The Other Thing

I have just been reading a chapter of Middlemarch titled 'Waiting for Death,' and damned if this didn't spur me into literary action.  Actually, this represents the first and only accomplishment of the day.  Oh, I managed to drive to a neighboring suburb for breakfast with a friend.  I've dealt with e-mails and last-minute arrangements for our trip.  But bigger, more serious endeavors have eluded me all day.  I'm not sure if it was the title of Elliot's chapter or just the spirit of reading, of getting into a scene in which the young and devil-may-care Fred sets out with hardened equestrian cohorts to sell his horse.  I only read a few pages before it seemed possible to write myself.  

Time is short.  Marlou and I are getting bodywork this afternoon.  Hard going, this life.  The masseur has come to our home, is working Marlou over now even as we speak.  The CD 'Desert Serenade' is quacking through my PC's speakers, making me seriously doubt my ability to label the library's sound discs correctly, mallards traditionally being in short supply in the Mojave.  Never mind.

My mind is rolling, that's the point.  Waiting for death.  Whose?  At this point, it's really not just Marlou's that concerns me.  In my early 60s, my disability seemingly aging faster than its owner, futility is in abundance.  That's why any source of motive power, of whatever spark it takes to get me interested in the next thing, is a sort of marvel.  These days, I regularly complain of not getting anything done.  I have community projects, in my mind virtual obligations, that interest me without spurring me.  The days are filled with inertia.

I take comfort in the garden.  At least, that is my conventional wisdom.  What I really take is energy.  It's June, almost, and something fierce is rocketing up the green stems.  It's decomposing things.  It's germinating them.  It's nibbling their leaves and attacking their roots, brutal and competitive and, at the end of the botanical day, destined for our table.  The tomatoes have stalled.  It's high time for them to be pregnant.  But blooms appear, disappear, burst open again, fade and drop, without a single tomato evident on a single plant.  It must be the bee shortage.  This idea appeals to me with its environmental end-of-days fabulist quality.  But wisely I didn't go there, as we say in California.  

Instead, I went to the Web, font of all knowledge, where I learned that I'm not alone.  Others have trod this tomatoless path and acquired wisdom.  Tomatoes, it seems, have bisexual flowers.  They don't really need bees for pollination.  The plant's own pollen simply falls from stamen to pistil within the same flower.  Bumblebees are a help, because in their, well, bumbling way, they knock a certain amount of pollen free.  According to the Web, a healthy wind will accomplish the same thing.  With my tomatoes planted in a deliberately sheltered spot, I may have undone my own pollination.  Naturally, there's a web-recommended remedy.  My tomato blossoms just need some good vibrations.  The best source: a sonic toothbrush.  Yes, that's what frustrated tomato growers are doing in backyards from Maine to Alaska.  And having recently purchased coyote urine, wandering outside to toothbrush my blossoms will not make me seem any more eccentric than I already am.

Maybe the real miracle is that I am finally able to distinguish between the one-step-after-the-other willfulness that has gotten me through much of life...and the other thing.  The latter, being engagement, arising out of God knows what.  At that time in the afternoon or late morning or in the middle of the night when things need to be said, stories need to be told, and it's happening.

How was it happening for Mary Ann Evans, a.k.a., George Eliot, day after day with quill and ink, spanning 800 pages?  County life, intricate, timeless in its motives and assumptions, yet gradually changing, while the author changed with it, spilling out the yarn, over the space of a couple of years near the end of her life.  No computer.  No spellcheck.  Just time every day.  And I wonder what time, more particularly whether it was the same time, that she wrote.  Which is one thing that I'm learning, late in my life.  That by writing each day, one can open up to what's there.  And the opening up process may not be a pleasant one.  Aimless hours, numb staring at tomato blossoms, empty musings on the carpet.  What the hell.