Iowans

They are baffling, Marlou's nephews, not because they are her nephews, but simply because they are of another generation and experience and are now working in our garden while I supervise and instruct from a wheelchair.  Neither has a clue about gardening.  They hail from Iowa, the agricultural heartland, but their hearts aren't in the land.  They've seen the farms from the freeway, both assure me.  And that's about it.  They know as much about the cultivated prairie as my Arizona niece knows about the lower Sonoran Desert, which she occasionally glimpses on her way to the mall.

Our goal at this very moment is to pick tomatoes.  It's a sad task, accomplished at the end of the season when all hope of ripening fruit is past.  I have learned, almost by accident, that throwing several handfuls of blood meal atop late-season tomato roots does for horticulture what methamphetamine probably does for patio resurfacing.  Things speed up and get interesting.  The vines are bursting with tomatoes, but they are green and will remain so.  The garden has fallen into shade.  The nights have fallen into autumn.  We going to have lots of fried green tomatoes or green tomato salsa or green tomato pie or one big Green party.

They're quite different from each other, these young men.  The older one has a contemplative, studious air.  He has a hard time finding tomatoes on the vines.  From the vantage of my wheelchair, I gaze up through the leaves and spot at least 20 on one plant alone.  I want to tell Elliot that tomatoes are the green, globular objects hanging off the swollen green stems at his eye level.  But his brother intervenes.  Nathan is currently the object of much family scrutiny and concern, under suspicion for attention deficit disorder.  But quite naturally, out of the corner of one of his ever wandering eyes, he spots the tomatoes and begins yanking them off the vine.  Soon, we have something approaching a bushel of never-to-ripen fruit and a swath of composting-in-place vegetation.  Amazing what a couple of young guys can accomplish.

I wonder what I will have accomplished with them by the time they leave us for Des Moines.  We seem to be covering a lot of interpersonal ground.  Both young men want to know all they can about their long deceased father.  They barely remember him, of course, but they feel his absence.  With all of us together, Marlou's cancer, the same disease that struck down Nathan and Elliot's dad, seems like what it is, the present challenge.  Is this too much sorrow for one family?  That verdict comes and goes, and we never know what it is. 

For now, the three Imes family members are seated on our sofa, me in my wheelchair.  Elliot asks his aunt, almost in as many words, about the seriousness of her cancer.  They are surprisingly direct and open.  Marlou talks about her situation and her future, and we feel the sadness together, until we feel the lateness together and go to bed.

If their ignorance of tomatoes is bewildering, their acceptance of 'L'elisir d'amore' is gratifying.  Opera, I have assured them both in the days preceding the performance, is an acquired taste.  But such observations prove unnecessary.  The nephews are into the Sunday matinee, enjoying the proceedings on stage at the Opera House as much as Marlou and I.  It's an international world, I say at intermission, explaining the casting of the Mexican tenor Ramón Vargas opposite a Russian soprano.  She's Albanian, Nathan corrects me.  These young men haven't had a lot of exposure to Donizetti in West Des Moines, but it doesn't matter.  They are Imeses, after all, have the arts receptor gene, and we are in sync.  I'm grateful to Marlou for anticipating all this.

It's Tuesday when we hand them over to United Airlines and resume our life.  Our life includes weekly chemotherapy and occasional meetings with Marlou's oncologist.  In the late afternoon, the three of us huddle in an examining room.  The oncologist is from India, by way of Berkeley, and she is cute and oddly American.  Marlou's blood chemistry looks good, she says.  No need to rush the next PET scan.  It can wait.  And she's not worried terribly about the effects of chemotherapy, this doctor.  Marlou is doing fine, for the moment.  Marlou is about to fly to Sweden, after all, in search of her great grandmother's roots.  After a few moments of such medical chitchat I feel the normalcy of our lives.  I haven't felt this for quite a while, but you learn to take solace in a good blood count.  I wonder if this is Samuel Beckett's kind of solace.  But I don't wonder too long.