’d be hard pressed to find anyone so conscientious when it came to painting the house. He’d painted the three down the street from us, and now I know why he came so highly recommended.
There is, of course, that stuff you cannot avoid with workmen, the endless amount of trash, broken sprinkler (sigh), and trampled zucchini plant. The dust is the worst. We finally gave in and gave a quick dust today after fighting the urge over the last few days. Every day we would dust and sweep, only to come back and find a thick layer of dust everywhere. I’m just hoping it’s not full of lead.
We have cleaned and cleaned and cleaned. And all the cleaning we did just to get the dust off led us invariably to other areas. Wendy found the source of the weevil invasion, three loosely sealed bags of pizza dough that a friend had given us a month ago. Ridiculously, our friend Denise told Wendy we’d need an exterminator to get rid of them. I reassured her all that needed to be done was get rid of everything milled (flour, corn, etc.) that was filled with the suckers. Clean up, spray some of the least offensive Raid on the market, wash up, and be done with it. We had them all the time in Georgia. They’re a pain, but, hell, in the scheme of Bugdom, “merely a bagatelle” as they say.
We started into the closets, in the living room, under the beds. Lord knows why, it’s supposed to be our day off. But we’re stuck here, and we’ll be going swimming in a little while, so we both figured we might as well make the best of it.
The worst part is trying to keep your wits about you while surrounded by dust and general mayhem (as in, “Oh, no, no bother. Just a little dust, and muck, and everything not where I wanted it to be and the heat, and the flies and leaves coming in the windows. La dee da da…”)
Honestly, I have no idea how people (say the aforementioned author of …Provence) managed not to kill anyone while they tore up his house over the year. He actually had it easy. He didn’t have children, he was with his wife, he was wealthy, and he had a whole new country and culture to explore. Not to mention he was gleaning every interaction he had for the book he was going to write when the whole damn thing was over. Much like some of Wendy’s clients, who can afford to rent other houses while theirs are remodeled, it’s inconvenient, but it pales in comparison to folks like Wendy’s mother who moved her kitchen out onto the back porch for 6 months while new cabinets, stove, and flooring were put in.
This is a small job, and only going to take a week, but with everything else going on (my father’s death, asking our niece to leave after lying to us for what seemed like the 100th time) it’s been a tough run of it.
I guess other folks would probably just head off to the movies.
Either we’re not so bright, or we’re industrious.
Or, of course, we are out of our minds.
I’ll leave that up to you to decide.
There are times when I do feel for the guy who wrote A Year in Provence, say for instance, when my whole house is being painted on July 4th and I’m trying to live normally while eight men whistle, sing, and joke in Spanish. It’s hard work for them, so I shouldn’t complain. But it’s hard to try to act normally when there is so much going on and it’s 84 degrees in the house.
The painter, Ricardo, comes from El Salvador, and is about the friendliest painter you’d ever long to find. He jokes, his English is great, and he believes all transactions are for the customer’s sake. I’d be hard pressed to find anyone so conscientious when it came to painting the house. He’d painted the three down the street from us, and now I know why he came so highly recommended.
There is, of course, that stuff you cannot avoid with workmen, the endless amount of trash, broken sprinkler (sigh), and trampled zucchini plant. The dust is the worst. We finally gave in and gave a quick dust today after fighting the urge over the last few days. Every day we would dust and sweep, only to come back and find a thick layer of dust everywhere. I’m just hoping it’s not full of lead.
We have cleaned and cleaned and cleaned. And all the cleaning we did just to get the dust off led us invariably to other areas. Wendy found the source of the weevil invasion, three loosely sealed bags of pizza dough that a friend had given us a month ago. Ridiculously, our friend Denise told Wendy we’d need an exterminator to get rid of them. I reassured her all that needed to be done was get rid of everything milled (flour, corn, etc.) that was filled with the suckers. Clean up, spray some of the least offensive Raid on the market, wash up, and be done with it. We had them all the time in Georgia. They’re a pain, but, hell, in the scheme of Bugdom, “merely a bagatelle” as they say.
We started into the closets, in the living room, under the beds. Lord knows why, it’s supposed to be our day off. But we’re stuck here, and we’ll be going swimming in a little while, so we both figured we might as well make the best of it.
The worst part is trying to keep your wits about you while surrounded by dust and general mayhem (as in, “Oh, no, no bother. Just a little dust, and muck, and everything not where I wanted it to be and the heat, and the flies and leaves coming in the windows. La dee da da…”)
Honestly, I have no idea how people (say the aforementioned author of …Provence) managed not to kill anyone while they tore up his house over the year. He actually had it easy. He didn’t have children, he was with his wife, he was wealthy, and he had a whole new country and culture to explore. Not to mention he was gleaning every interaction he had for the book he was going to write when the whole damn thing was over. Much like some of Wendy’s clients, who can afford to rent other houses while theirs are remodeled, it’s inconvenient, but it pales in comparison to folks like Wendy’s mother who moved her kitchen out onto the back porch for 6 months while new cabinets, stove, and flooring were put in.
This is a small job, and only going to take a week, but with everything else going on (my father’s death, asking our niece to leave after lying to us for what seemed like the 100th time) it’s been a tough run of it.
I guess other folks would probably just head off to the movies.
Either we’re not so bright, or we’re industrious.
Or, of course, we are out of our minds.
I’ll leave that up to you to decide.
Wednesday, May 10, 2006
Reality Bites
May 10th
Matilijas in full bloom, Dr. Suess bushes going crazy, arugula gone to seed...
I was going to write about reality. But something got in the way.
I was thinking, and have been thinking for awhile, about the nature of reality in our manufactured world.
So, it's 2006 and you build a Tudor style house in Southern California. A house designed a long, long time ago in merry old England. Think about Tudor. Perhaps there are timbers because that was an affordable way to build a house, since timber was everywhere and made great frames. The whole style of the house was based on the reality of the situation. Much of it was build out of need, economy, and some style. Yet, here we are, hundreds of years later, trying to protect the forests and spending a lot more money to build a house which doesn't fit any bill except that it is pretty and makes us all think of England.
When people come in they think the house is charming. It whisks them back to another era. I don't know about you, but that wasn't a particularly healthy era when it came to living past 40 years old. We are, in so many senses, living in this fantasyland and dreaming about a place we don't really know.
Those people, way back a when, lived more in reality. Hopefully they were looking at their surroundings and acting upon them. When all they had was mud, they made a mud house. Attractive? Maybe not particularly, but it did, and here's the only word I can think of to describe it, resonate. Resonated with the surroundings, with their economy, with their tribe who lived in like houses.
It's exactly the same with the garden. We put 40% of our water into lawns, which remain highly unused for the most part, then complain that the well is going dry. (Okay, maybe we don't complain, but if you read the papers, scientists and farmers are complaining.) Speaking of England, that's where the idea of a grass lawn comes from. A country whose trademark item is an umbrella.
Like I said, I was going to write about it (and in many ways, I guess I am), but walking back from yoga, exhausted, tired, and going by the Korean church with their dandelion garden, I thought, "Who the hell cares?"
Maybe not my best turn of phrase, but I get the point even today. All this complaining and worrying, is it really getting us anywhere? So my neighbor waters his lawn every single night and my other neighbor smothers his grass with pesticides and fertilizer, does it make them worse people? No, they're great people, I just happen to think both are misinformed.
Here's the problem: how do I continue to do what I think is right (in all areas of my life) and not get angry with someone else for their actions?
It's a question I can't really answer today.
But I believe that starting at the beginning, calming myself, working with my hands in the garden, has the answer. In the same way you don't decide to start your diet on the maddest crazy busiest shopping day before Christmas, trying to calm yourself while you're yelling at people just doesn't work.
It feels good.
But it doesn't work.
Matilijas in full bloom, Dr. Suess bushes going crazy, arugula gone to seed...
I was going to write about reality. But something got in the way.
I was thinking, and have been thinking for awhile, about the nature of reality in our manufactured world.
So, it's 2006 and you build a Tudor style house in Southern California. A house designed a long, long time ago in merry old England. Think about Tudor. Perhaps there are timbers because that was an affordable way to build a house, since timber was everywhere and made great frames. The whole style of the house was based on the reality of the situation. Much of it was build out of need, economy, and some style. Yet, here we are, hundreds of years later, trying to protect the forests and spending a lot more money to build a house which doesn't fit any bill except that it is pretty and makes us all think of England.
When people come in they think the house is charming. It whisks them back to another era. I don't know about you, but that wasn't a particularly healthy era when it came to living past 40 years old. We are, in so many senses, living in this fantasyland and dreaming about a place we don't really know.
Those people, way back a when, lived more in reality. Hopefully they were looking at their surroundings and acting upon them. When all they had was mud, they made a mud house. Attractive? Maybe not particularly, but it did, and here's the only word I can think of to describe it, resonate. Resonated with the surroundings, with their economy, with their tribe who lived in like houses.
It's exactly the same with the garden. We put 40% of our water into lawns, which remain highly unused for the most part, then complain that the well is going dry. (Okay, maybe we don't complain, but if you read the papers, scientists and farmers are complaining.) Speaking of England, that's where the idea of a grass lawn comes from. A country whose trademark item is an umbrella.
Like I said, I was going to write about it (and in many ways, I guess I am), but walking back from yoga, exhausted, tired, and going by the Korean church with their dandelion garden, I thought, "Who the hell cares?"
Maybe not my best turn of phrase, but I get the point even today. All this complaining and worrying, is it really getting us anywhere? So my neighbor waters his lawn every single night and my other neighbor smothers his grass with pesticides and fertilizer, does it make them worse people? No, they're great people, I just happen to think both are misinformed.
Here's the problem: how do I continue to do what I think is right (in all areas of my life) and not get angry with someone else for their actions?
It's a question I can't really answer today.
But I believe that starting at the beginning, calming myself, working with my hands in the garden, has the answer. In the same way you don't decide to start your diet on the maddest crazy busiest shopping day before Christmas, trying to calm yourself while you're yelling at people just doesn't work.
It feels good.
But it doesn't work.
Reality Bites
May 10th
Matilijas in full bloom, Dr. Suess bushes going crazy, arugula gone to seed...
I was going to write about reality. But something got in the way.
I was thinking, and have been thinking for awhile, about the nature of reality in our manufactured world.
So, it's 2006 and you build a Tudor style house in Southern California. A house designed a long, long time ago in merry old England. Think about Tudor. Perhaps there are timbers because that was an affordable way to build a house, since timber was everywhere and made great frames. The whole style of the house was based on the reality of the situation. Much of it was build out of need, economy, and some style. Yet, here we are, hundreds of years later, trying to protect the forests and spending a lot more money to build a house which doesn't fit any bill except that it is pretty and makes us all think of England.
When people come in they think the house is charming. It whisks them back to another era. I don't know about you, but that wasn't a particularly healthy era when it came to living past 40 years old. We are, in so many senses, living in this fantasyland and dreaming about a place we don't really know.
Those people, way back a when, lived more in reality. Hopefully they were looking at their surroundings and acting upon them. When all they had was mud, they made a mud house. Attractive? Maybe not particularly, but it did, and here's the only word I can think of to describe it, resonate. Resonated with the surroundings, with their economy, with their tribe who lived in like houses.
It's exactly the same with the garden. We put 40% of our water into lawns, which remain highly unused for the most part, then complain that the well is going dry. (Okay, maybe we don't complain, but if you read the papers, scientists and farmers are complaining.) Speaking of England, that's where the idea of a grass lawn comes from. A country whose trademark item is an umbrella.
Like I said, I was going to write about it (and in many ways, I guess I am), but walking back from yoga, exhausted, tired, and going by the Korean church with their dandelion garden, I thought, "Who the hell cares?"
Maybe not my best turn of phrase, but I get the point even today. All this complaining and worrying, is it really getting us anywhere? So my neighbor waters his lawn every single night and my other neighbor smothers his grass with pesticides and fertilizer, does it make them worse people? No, they're great people, I just happen to think both are misinformed.
Here's the problem: how do I continue to do what I think is right (in all areas of my life) and not get angry with someone else for their actions?
It's a question I can't really answer today.
But I believe that starting at the beginning, calming myself, working with my hands in the garden, has the answer. In the same way you don't decide to start your diet on the maddest crazy busiest shopping day before Christmas, trying to calm yourself while you're yelling at people just doesn't work.
It feels good.
But it doesn't work.
Matilijas in full bloom, Dr. Suess bushes going crazy, arugula gone to seed...
I was going to write about reality. But something got in the way.
I was thinking, and have been thinking for awhile, about the nature of reality in our manufactured world.
So, it's 2006 and you build a Tudor style house in Southern California. A house designed a long, long time ago in merry old England. Think about Tudor. Perhaps there are timbers because that was an affordable way to build a house, since timber was everywhere and made great frames. The whole style of the house was based on the reality of the situation. Much of it was build out of need, economy, and some style. Yet, here we are, hundreds of years later, trying to protect the forests and spending a lot more money to build a house which doesn't fit any bill except that it is pretty and makes us all think of England.
When people come in they think the house is charming. It whisks them back to another era. I don't know about you, but that wasn't a particularly healthy era when it came to living past 40 years old. We are, in so many senses, living in this fantasyland and dreaming about a place we don't really know.
Those people, way back a when, lived more in reality. Hopefully they were looking at their surroundings and acting upon them. When all they had was mud, they made a mud house. Attractive? Maybe not particularly, but it did, and here's the only word I can think of to describe it, resonate. Resonated with the surroundings, with their economy, with their tribe who lived in like houses.
It's exactly the same with the garden. We put 40% of our water into lawns, which remain highly unused for the most part, then complain that the well is going dry. (Okay, maybe we don't complain, but if you read the papers, scientists and farmers are complaining.) Speaking of England, that's where the idea of a grass lawn comes from. A country whose trademark item is an umbrella.
Like I said, I was going to write about it (and in many ways, I guess I am), but walking back from yoga, exhausted, tired, and going by the Korean church with their dandelion garden, I thought, "Who the hell cares?"
Maybe not my best turn of phrase, but I get the point even today. All this complaining and worrying, is it really getting us anywhere? So my neighbor waters his lawn every single night and my other neighbor smothers his grass with pesticides and fertilizer, does it make them worse people? No, they're great people, I just happen to think both are misinformed.
Here's the problem: how do I continue to do what I think is right (in all areas of my life) and not get angry with someone else for their actions?
It's a question I can't really answer today.
But I believe that starting at the beginning, calming myself, working with my hands in the garden, has the answer. In the same way you don't decide to start your diet on the maddest crazy busiest shopping day before Christmas, trying to calm yourself while you're yelling at people just doesn't work.
It feels good.
But it doesn't work.
Reality Bites
May 10th
Matilijas in full bloom, Dr. Suess bushes going crazy, arugula gone to seed...
I was going to write about reality. But something got in the way.
I was thinking, and have been thinking for awhile, about the nature of reality in our manufactured world.
So, it's 2006 and you build a Tudor style house in Southern California. A house designed a long, long time ago in merry old England. Think about Tudor. Perhaps there are timbers because that was an affordable way to build a house, since timber was everywhere and made great frames. The whole style of the house was based on the reality of the situation. Much of it was build out of need, economy, and some style. Yet, here we are, hundreds of years later, trying to protect the forests and spending a lot more money to build a house which doesn't fit any bill except that it is pretty and makes us all think of England.
When people come in they think the house is charming. It whisks them back to another era. I don't know about you, but that wasn't a particularly healthy era when it came to living past 40 years old. We are, in so many senses, living in this fantasyland and dreaming about a place we don't really know.
Those people, way back a when, lived more in reality. Hopefully they were looking at their surroundings and acting upon them. When all they had was mud, they made a mud house. Attractive? Maybe not particularly, but it did, and here's the only word I can think of to describe it, resonate. Resonated with the surroundings, with their economy, with their tribe who lived in like houses.
It's exactly the same with the garden. We put 40% of our water into lawns, which remain highly unused for the most part, then complain that the well is going dry. (Okay, maybe we don't complain, but if you read the papers, scientists and farmers are complaining.) Speaking of England, that's where the idea of a grass lawn comes from. A country whose trademark item is an umbrella.
Like I said, I was going to write about it (and in many ways, I guess I am), but walking back from yoga, exhausted, tired, and going by the Korean church with their dandelion garden, I thought, "Who the hell cares?"
Maybe not my best turn of phrase, but I get the point even today. All this complaining and worrying, is it really getting us anywhere? So my neighbor waters his lawn every single night and my other neighbor smothers his grass with pesticides and fertilizer, does it make them worse people? No, they're great people, I just happen to think both are misinformed.
Here's the problem: how do I continue to do what I think is right (in all areas of my life) and not get angry with someone else for their actions?
It's a question I can't really answer today.
But I believe that starting at the beginning, calming myself, working with my hands in the garden, has the answer. In the same way you don't decide to start your diet on the maddest crazy busiest shopping day before Christmas, trying to calm yourself while you're yelling at people just doesn't work.
It feels good.
But it doesn't work.
Matilijas in full bloom, Dr. Suess bushes going crazy, arugula gone to seed...
I was going to write about reality. But something got in the way.
I was thinking, and have been thinking for awhile, about the nature of reality in our manufactured world.
So, it's 2006 and you build a Tudor style house in Southern California. A house designed a long, long time ago in merry old England. Think about Tudor. Perhaps there are timbers because that was an affordable way to build a house, since timber was everywhere and made great frames. The whole style of the house was based on the reality of the situation. Much of it was build out of need, economy, and some style. Yet, here we are, hundreds of years later, trying to protect the forests and spending a lot more money to build a house which doesn't fit any bill except that it is pretty and makes us all think of England.
When people come in they think the house is charming. It whisks them back to another era. I don't know about you, but that wasn't a particularly healthy era when it came to living past 40 years old. We are, in so many senses, living in this fantasyland and dreaming about a place we don't really know.
Those people, way back a when, lived more in reality. Hopefully they were looking at their surroundings and acting upon them. When all they had was mud, they made a mud house. Attractive? Maybe not particularly, but it did, and here's the only word I can think of to describe it, resonate. Resonated with the surroundings, with their economy, with their tribe who lived in like houses.
It's exactly the same with the garden. We put 40% of our water into lawns, which remain highly unused for the most part, then complain that the well is going dry. (Okay, maybe we don't complain, but if you read the papers, scientists and farmers are complaining.) Speaking of England, that's where the idea of a grass lawn comes from. A country whose trademark item is an umbrella.
Like I said, I was going to write about it (and in many ways, I guess I am), but walking back from yoga, exhausted, tired, and going by the Korean church with their dandelion garden, I thought, "Who the hell cares?"
Maybe not my best turn of phrase, but I get the point even today. All this complaining and worrying, is it really getting us anywhere? So my neighbor waters his lawn every single night and my other neighbor smothers his grass with pesticides and fertilizer, does it make them worse people? No, they're great people, I just happen to think both are misinformed.
Here's the problem: how do I continue to do what I think is right (in all areas of my life) and not get angry with someone else for their actions?
It's a question I can't really answer today.
But I believe that starting at the beginning, calming myself, working with my hands in the garden, has the answer. In the same way you don't decide to start your diet on the maddest crazy busiest shopping day before Christmas, trying to calm yourself while you're yelling at people just doesn't work.
It feels good.
But it doesn't work.
Monday, May 01, 2006
Love Lies Bleeding in my Hands
May 1st
May Day.
The Matillija poppies have risen their full 8 foot height and are just beginning to open in their "dancer's pose", as Wendy likes to call it, or "fried egg" pose, as I do. Love-in-a-Mist, a flower from the time when they named them beautifully (think Love-Lies-Bleeding or Fireman's Britches) cluster around what is left of an ancient cactus garden I have yet to rip out. That area, so hot, hot in the summer time you couldn't walk across it, was home to so many borage plants, it's hard to believe I only have one left.
Just thinking about them reminds me how charmed I was when we moved into this house. By the late-20's era, by my new love, by this massive garden that had gone to seed after one of the men withered and passed away from AIDS. I remember sun, heat, and opportunity. At that time I was still hoping to write for television or movies and did not have children.
It's easier to look back, right? To see everything was much easier then? We forget so much. I was in emotional pain then and had trouble with direction in my life. More trouble than now, if you can believe it.
This house has so much history, built by a surgeon, lived in by a landscape architect. We're only the third owners in all those years. With all the terrible things that have gone on around here (and I believe I've only heard more since joining the Neighborhood Watch Program), I still feel so rooted historically to this house.
I was going to write today about what is real and what is not, something that's been on my mind since I worked at Disney and was intrigued by the arguments against the Disneyfication of Fill-in-the-Blank (New York, LA, Paris, the world), but it doesn't feel like that kind of day.
Yesterday was tiring and uplifting in the garden. The lawn hadn't been mowed in two weeks and Mark, my neighbor, just got his new lawn in. And is one of those people who picks up every leaf that falls. Sharp contrast to the people who used to rent the place. I hate to take part in competition, but there's nothing that quickens your game as much as someone who is excellent at what they do.
I finally ripped out two large lavender bushes and an enormous fortnight lilly that had taken over part of my front walk. I'd spend the last four years fighting them, continually cutting them back, only to have them return with a vengeance. Maybe taking over my own garden instead of having someone else do it for me has someone empowered me, because I ripped both out without much pity, then stood back and saw how good it looked. I stopped and tried to think why I was so concerned about ripping them out before. There is a great possibility they were part of my "If it's green, it stays" policy. We'd lost so many plants over the years, I was hesitant to clear something out that was actually doing well. No one likes a hole in a garden and what are the chances whatever you put there will do well? (The answer to that is 60/40.)
I did, however, take the time to divide the fortnight lilly into 10 smaller plants and put them out back, which is something that still amazes me to no end.
The thing that always surprises me in regards to yard work, is where my interests lie. There is nothing so enjoyable as sitting down with a catalog and picking out new plants and nothing so disheartening as seeing those plants or seeds fail to grow, get eaten, or downright perish.
But with all the big work putting in walkways, clearing out brush, dividing perennials, nothing comes close to the act of solitude known as weeding. You can be amazed through all your other big actions in the garden, but I feel you can only enjoy God's presence or "the big picture" in the small act of getting your face ten inches from the soil and picking out a weed.
And yes, I don't think I did enough weeding yesterday.
As luck would have it, there's still time tonight.
May Day.
The Matillija poppies have risen their full 8 foot height and are just beginning to open in their "dancer's pose", as Wendy likes to call it, or "fried egg" pose, as I do. Love-in-a-Mist, a flower from the time when they named them beautifully (think Love-Lies-Bleeding or Fireman's Britches) cluster around what is left of an ancient cactus garden I have yet to rip out. That area, so hot, hot in the summer time you couldn't walk across it, was home to so many borage plants, it's hard to believe I only have one left.
Just thinking about them reminds me how charmed I was when we moved into this house. By the late-20's era, by my new love, by this massive garden that had gone to seed after one of the men withered and passed away from AIDS. I remember sun, heat, and opportunity. At that time I was still hoping to write for television or movies and did not have children.
It's easier to look back, right? To see everything was much easier then? We forget so much. I was in emotional pain then and had trouble with direction in my life. More trouble than now, if you can believe it.
This house has so much history, built by a surgeon, lived in by a landscape architect. We're only the third owners in all those years. With all the terrible things that have gone on around here (and I believe I've only heard more since joining the Neighborhood Watch Program), I still feel so rooted historically to this house.
I was going to write today about what is real and what is not, something that's been on my mind since I worked at Disney and was intrigued by the arguments against the Disneyfication of Fill-in-the-Blank (New York, LA, Paris, the world), but it doesn't feel like that kind of day.
Yesterday was tiring and uplifting in the garden. The lawn hadn't been mowed in two weeks and Mark, my neighbor, just got his new lawn in. And is one of those people who picks up every leaf that falls. Sharp contrast to the people who used to rent the place. I hate to take part in competition, but there's nothing that quickens your game as much as someone who is excellent at what they do.
I finally ripped out two large lavender bushes and an enormous fortnight lilly that had taken over part of my front walk. I'd spend the last four years fighting them, continually cutting them back, only to have them return with a vengeance. Maybe taking over my own garden instead of having someone else do it for me has someone empowered me, because I ripped both out without much pity, then stood back and saw how good it looked. I stopped and tried to think why I was so concerned about ripping them out before. There is a great possibility they were part of my "If it's green, it stays" policy. We'd lost so many plants over the years, I was hesitant to clear something out that was actually doing well. No one likes a hole in a garden and what are the chances whatever you put there will do well? (The answer to that is 60/40.)
I did, however, take the time to divide the fortnight lilly into 10 smaller plants and put them out back, which is something that still amazes me to no end.
The thing that always surprises me in regards to yard work, is where my interests lie. There is nothing so enjoyable as sitting down with a catalog and picking out new plants and nothing so disheartening as seeing those plants or seeds fail to grow, get eaten, or downright perish.
But with all the big work putting in walkways, clearing out brush, dividing perennials, nothing comes close to the act of solitude known as weeding. You can be amazed through all your other big actions in the garden, but I feel you can only enjoy God's presence or "the big picture" in the small act of getting your face ten inches from the soil and picking out a weed.
And yes, I don't think I did enough weeding yesterday.
As luck would have it, there's still time tonight.
Wednesday, March 29, 2006
Marketing Nature's Own
March 29, 2006
Rains again. Rains expected.
Ryan has 4 zucchini seedlings up now and you have never seen a kid so excited by vegetables. Well, he likes watching them grown and picking them he doesn’t necessarily enjoy eating them.
Someone was cursing Marketing and Marketers the other day, primarily because it’s so difficult to keep track of what’s good for you because they are constantly playing with the words. If wheat bread is good for you, they’ll include something in the title of their product like Ground Wheat Flour (which I believe is actually just flour, ground from wheat, which we eat all the time) to make you buy it with the understanding that this is good for you like wheat bread is. Which is essentially a lie.
I laughed. It imitates Nature herself, don’t you see?
Let’s say there’s a butterfly, like the Monarch, which tastes good to birds. Somewhere along the line, nature produced a toxin in some of them which made them taste horrible to birds. In time that feature came to be in all Monarchs, and as a direct result, birds won’t eat them. What is also interesting is that birds will associate the color and pattern of the Monarch with the foul taste. Now along comes this other butterfly (and I’ll be damned if I can remember the name) who develops the same coloring and marking of the Monarch but, get this, don’t contain the toxin that makes them so inedible. They are mimicking in order to increase their chances of survival.
And if that’s not Marketing, I’ll eat my hat.
Our ancestors didn’t have it any easier, so don’t fool yourself. Anyone who foraged had to be able to tell the difference between an edible morel mushroom and a Death Cap. They also needed to know the time to pick wild berries, roots, and tubers, because doing so at the wrong time could cause illness or death. They needed to be able to read seasons, prepare meats, buy meats and vegetables from sometimes untrustworthy sources; in other words they had a hell of a lot of work to do that we never even think about.
These people were up at dawn and asleep before their heads hit their pillows.
So complaining about a bunch of stuffed white shirts making marketing campaigns trying to fool you doesn’t get you very far when you look back historically.
In fact, we look bad because we have it so damn easy. If the Marketers are trying to stick it to us, don’t just sit and complain, you’ve got 3,000 pages of reference materials all over the Web on any subject from Types of Wheat Flour to the difference between Biodegradable and Compostable.
As my mother always used to tell me, referring to those hucksters who sold vegetables on the streets of South Philly, “Did you ever hear a huckster yell, ‘Rotten tomatoes!’”
Stay one step ahead of the Marketers and read as much as you can to give your family the nourishment they need, your planet the treatment it deserves, or the company the money for products made that agree with your actual standards, not ones laid on afterwards by a campaign team.
And don’t be surprised when they change their stripes because you aren’t buying.
Monday, March 27, 2006
Lying Down
March 27th
The rain has just set in. Temperatures in the mid 70s. The California Poppies are just coming up, Ryan was excited to show me two this morning.
The weekend in the yard wasn't a particularly difficult one, I'm still maintaining (or trying to maintain) the balance between working in the house and outside on Saturdays while Wendy is working. And, yes, by the end of the day (5pm) I am ready for a) a long bike ride or b) a cold beer.
We'd all gotten free seeds last week from our little Farmer's Market (I think there are only 10 stalls, one of them devoted entirely to mozzarella, if you can believe it). They're last year's seeds and I don't expect them to take. Thankfully. Abby I believe is trying to grow turnips, which I can't stand. Ryan is frustrated that we have to wait a few weeks before planting the watermelon. We have a few Gold Rush yellow zucchini sprouts up which we'll move to the back, where they did so well last year.
Working in the garden started me thinking (which is actually not such a difficult task) about what is real and what is fake. Moreover, where are we lying to ourselves and where are we true.
I was thinking in particular about this really awful restaurant we took the kids to just outside Disneyland, called Rainforest Cafe. What's so terrifically sad about it is how goddamned misguided the whole adventure is, from the gift shoppe at the front to the food choices for the children. If you can believe it, at a place called the Rainforest Café a child’s plate does not come with fruit. The adult plate does not come with fruit. What a perfect opportunity to give a kid a banana (though, notably, I’m sure plenty of rainforests fall to make way for banana plantations, but still…) And how about donating a portion, even a nickel a plate, to saving the rainforest? How about skipping the desserts and sponsoring a gorilla in the wild? How about compostable plates? Here was the horrible themed restaurant based on a fragile ecosystem which is dying while you eat the fried onion blossom appetizer.
Honestly, you can’t take me anywhere.
We did get drinks, and sometimes that takes me out of If-I-Ran-The-Circus mode.
But still, where does this enormous corporation get off fooling people into thinking their somehow a part of the circle of life while they run laughing to the bank in their Hummers?
One of the very things I love about my garden is it is true. Whether or not you see it as a weedy mess (and most people don’t, I’m probably the worst offender here), it actually is a pesticide free, fertilizer free, environment for that circle of life Rainforest Café was imitating. Everything from the skunks to the billions of little ants living under my porch have a place to live. You can’t dig in my garden without turning up earthworms. That, my friend, is what they call a good thing.
The birds come in looking to eat the worms, and when they do they don’t have to worry that they’ve been soaked in Malathion or something else. And the worms that live can do their business. This is real, this is what’s happening as you stick your hands in the soil. Not a flock of birds trilling at the push of a button.
I may have said it before, but I always wondered why those crazy Zen monks were always telling you to do the most boring things: wash dishes, weed your garden, sit and stare at a wall for 40 minutes. But here it is, can’t you see? Here is where you can’t escape yourself and you can’t run away from reality. Boring old stupid reality. Just sitting there and clearing out the pond of amusements, taxes that need doing, and plasma screen TVs.
I’m not saying that diversions aren’t fun, and aren’t necessary, but I always crave something deeper, something meaningful. Which often makes me a pain in the ass.
I need to learn to sit and weed and listen and not get up on my high horse (as it were) taking potshots at passers by. Do not judge, lest ye be judged, boy. That’s the difficult part. Even taking away many of the diversions, which I seemed to have done, is not enough, the road is longer, and you have just taken the first steps.
Not that they are bad steps.
There are just a hell of a lot of them.
And I hope they will get easier somewhere along the way.
Wednesday, March 08, 2006
Green is also the Color of the Ocean
I'm jealous. Today, anyway, of my friend Karen. And Anne Lamott. They're both writers who write during the day and are devoted to it. That's actually a little unfair, since Karen is home schooling children during the day and shouldn't have the energy to write. But they both write anyway.
I think it's painful to write sometimes. Especially when I'm reading Anne Lamott, who not only goes into her past addictions and bad behaviors in general, but brings you into the uncomfortable present. Here she's out of money right near the end of her last book, here her son Sam is telling her how much he hates her, here another parent is worried about her son's school performance. Okay, that last one is hilarious:
"Sam really has a gift for making things out of next to nothing… His last teacher, after expressing some concern about his handwriting, said, "He makes such amazing things out of… of… of," and I said, "Garbage?," and she said, "Yes!"
Sometimes I have a knee-jerk concern that he has so little interest in school. At the end of second grade, on of the mothers said, "Gee he doesn’t go much for homework, does he?," and I wanted to scream, "No, but he makes inventions, you dumb slut, out of garbage. While your kid is an obsequious little Type A suck.
I realize I may be the least bit sensitive."
-- Traveling Mercies
Wendy, my wife, is very shy though startlingly open to those who are open with her. I'm afraid at times to bring my life out into the open, when the open is so horrifyingly scary sometimes. The open, it seems, is Howard Stern and American Idol. It's people who grew up in schools making fun of other people, now spending all their free time to laugh at people on TV. (If you want to know, the people who produce those shows more than likely hate the shows and themselves for making it. They also hate the people watching it. It's a tiny little circle of self-loathing anyone outside of the TV industry cares to talk about. I know, I worked in it for 7 years.)
So I take those moments to the garden. And most times they go away. And I wonder, am I stunting my writing by gardening, or does writing stunt my growth?
I keep thinking of those crazy Zen Buddhist monks telling everyone to shut up and go back to washing dishes. Washing dishes! What the hell can you find there? We should be at revivals, or shopping, or learning new things with our friends, you're telling me I'm going to find peace doing something I wanted to hire a housekeeper to do?
(Those not my personal thoughts at the end there. I can't afford a housekeeper and I do my share of dishes every day.)
The garden brings all those self-loathing, confusing, and horrifying thoughts to soil level. And I don't know how it does it, but it usually can take care of them in an hour or so.
So, I don't know if it's I'm afraid to write because I'm shy or because I'm lazy.
Regardless, lunch hour is over for this day, and I guess I got to spend this time writing at least.
It'll do.
I think it's painful to write sometimes. Especially when I'm reading Anne Lamott, who not only goes into her past addictions and bad behaviors in general, but brings you into the uncomfortable present. Here she's out of money right near the end of her last book, here her son Sam is telling her how much he hates her, here another parent is worried about her son's school performance. Okay, that last one is hilarious:
"Sam really has a gift for making things out of next to nothing… His last teacher, after expressing some concern about his handwriting, said, "He makes such amazing things out of… of… of," and I said, "Garbage?," and she said, "Yes!"
Sometimes I have a knee-jerk concern that he has so little interest in school. At the end of second grade, on of the mothers said, "Gee he doesn’t go much for homework, does he?," and I wanted to scream, "No, but he makes inventions, you dumb slut, out of garbage. While your kid is an obsequious little Type A suck.
I realize I may be the least bit sensitive."
-- Traveling Mercies
Wendy, my wife, is very shy though startlingly open to those who are open with her. I'm afraid at times to bring my life out into the open, when the open is so horrifyingly scary sometimes. The open, it seems, is Howard Stern and American Idol. It's people who grew up in schools making fun of other people, now spending all their free time to laugh at people on TV. (If you want to know, the people who produce those shows more than likely hate the shows and themselves for making it. They also hate the people watching it. It's a tiny little circle of self-loathing anyone outside of the TV industry cares to talk about. I know, I worked in it for 7 years.)
So I take those moments to the garden. And most times they go away. And I wonder, am I stunting my writing by gardening, or does writing stunt my growth?
I keep thinking of those crazy Zen Buddhist monks telling everyone to shut up and go back to washing dishes. Washing dishes! What the hell can you find there? We should be at revivals, or shopping, or learning new things with our friends, you're telling me I'm going to find peace doing something I wanted to hire a housekeeper to do?
(Those not my personal thoughts at the end there. I can't afford a housekeeper and I do my share of dishes every day.)
The garden brings all those self-loathing, confusing, and horrifying thoughts to soil level. And I don't know how it does it, but it usually can take care of them in an hour or so.
So, I don't know if it's I'm afraid to write because I'm shy or because I'm lazy.
Regardless, lunch hour is over for this day, and I guess I got to spend this time writing at least.
It'll do.
Saturday, March 04, 2006
Rainy Days and Saturdays
March 4, 2006
The rains are just finishing here today. People in Southern California, the ones who live in the city anyway, look at rain as an inconvenience. Maybe all people in the suburbs and cities around the country do. As if the weather was here for them, to help them go about their days of shopping, soccer practice, golfing, or whatnot. I think it’s one of the beautiful things gardening taught me about the nature of weather and its intimate connection with the growing things on the planet. Without rain, the trees in the forest would never grow, nor the wild berries that feed the bears. It may sound corny, but when my corner of the world gets rain I know intimately about the water percolating down through the soil and each plant bringing in the life-giving nectar. Listen to me, waxing poetic about the rain.
It’s just that in my mind before rain was entwined with bad feelings like loneliness and depression. I imagined Karen Carpenter standing with an umbrella in my front yard singing to herself “Rainy Days and Mondays always get me down”.
Perhaps, too, that our lives are so busy as adults that it’s nice for once to take a break and sit inside. Since there are so few bad weather days here, it’s easy to hear your mother still yelling, “Go outside, it’s a beautiful day.” Going to a movie during a sunny afternoon here is still one of the few guilty pleasures I still love.
Ryan and I have gotten out the seed growing tray and have been trying to germinate some old seeds that the garden store guy gave us last time we were there. They hadn’t taken off all last week so I thought they needed the warmth of being inside. Ryan was very excited yesterday when he showed me the sprouts. Unfortunately they were sprouts of various kinds of mushrooms whose spores must’ve been in the soil mixture. We’re really not the best seed growers. In fact, I’m always surprised at how brown our thumbs are. Sometimes I think I’m just lazy because I don’t want to do all the work so many other gardeners do: the endless watering, daily checking on seeds, fertilizing, double-digging, and mulching. We do some of that, but really we kind of let things fend for themselves and consider it a huge bonus when we get lots of lettuce or see our Spanish lavender blooming.
I’m excited whenever I see a plant with the description Thrives on Neglect.
I guess I swing back and forth in my heart on what a gardener really is. Which is what neurotics do really well. The one thing I can confirm is somehow both our children, Ryan especially, have an appreciation of nature I never had as a child. They are excited, as they should be, when they go pick lettuce for us. Though kids with massive gardens in their back yards may dread going out, that we have just a taste of it brings a sense of wonder which is enough, I think, for city kids.
We will never be great gardeners. That’s just a fact (unless, of course, Ryan suddenly decides when he is older to raise his own vegetables and flowers). We will never be leaving bagfuls of zucchini and tomatoes on our neighbors porches then run away into the night, as we barely grow enough for ourselves.
I think it’s okay we still experience the awe of plants growing and the it drives us out, farther out, to the deserts, the forest, and the ocean. And while others are hell bent on taming it with their noisy, obnoxious machinery, that maybe we will have the patience to sit quietly for a minute or two and fully enjoy God’s bounty and gifts to us.
Sunday, February 05, 2006
Gardens Gone Wild
February 5, 2006
Well, it's finally happened, after much hemming and hawing, we've finally let Javier, our gardener, go. It's very strange, because everyone I spoke to about doing this (which, neurotically, were many) kept asking me, "Did you fire your gardener yet?"
But I wasn't actually firing him. I just wasn't going to be using him anymore. Or I have great hope not to be using him in the future. Whether or not that actually happens remains to be seen.
I spent Saturday, after taking Abby and Ryan to a friend's Princess Party running the electric mower and weed whacker and it was strangely refreshing. The mowing, of all things, was incredibly easy, because we have so very little lawn. Where I thought we'd get hung up was in the leaf litter and trimming department. Traditionally, I have always done most of the weeding here as well as cutting back the perennials like the Matillija Poppies and Lion's Tail in the fall and winter. That being said, I wondered if I could add on top of that a weekly foray into the jungle to cut, hack, trim, plus do the mow, blow, and go traditional to Southern California. Well, it's worth a try. The worst that can happen is I can decide this was a terrible choice, call Javier and have him charge me an extra $20 a month to do the job he was doing before, right? Or maybe the worst is I could end up with hundreds of dollars worth of hospital bills. But let's not spend time there yet.
What I did find, was I felt more in control of my garden. Not that I ever felt like a stranger, like those folks in those beautiful houses who have landscape architects incessantly building them Zen rock gardens and koi ponds so they are "surprised every time I come around the corner" (I'm quoting an LA Times article). If you're taken aback when you go into your own garden, you really can't call yourself a gardener. The surprises a gardener gets is when they find the area they haven't been able to get to all season has become a pumpkin patch by accident and is chock full of 10 pounders.
There are beautiful things I don't think translate to normal gardeners, or maybe even normal city dwellers. The beauty of fallen leaves, for instance. Gardeners spend every weekday and weekend blowing them around, herding them into, and putting them into bins and lawn and leaf bags. But when you go into the country, it seems like no one's been in the lawn to mow or rake in weeks, if not months. Removing the leaves, also, destroys nature's very process of decomposition. The leaves suppress weeds around the tree, conserve moisture, and allow microorganisms and earthworms to break the leaves back into usable compost to feed the garden.
Ah, the kids have found me. They always find me. And of course they want to play on the computer. It's probably because we limit their time on both the computer and watching videos/television (called "screen time" in my brother Jack's house), so every time one is on they tend to look like deer in the headlights.
Soon, I guess, I'll wonder where they and the time have gone.
Of course, that doesn't nothing for my sanity-preservation moves at the moment, but…
Well, it's finally happened, after much hemming and hawing, we've finally let Javier, our gardener, go. It's very strange, because everyone I spoke to about doing this (which, neurotically, were many) kept asking me, "Did you fire your gardener yet?"
But I wasn't actually firing him. I just wasn't going to be using him anymore. Or I have great hope not to be using him in the future. Whether or not that actually happens remains to be seen.
I spent Saturday, after taking Abby and Ryan to a friend's Princess Party running the electric mower and weed whacker and it was strangely refreshing. The mowing, of all things, was incredibly easy, because we have so very little lawn. Where I thought we'd get hung up was in the leaf litter and trimming department. Traditionally, I have always done most of the weeding here as well as cutting back the perennials like the Matillija Poppies and Lion's Tail in the fall and winter. That being said, I wondered if I could add on top of that a weekly foray into the jungle to cut, hack, trim, plus do the mow, blow, and go traditional to Southern California. Well, it's worth a try. The worst that can happen is I can decide this was a terrible choice, call Javier and have him charge me an extra $20 a month to do the job he was doing before, right? Or maybe the worst is I could end up with hundreds of dollars worth of hospital bills. But let's not spend time there yet.
What I did find, was I felt more in control of my garden. Not that I ever felt like a stranger, like those folks in those beautiful houses who have landscape architects incessantly building them Zen rock gardens and koi ponds so they are "surprised every time I come around the corner" (I'm quoting an LA Times article). If you're taken aback when you go into your own garden, you really can't call yourself a gardener. The surprises a gardener gets is when they find the area they haven't been able to get to all season has become a pumpkin patch by accident and is chock full of 10 pounders.
There are beautiful things I don't think translate to normal gardeners, or maybe even normal city dwellers. The beauty of fallen leaves, for instance. Gardeners spend every weekday and weekend blowing them around, herding them into, and putting them into bins and lawn and leaf bags. But when you go into the country, it seems like no one's been in the lawn to mow or rake in weeks, if not months. Removing the leaves, also, destroys nature's very process of decomposition. The leaves suppress weeds around the tree, conserve moisture, and allow microorganisms and earthworms to break the leaves back into usable compost to feed the garden.
Ah, the kids have found me. They always find me. And of course they want to play on the computer. It's probably because we limit their time on both the computer and watching videos/television (called "screen time" in my brother Jack's house), so every time one is on they tend to look like deer in the headlights.
Soon, I guess, I'll wonder where they and the time have gone.
Of course, that doesn't nothing for my sanity-preservation moves at the moment, but…
Saturday, January 28, 2006
Letter to Cal
January 28, 2006
Saturday morning. Wendy’s at work, as she usually is until two, and I’m here with Ryan and Abby.
Saturdays are hard. They always have been for me, unless I had a very, very late Friday and woke up late. I think much of it is the childhood memory of waking up to my mother vacuuming. I was asleep and the world had already started its busy little chores. But my mistake, really, being alive is full of busy little chores, and we are lucky enough to grow up in a time and place where we won’t be spending our day gathering firewood, food, or tending to the plants and animals all day. I know, odd thoughts for a man who lives in the center of Los Angeles, but there you have it. We could deny the reality all day long if we wanted to that other people pick our food and create our energy for us and all we have to do is find to enough work to pay for it, but there you have it. I’ve always been fascinated by what I used to call “those early people”, but let’s face it, those people are living less than 2,000 miles away from me in the heart of Mexico.
I guess the question I ask myself, now that I have children, a wife, and a job where I write every day, what’s next?
Like the rain cloud, I don’t think I can leap to that answer directly. And I believe I’m starting to understand again, the importance of faith. I wrote to you in the past about my attending a Presbyterian church and dong some important work on becoming a Christian. Three and a half years later, I have fallen out of Christianity. Maybe that’s no the right grouping of words. I wanted to become a Christian and attended church regularly and went to Bible studies (which were taught by a really fascinating guy from Belfast, who had a lot to say about “terrorism”), and though I respected the teachers and found my heart softening, I could never grasp the central dogma. I don’t believe either Christianity or Judaism are true to me. I wanted to say true, but that’s not fair. Though all religions have their terrible pasts, the people that really “get it” are miles ahead of the rest of us. I don’t want to belittle their faiths, anymore than I want to belittle those people in the rainforest who believe their gods live in the trees and in thunderclouds. It’s just something I couldn’t take to for a number of reasons. I feel strongly toward Buddhism, and you may know that many years ago I spent two years studying a few times a month with Zen Buddhists, but their work is difficult, and sitting for 30 minutes staring at a wall can be torture.
You probably know this feeling: part of you wants to run off and join a monastery and the other part of you wants to run away screaming.
So many people have said, I believe truly, you see things not as they are but as you are. Probably the most affecting story I’ve heard about this was from Victor Frankl (not sure about that spelling), who was tortured endlessly in a Nazi concentration camp and envisioned himself years from then, telling his pupils about it. (How is it I can’t mention the Nazis without become violently angry and at the same time sad?)
So where does that leave a husband and father of two? I realize I’m being ridiculously black and white about this. I can go a couple times a month to meditate. I don’t need to sell everything I own and go off to the mountains. I still find time to go to yoga once a week, which I love for its workout and calming effects on my crazy head, but its not enough; religious people see (and have seen since the dawn of man) something we don’t, something not only extraordinarily important, but something essential to living with joy. We both are basically non-consumers (well, within reason, right?), but to see the culture of consumerism and media and have nothing that you can hold up against it to say “see, this is what is all about” is disheartening. No, debilitating.
Other men and women have hobbies or sports to turn to. Well, the ones who haven’t turned to the 2+ hours of TV every night. And I think now that the incredibly time-consuming part of raising Ryan and Abby is over, I am ready to do something with my nights more interesting than making sure we have enough money to make it through the month on Microsoft Money.
There’s so much else, but without this essential fact, I think the rest might sound like that fluff you find in the lint filter in the dryer.
And though I, like my mother, spend much of my Saturday cleaning this place up (and starting next month, taking care of the yard in lieu of our gardener), but I thought it would be better spent kicking off with a letter to someone I find so important.
Um, that’d be you.
I miss your voice and your talks and hope one of us is smart enough this February to pick up the damn phone and call.
You know my time zone, right?
Hoping you and everyone you love is doing well,
Tim
Wednesday, October 26, 2005
Gangsta Crap
October 24, 2005
It’s misting again outside, but harder than it has been the past two mornings. It’s enough to change the timbre of the cars as they pass by our house, enough to start the germination of all those native seeds I have yet to plant. Enough to make you a little sad if you stand in it by yourself and feel the fall coming on.
Maybe it’s just because I’m done paying bills (which is always excruciating to me), or because my wife is talking to her estranged father on the phone, but the sadness gripped me when I stood on the porch looking out at the massive juvenile California sycamore we planted when Ryan was born.
There are reasons I’m a frustrated gardener. Probably one is, like the bonsai artists, I want to control the world, and it angers me when it doesn’t listen to my commands.
Looking at that beautiful tree we planted when Ryan was born I think of how different I want the world to be, a longing for peace. In my garden I hope to undo a little of what my fellow humans have instigated on the very ground we walk on. Ridiculous as that sounds as a man who lives in a dirty, crime-ridden city, it’s something I still believe strongly.
There was a day, a cold day last year, maybe the year before, Wendy was working and I took the children to Descanso Gardens to have a look around and ride the train once around the park. It was around this time of year, and the winter rains were just setting in. It wasn’t that cold when we started, but by the time I bought them hot chocolate and I held Abby’s little ice cube hands in mine, I felt terrible for letting her run around without gloves on.
They both fell fast asleep by the time I came home. I put them into their beds, turned on the radio, and started to wash dishes and look out at the beautiful rain.
Just then shots rang out, about a block away from our house. I could barely make out a black SUV driving away and a figure lying down. Police cars arrived in waves no more than three minutes later and neighbors started pouring out of their houses to find out what had happened.
Of course it was gang related. Of course all these misguided kids were killing each other like the assholes they admire so much.
I went back to my house and said, “We are moving”.
I couldn’t shake the feeling of how ineffectual my puttering in the garden had been. How, like the priest in the Beatles’ Eleanor Rigby he walks away from the grave and “no one was saved”.
I believed strongly in God when those kids were shot and killed. And I do still, mostly. I don’t wonder how He would let them do something so horrible as that. He has let much, much more horrible things happen on a daily basis for everyone, humans, animals, and insects alike.
I wondered, tonight, staring out at that black, black rain, about another man’s garden, in a country like Iraq. A garden that has seen dictators come and go, withstood wars, jihads, and so much human misery.
Those closest to God, even the Buddhists who don’t necessarily even believe in Him, would tell me to continue to garden, regardless.
Mother Theresa continued to heal the sick though Calcutta would always churn out an infinite number more than she could ever heal, or help through the night as they passed out of her arms and into their Lord’s.
And those people would tell you that Smith & Hawken, Gardener’s Eden, Sunset, and your Sunday supplement are full of shit. There is Gardening, and then there is all the crap thrown on top of it. There is a deep reason for putting your hands in that soil and it may not always be clear. Many of those incredibly, wonderfully, unfathomably smart people would tell you they were not always clear, either, but you should do it.
Because it is in your bones.
Do it if you’re tired. Or nervous. Or feel like taking a rifle to every gangbanger, politician, and black SUV driver in sight.
There is a connection between your hands and the earth that started before you were born. Probably before any of us were born.
And it is as rich as any loam you could find in the finest garden on the earth.
It’s misting again outside, but harder than it has been the past two mornings. It’s enough to change the timbre of the cars as they pass by our house, enough to start the germination of all those native seeds I have yet to plant. Enough to make you a little sad if you stand in it by yourself and feel the fall coming on.
Maybe it’s just because I’m done paying bills (which is always excruciating to me), or because my wife is talking to her estranged father on the phone, but the sadness gripped me when I stood on the porch looking out at the massive juvenile California sycamore we planted when Ryan was born.
There are reasons I’m a frustrated gardener. Probably one is, like the bonsai artists, I want to control the world, and it angers me when it doesn’t listen to my commands.
Looking at that beautiful tree we planted when Ryan was born I think of how different I want the world to be, a longing for peace. In my garden I hope to undo a little of what my fellow humans have instigated on the very ground we walk on. Ridiculous as that sounds as a man who lives in a dirty, crime-ridden city, it’s something I still believe strongly.
There was a day, a cold day last year, maybe the year before, Wendy was working and I took the children to Descanso Gardens to have a look around and ride the train once around the park. It was around this time of year, and the winter rains were just setting in. It wasn’t that cold when we started, but by the time I bought them hot chocolate and I held Abby’s little ice cube hands in mine, I felt terrible for letting her run around without gloves on.
They both fell fast asleep by the time I came home. I put them into their beds, turned on the radio, and started to wash dishes and look out at the beautiful rain.
Just then shots rang out, about a block away from our house. I could barely make out a black SUV driving away and a figure lying down. Police cars arrived in waves no more than three minutes later and neighbors started pouring out of their houses to find out what had happened.
Of course it was gang related. Of course all these misguided kids were killing each other like the assholes they admire so much.
I went back to my house and said, “We are moving”.
I couldn’t shake the feeling of how ineffectual my puttering in the garden had been. How, like the priest in the Beatles’ Eleanor Rigby he walks away from the grave and “no one was saved”.
I believed strongly in God when those kids were shot and killed. And I do still, mostly. I don’t wonder how He would let them do something so horrible as that. He has let much, much more horrible things happen on a daily basis for everyone, humans, animals, and insects alike.
I wondered, tonight, staring out at that black, black rain, about another man’s garden, in a country like Iraq. A garden that has seen dictators come and go, withstood wars, jihads, and so much human misery.
Those closest to God, even the Buddhists who don’t necessarily even believe in Him, would tell me to continue to garden, regardless.
Mother Theresa continued to heal the sick though Calcutta would always churn out an infinite number more than she could ever heal, or help through the night as they passed out of her arms and into their Lord’s.
And those people would tell you that Smith & Hawken, Gardener’s Eden, Sunset, and your Sunday supplement are full of shit. There is Gardening, and then there is all the crap thrown on top of it. There is a deep reason for putting your hands in that soil and it may not always be clear. Many of those incredibly, wonderfully, unfathomably smart people would tell you they were not always clear, either, but you should do it.
Because it is in your bones.
Do it if you’re tired. Or nervous. Or feel like taking a rifle to every gangbanger, politician, and black SUV driver in sight.
There is a connection between your hands and the earth that started before you were born. Probably before any of us were born.
And it is as rich as any loam you could find in the finest garden on the earth.
Thursday, October 20, 2005
Box Stores and Gardeners and Whiskers on Kittens
October 20, 2005
It’s 8:30 at night, 68 degrees outside, the children are (finally) asleep, Wendy is being taken out for her birthday by our friend Denise, and, I finally get a chance to sit down and write.
This morning, the light came streaming in where the eucalyptus once stood. All that remain of the giant are tiny woodchips and (ironically) a little replanted jade plant the tree guys had to relocate when they disassembled the fence to get the stump grinder in.
I’m not going to be romantic about this tree. You can write poems about them, you can drain them of sap to make syrup, use their fronds for houses, curse them when you hit your head on them, and you can cut them down when they become a nuisance. I’m not crazy about killing living things, but there are several factors about this tree you have to consider. One, in a good wind limbs drop on my roof. In fact, all the crap it drops on a regular basis are giving my saltillo tile roof a half life (I’m guessing $20K to replace). These things explode when they catch fire. Okay, maybe that’s a myth, but still… Two, it really doesn’t belong here in the first place. All the eucalyptus trees you see in California are related to ones brought over by one guy from Australia in the 30’s and 40’s as windbreaks, landscaping, etc. Yes, they are drought tolerant, but they don’t feed any wildlife that I know of and they stink to high hell. Which brings us to point three: they stink to high hell. Wendy wanted to get rid of it when we moved in and has always regretted not doing it before we did.
For the job of removal we ended up going with Paul instead of Javier, our normal gardener. Besides the money thing (which was about a $2K difference) I was unsure if Javier could pull the dang thing off without killing him and us in the process. What I haven’t done, unfortunately, is tell him someone else ripped out the tree. I have four days to do that before he comes over here and discovers it for himself.
Worse yet, I’m going to have to tell him we’re going to attempt to take care of the yard ourselves starting next month. “Just in time for Christmas”, Wendy commented when I told her.
I told her that wasn’t making the decision any less difficult. Javier has been working in this garden for at least 15 years. I’ve heard about his kids going to school and then college, and for a guy who came from Zacatecas, Mexico 30 some years ago, he’s done all right. It’s nice knowing, too, in some way we helped him by being his clients. It’s the opposite feeling you get when you go to visit the near Dead people at Costco or Wal-Mart to purchase some cheap shoes made for a nickel in China.
Okay, I’ve got a thing about box stores. And though I was probably halfway there anyway, working with my hands in the garden and seeing the fruits of my own labors (so to speak) has certainly pushed me the rest of the distance to hating gross consumerism.
The Javier decision is an economic one. We can either try to keep the filth in the house under control by bringing in a maid once or twice a month or we could have Javier. We can’t have both. We’re damn lucky to have even one. But my Saturdays are spent vacuuming and cleaning bathrooms while Wendy is at work, so you can probably venture a guess I’d much rather be out in the yard on those days.
What worries me, of course, is what if I make the discovery I can’t keep up with the damn thing.
He and his helper can fill one of those 90-gallon green trashcans every week with stuff from our yard. I have to figure out if I can do that without losing my mind and killing my family. Honestly, there’s a lot to love about this yard: we’re organic, we’re certified by the National Wildlife Federation as a Backyard Wildlife Habitat (or front in our case), and whenever I’m out working I always here people say, “I love your yard”.
But then again, there’s a hell of a lot to hate: we’re inundated with Bermuda grass that Paul, the guy who lived here before, failed to kill before planting drought tolerant plants, it always looks like a mess to me, and I honestly get the feeling on some days I’m Sisyphus trying to roll that boulder up the hill before the damn thing comes down again and tries to run me over.
Maybe I should get my Master’s in Mythology of Gardening.
Hell, it’s California, someone’s probably already offering it.
Probably Berkeley.
Saturday, October 08, 2005
Stinky Australians
October 5, 2005
The Santa Ana winds are up. People in many parts of the country are putting on their warm jackets and collecting leaves to burn. In Los Angeles today it was 94 degrees and the leaves and the trees and the grass and several houses were burning regardless of anyone trying to collect them.
I think about the Santa Anas every year when they come up. Like the French Mistral winds, they are full of mystery. I can imagine people in the 1800s blaming all sorts of things on these winds. Anything from ripping down a neighbor’s fence to murder. Notably, I’ve never seen anyone go crazy from these particular winds. And even in a litiginious state like this has its limits for alibis. (Up to now, anyway.)
I’m going back to the back yard.
I started here years ago. And now I’m back. If I stay another 11 years, I imagine I’ll be back again a few times. Maybe I’ll leave a note for myself so I don’t forget what I’ve done.
We’ve decided to finally call it a day on the grass. Yes, men of suburban USA, I have given up on this goddamn grass and I am putting in something else. Something that uses less water maybe. Something that doesn’t die in patches when you put a pool on it for 4 hours one summer day. Something that isn’t a colossal waste of pesticide, herbicide, fertilizer, and insecticide. Maybe bark. Wendy and I did take an honest look at the area (it didn’t take long, it’s only 500 sq. feet. There was still time for drinks and snacks.) and after thinking of what we use it for – parties, setting up the kids’ pool, something to waste water on – we both decided that grass was a waste. Unfortunately, I, like every other man in this country it seems, have been indoctrinated with pictures of kids lying on the cool, downy soft grass and watching clouds pass by. “Damn it, why can’t I give my kids at least that!”, I’d say in my head as I watered the browning St. Augustine, Bermuda, or what have you. I will try to remind myself that I am a former cult member and these thoughts, along with looking at pictures of naked women and taking bong hits while driving, were never really such a hot idea in the first place. And were a lot less hot after getting married.
It was only a matter of time, of course, for Wendy to look up at the towering 80 foot Eucalyptus that some ignoramus planted three feet from my house (and thus leaning precariously over my roof) and say, “We’ve really got to get rid of that thing.” She’s right, I know. Those things explode when they catch fire. They stink. They peel incessantly. Their branches fall on everything including my roof and my neighbor’s cactus garden. And my roofer told me I could take 5 years off the life of my roof if I don’t do anything about it. “But it’s been there for, what, 20 years?” I still counter, hoping that it doesn’t sound as dumb to her as it does to me.
But of course it does. So the first call I make is to our gardener, Javier. He shows up as I’m trying to eat lunch on a Sunday. He’s dressed in church clothes or realtor clothes (I can never tell) and assesses the situation. He pats the tree and says, “Mr. Tim. I’ve talked to a couple guys who have the equipment. And I’m thinking to cut down this tree and that one (he points to the other godforsaken eucalyptus which is also three feet away from my house, but has chosen to try to knock over my fence instead of smashing through my roof)… is, um…” And he pauses. I’m not a fan of his pauses. Because even though he does things very inexpensively when he pauses it means it sounds like a lot of money, even to him. “It’s a big tree, Mr. Tim.” Okay, that’s worse than a pause. That is a big red light warning me to run away. But I just stand there and take it like a man. A man who has chosen to put in bark instead of a lawn and will discuss this very expensive subject so his wife can sleep during the night when the winds blow. “Five, maybe six thousand.”
Man am I hoping he’s talking pesos. Even if it’s the new pesos, it’s still going to be cheaper than dollars.
But he is talking dollars. I go over the whole dance: what if we just take one down, trim two, trim one, and, lastly, take fifteen bucks and go in and tell my wife it’s impossible without knocking down the house first.
I do call another tree guy, Paul Shiver, who cut down the (Jesus, who are the people who planted this bunch of loser trees around this property? Can I find them? Can I sue them?) 80-foot cottonwood tree which ripped up our entire front sidewalk and was, get this, something like 8 years old. Yes, that’s 10 feet a year. If you are looking for a tree to rip up everything in its path to give you shade, here’s your best bet. Did I fail to mention that they are riparian, nee river, trees? That means they put their roots out nice and low looking for water everywhere, thus the ripping up asphalt and concrete problem. It also means that these 80-foot wonders don’t hold onto a heck of a lot of soil and can end up in your house with Piglet, Pooh, and Owl on a particularly blustery day.
Paul, who ripped out the cottonwood 5 years ago remembers our house when I call him. Not the house, the tree. “That was a big tree,” he says. For some reason I thought these guys were always ripping out big trees. Wow, he’s going to love his next challenge. But I called him, because even though I asked Javier if he’s bonded, I’m not really sure he is. And I’d hate to discover that moments after one of his guys accidentally bungee jumps through our front window.
Which leaves me hear, 9pm, 70 degrees, and waiting for Paul Shiver’s bid so I can actually bite my tongue off in conversation.
I could look at my bank account again. But that’s not really going to do me much good. I know this money’s coming out of the home equity loan. You remember that loan, don’t you? The one your financial guy tells you not to touch and yet the home equity people keep dreaming up new ideas how to use it: new bathroom, new car, new pool… or, in my case, new hole in your back yard where that stupid ass eucalyptus used to be.
The Santa Ana winds are up. People in many parts of the country are putting on their warm jackets and collecting leaves to burn. In Los Angeles today it was 94 degrees and the leaves and the trees and the grass and several houses were burning regardless of anyone trying to collect them.
I think about the Santa Anas every year when they come up. Like the French Mistral winds, they are full of mystery. I can imagine people in the 1800s blaming all sorts of things on these winds. Anything from ripping down a neighbor’s fence to murder. Notably, I’ve never seen anyone go crazy from these particular winds. And even in a litiginious state like this has its limits for alibis. (Up to now, anyway.)
I’m going back to the back yard.
I started here years ago. And now I’m back. If I stay another 11 years, I imagine I’ll be back again a few times. Maybe I’ll leave a note for myself so I don’t forget what I’ve done.
We’ve decided to finally call it a day on the grass. Yes, men of suburban USA, I have given up on this goddamn grass and I am putting in something else. Something that uses less water maybe. Something that doesn’t die in patches when you put a pool on it for 4 hours one summer day. Something that isn’t a colossal waste of pesticide, herbicide, fertilizer, and insecticide. Maybe bark. Wendy and I did take an honest look at the area (it didn’t take long, it’s only 500 sq. feet. There was still time for drinks and snacks.) and after thinking of what we use it for – parties, setting up the kids’ pool, something to waste water on – we both decided that grass was a waste. Unfortunately, I, like every other man in this country it seems, have been indoctrinated with pictures of kids lying on the cool, downy soft grass and watching clouds pass by. “Damn it, why can’t I give my kids at least that!”, I’d say in my head as I watered the browning St. Augustine, Bermuda, or what have you. I will try to remind myself that I am a former cult member and these thoughts, along with looking at pictures of naked women and taking bong hits while driving, were never really such a hot idea in the first place. And were a lot less hot after getting married.
It was only a matter of time, of course, for Wendy to look up at the towering 80 foot Eucalyptus that some ignoramus planted three feet from my house (and thus leaning precariously over my roof) and say, “We’ve really got to get rid of that thing.” She’s right, I know. Those things explode when they catch fire. They stink. They peel incessantly. Their branches fall on everything including my roof and my neighbor’s cactus garden. And my roofer told me I could take 5 years off the life of my roof if I don’t do anything about it. “But it’s been there for, what, 20 years?” I still counter, hoping that it doesn’t sound as dumb to her as it does to me.
But of course it does. So the first call I make is to our gardener, Javier. He shows up as I’m trying to eat lunch on a Sunday. He’s dressed in church clothes or realtor clothes (I can never tell) and assesses the situation. He pats the tree and says, “Mr. Tim. I’ve talked to a couple guys who have the equipment. And I’m thinking to cut down this tree and that one (he points to the other godforsaken eucalyptus which is also three feet away from my house, but has chosen to try to knock over my fence instead of smashing through my roof)… is, um…” And he pauses. I’m not a fan of his pauses. Because even though he does things very inexpensively when he pauses it means it sounds like a lot of money, even to him. “It’s a big tree, Mr. Tim.” Okay, that’s worse than a pause. That is a big red light warning me to run away. But I just stand there and take it like a man. A man who has chosen to put in bark instead of a lawn and will discuss this very expensive subject so his wife can sleep during the night when the winds blow. “Five, maybe six thousand.”
Man am I hoping he’s talking pesos. Even if it’s the new pesos, it’s still going to be cheaper than dollars.
But he is talking dollars. I go over the whole dance: what if we just take one down, trim two, trim one, and, lastly, take fifteen bucks and go in and tell my wife it’s impossible without knocking down the house first.
I do call another tree guy, Paul Shiver, who cut down the (Jesus, who are the people who planted this bunch of loser trees around this property? Can I find them? Can I sue them?) 80-foot cottonwood tree which ripped up our entire front sidewalk and was, get this, something like 8 years old. Yes, that’s 10 feet a year. If you are looking for a tree to rip up everything in its path to give you shade, here’s your best bet. Did I fail to mention that they are riparian, nee river, trees? That means they put their roots out nice and low looking for water everywhere, thus the ripping up asphalt and concrete problem. It also means that these 80-foot wonders don’t hold onto a heck of a lot of soil and can end up in your house with Piglet, Pooh, and Owl on a particularly blustery day.
Paul, who ripped out the cottonwood 5 years ago remembers our house when I call him. Not the house, the tree. “That was a big tree,” he says. For some reason I thought these guys were always ripping out big trees. Wow, he’s going to love his next challenge. But I called him, because even though I asked Javier if he’s bonded, I’m not really sure he is. And I’d hate to discover that moments after one of his guys accidentally bungee jumps through our front window.
Which leaves me hear, 9pm, 70 degrees, and waiting for Paul Shiver’s bid so I can actually bite my tongue off in conversation.
I could look at my bank account again. But that’s not really going to do me much good. I know this money’s coming out of the home equity loan. You remember that loan, don’t you? The one your financial guy tells you not to touch and yet the home equity people keep dreaming up new ideas how to use it: new bathroom, new car, new pool… or, in my case, new hole in your back yard where that stupid ass eucalyptus used to be.
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