Pop.

The Growing Season

It begins with touch. His hands press down firming the soil, compacting it just enough, giving through touch the promise of life to come. Throughout the long winter the man has planned his garden with care, considering the needs of each plant as it develops from seed to seedling. The gardener knows that each will respond in unique ways to light and heat, water and fertilizer, and each will be challenged by pests large and small seeking to claim the crop as their own. We are vulnerable the plants say, take care of us and let us grow. And in return we will sustain you when the daylight fades and the long night begins.

Dear Pop • Forty years is a long time to wait to hear from your youngest but I will argue in matters of the heart the statute of limitations need not apply.  I started to write to you to let you know how things turned out; the places we went, the things we did, the wonders we saw.  How we succeeded and how we failed.  I thought I would give you a kind of diary, and maybe I will do that a bit later.

But for now I want to talk to you about the growing season. And let me set your mind at ease right from the start; I ended up actually liking vegetables despite all those hot summers slaving away in the garden.

Potatoes are like icebergs; the real part is below the surface. If the leafy plant is too lush, too green, or too large, the tubers below will suffer; punished for the sin of vanity. Before the last frost of spring the man and his sons would plant the cut seed potato with the ‘eyes’ down, appropriate for a vegetable whose future lay below. The man would plant them deep because if the tubers came into contact with sunlight they might develop solanine, a bitter, toxic alkaloid that imparts a greenish tinge. It occurs to me now that this could be the botanical source of the vampire legends. The little still forming bumps on the underground stems are called stolons, a great word for Scrabble and crossword puzzles. The tops of the potato plant die just after first frost, and, using a pitchfork we turn the earth to expose the prize, now fat and white and dense, like a piece of living granite.

Dear Pop • On hot summer days your three boys would go down to the spring, a natural up-welling with water as cold as a mountain pass in February. We would bend down and drink from this pool like the two-legged animals we were. Through the water we would see frogs swimming on the bottom but thought nothing of it, as if sharing this natural thing was not just normal, but a requirement of simpler times. I guess we were lucky not to grow a third eye in our forehead or come down with some sort of horrendous intestinal parasite. These days our water comes neatly wrapped in clear plastic bottles but it seems oddly tasteless, endlessly filtered through many layers of commerce. Perhaps we need the frogs to make it real.

The humble yam occupies a spot in the food kingdom much higher than its poor name implies. The man would prepare elaborate mounds into which the nascent yams would go, taking great care in mixing in the right amount and type of fertilizer. Yet the yam yield always seemed less than bountiful. Next year, the man would say, next year.

Dear Pop • Our dog Suzy (who we nicknamed “Tooler” for some reason) would deliver a batch of puppies on demand twice a year or so and we kids would be tasked to sell them by the side of the road. We built makeshift pens of chicken wire, stood up our “Puppies for Sale” sign and waited for the cars to stop. And waited and waited; traffic patterns around the back roads of Laurel, Maryland were unaware of the metropolis to come. Not only would you not recognize the old Laurel place today Pop, I doubt you could even find it amongst the endless malls of the Baltimore-Washington Metroplex. Anyway, I remember once that a guy got out and asked how much for the gray one? They are all $5 mister. He then proceeded to pick the puppy up by the ears, saying that if the dog doesn’t cry out it will be a fine dog. It didn’t make a sound and thus was traded for five dollars, proving that a good set of ears may not take you a long way but at least you’ll be the first to go.

Snap beans were fated to be canned and subsequently eaten all winter long. The man plants both the type that grow on low bushes and the kind that climb on poles, much preferred by those assigned as harvester droids. String beans have this tough, well, string that runs down the length of the bean and should be stripped off before snapping the beans into three equal parts. I can remember entering a kind of bean snapping Zen state as I transformed a basket of newly picked beans into a bucket of snapped, ready to cook beans. Glancing around I would sometimes eat the raw bean, feeling wicked and primal.

Dear Pop • In Maryland I remember the winter months most clearly. After any snow we would be found on the hill out back of the house, a hill which ended at the pond. These landmarks required the power of capital letters: The Hill, The Pond. Oh how we rode our sleds down The Hill, Pop! Remember? We’d hit those jumps one, two, three and if there was still someone on-board at the bottom, The Pond, hopefully frozen, awaited them and across they would go. But the real adventure was always reserved for the toboggan, a creaky, impossible-to-control screaming ride of death which could carry four stalwart souls down The Hill and over the jumps. On the way we would always lose at least one passenger, a snow covered laughing lump not at all displeased over being so rudely ejected. I seem to recall that the fourth rider was sometimes you, Pop, which ranks as one of the coolest things ever. It is your laughter I hear over the decades now, a memory not stilled with time.

One of the man’s favorites was squash; summer squash, acorn squash, zucchini — and for some reason eggplant although I never could figure out why. Eggplant to this day remains on my “do not consume” list. I never bought into the concept of acorn squash, but learned to like and even request summer squash. Although squash appears hardy in fact it remains quite fragile and susceptible to many insect pests. Kind of like us.

Dear Pop • I close my eyes and I am “Weed”. Your older sons bestow this name upon me because I am “always popping up where I don’t belong”. It becomes a part of my persona to the extent that I have a license plate made for my Schwinn bike (“WEEDER”, it proclaims). This nickname is an obvious source of embarrassment for me, but strangely it also affords a kind of perverse recognition, much preferred over the stealthy silence of anonymity.

Your three boys are playing American football on a field of grass awash with the light of a phosphorescent blue sky. The youngest is hesitant to join in. He hopes to be seen as an unlikely equal in his brothers’ eyes, yet he feels he cannot compete with them; they are too tall and swift. But they insist he play because he is their brother and this is a matter of blood and kin. In a flash of insight and compassion, they conspire to allow him to run untouched to score. As he raises his arms in triumphant, he realizes he is free of the inconstant gift of the Weeder; what his brothers have given, they have magically taken away and left in its place, family.

The North American cantaloupe holds the promise of a wonderful surprise, covered as it is by a reticulated skin covering. In Australia and New Zealand it is usually called rockmelon due to this skin. So cool Down Under. Why couldn’t we think of a name like that? Yet, cantaloupe is preferred over the laughable “musk melon”.

Dear Pop • Behind our house there were seven large oak trees, stately and majestic, to all appearances as old as the earth itself. This spare wood resonated with an ancient wisdom in a language that I, at six, once knew. Hurricane Hazel made landfall on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. Eventually the eye would pass directly over Washington DC, my trees, and I. You did not know this but as the storm approached I snuck outside to watch, fear overcome by curiosity. The winds grew and grew until the giant oaks themselves were bent and twisted like blades of grass. For the first time I realized that big and small depended on how you saw a thing, and on what was standing near. The trees, the storm, the boy – all locked in the timeless beauty of scale. The storm passed; the trees and I survived only slightly worse for wear. And though I’ve been away many years, I believe the oaks remain, as big as the memory that binds them — and as small.

No garden would be complete without the watermelon, the funny old uncle of the food kingdom. The man watches as his youngest son sits on the ground under a spreading Elm tree, tap, tap, tapping the outside of several large oblong watermelons. He is listening for the properly pitched hollow sound which indicates perfect ripeness. He chooses and begins to cut open his victim. Watermelons are full of black seeds (no seedless in those days) but it is no problem at all as the boy devises a spontaneous game of long-distance seed spitting. Next spring small watermelon vines will sprout on the site of this carnage, the boy an impromptu participant in the food chain.

Dear Pop • You and Mom had three kids before I came along, and as destructive as the War was I know it paled in comparison to losing your only daughter to that terrible accident. Someone was supposed to have said back then that it was good that I happened when I did; I could help fill the void left by Margaret’s passing. In retrospect this is surely a responsibility too heavy; too high; too steep; a mountain peak clouded in infinite sorrow. We who remain should never be asked to climb such a thing; cannot be asked to climb such a thing.

The war came as wars always do to take you from each other, a war that you would never speak of. I think that you were made hollow by what you saw and did, emptied in some terrible way. Then the death of your daughter took the rest – but you moved forward regardless.

The personal war of attrition fought by you and Mom resulted in many notable moments spanning the years of our youth. These were not glorious, history-producing battles of bravery and sacrifice; just grim, failed signposts announcing to our peers that we were somehow different; that we had failed. You would think that exposure to the sun would weaken the power of the demons of a desperate family. But visibility can breed contempt and a bitter truth. No words, no memory, no dreams will lessen the sadness, helplessness and betrayal I feel when I remember the bad times. Both of you entered that place of pain where you used us, your own children, as weapons against one another. You made us choose sides. I will never know the lowest point you felt you reached — when you hit the rocky depths — but that was the worst of times me. Today this is our burden to carry and this mountain we have no choice but to climb.

Yet, I know that you and Mom loved each other along the way. I believe that you must have walked a quiet path hand in hand and looked at one another with eyes filled with promise, potential and passion. The future must have seemed unlimited to you then; a thing of gleaming hope. It saddens me now that I missed the early years of your relationship and that I can only remember the bad times, the tearing down, the anger, pain and suffering that your lives, and ours, became. But I still believe those first happy times had to have existed and were as real — in truth I hope more real — than the other parts I was there to witness, before life came to take it all away.

At the top of the food chain was sweet corn. If the corn crop was good the entire season was deemed a success; a failed or substandard corn yield could never be balanced by a stellar showing of lesser vegetables; a result disallowed by the arcane mathematics of harvest. At the end of the season, when the skies turned gray with scuttled clouds and tassels tinted dark brown, we would shuck the ears and sample the crop. The man would say that there is nothing better than fresh sweet corn and, sweeping though that statement may be, such new corn surely ranks high on our list of Good Things. His preparation of the corn rows was meticulous, pushing several seeds into the soil; taking care not to space them too closely or too far apart. That each seed could create such abundance was a mystery to me then, and though I have come to understand the mechanics, the miracle remains. Mystery just tastes better. Sometimes the man would show us kids how to plant the seeds, sharing with us his love of gardening. And it was in those times that three brothers in an otherwise dysfunctional household witnessed a larger miracle.

Dear Pop • I am the last one left at home, living in the strange place you and Mom made together. Mom’s behavior, always odd when it comes to you, becomes increasingly bizarre and frightening. A college sophomore; I am poised to enter life yet I am afflicted with that malaise which strikes people of a certain young age. Uncertainty is my closest friend; always ready to impart his tentative and formless advice.

Even your stubborn stoicism could not hide the fact that something was wrong. Yet when you collapsed in the bathroom and again in the driveway as Mom and I tried to get you to the hospital I still couldn’t completely understand. Leukemia they said–very advanced. Your personal physician shows up at the hospital in tears, having completely missed the diagnosis. My brothers come back home to help and we play cards into the wee hours, waiting. Two days later you are seemingly stable and we go visit you. I watch as Mom approaches your bedside. I am terrified because I have no idea what she may do. But she reaches out and gently takes your hand and looks directly at you. I cannot look away as a single tear slides down your cheek. In that single frozen moment I see the trace of two lifetimes; of what happened to you both. And what did not. On your death bed I witnessed, for the first and last time, an act of tenderness between you two. To this day I do not know whether to laugh or to cry.

Cry, I think.

What have I learned over the years? What did you teach me? You passed your introverted ways to me and that has been a mixed blessing. I am pretty good one-on-one and speaking to large audiences, but I fail totally at parties and small talk. I am better at looking inside my skin than out at the world even when the view inside ain’t pretty. I have learned that life’s mysteries still astound; gates are slow to open and quick to close whether we pass through them or not; the smallest things can be the most important. Observe. Don’t drink. Don’t smoke. Love. Learn. Be patient. Pay attention. Tame the demons and celebrate the child; not the other way round. Learn to cherish those who came before; and those who will follow.

And above all; remember your father’s garden.

The man pauses in his labors and looks to the sky where the clouds are becoming heavy and dark.  He is thinking about his other crop, his family and his three boys. He knows he has not prepared so well for this longer and far more important growing season, a season that will span generations. He wonders what legacy he will leave to his boys and if his failures in marriage will hold them back as an anchor to a ship, sails billowing, straining to leave the harbor. He looks at the furrows so meticulously parallel holding the promise of the seeds within. He has done what he has done in the only way he knew. He stoops down to the soil hands pressed down, getting back to the thing he loves, the thing he knows. Some mysteries must be lived. 

Deep in the dark earth the seeds await.  Out in the air, it begins to rain.