Spinach

I was ready, and had been rehearsing the event for days, wondering how to approach him and desperately trying to remember his assistant's name.  So much seemed to hang in the balance.  Our rapport, however slight, would make all the difference, I was certain.  If he said no, indicated that he was behind schedule and another day would do, wouldn't it -- what would I say?  I could see him outside, rolling equipment off his pickup, getting those ear protectors clamped on his head.  I would have to have an answer ready.  And I would have to talk loud.  He wore those sound-blocking earmuffs for a reason, the gardening experience being late-industrial in places like Menlo Park.

Take a close look at the average leaf blower, observing how the device hikes snugly up the wearer's back.  Once in place, you can't tell me the thing isn't a dead ringer for the jet pack James Bond wore in some film 20 years ago.  Conspiracy theorists have every reason to eye legions of garden maintenance guys with suspicion.  They are equipped, all of them, with high-compression systems that require noise protection gear normally seen in and around jet aircraft.  And their purpose, the blowing about of leaves, pine needles, old condoms and similar organic material, tends to be masked behind a heavy reliance on Spanish.  There's every reason to believe that the air duct, when pointed downward, will send any of these men airborne.  Expect this soon, high over the streets of Menlo Park, 'gardeners' in V formation, blowers roaring, eyes on the horizon, their mission known only to those with the right kind of earmuffs.  You heard it here first.

First, I do have to talk to the guy with the pickup.  He has placed two aluminum rails at the back of his Toyota and is now rolling a lawnmower down.  London cabbies employ the same trick, using collapsible inclines to load and unload wheelchairs.  That's why the gardener with his lawnmower and rails has a disorienting effect at this moment.  That, and the fact that the January sun is beating with the intensity of the milder tropics.  We say hello, he and I.  Then I propose, in the nicest and most engaging way possible, that he help me.  This puts things on a personal level.  I, the cripple, need his, the Japanese gardener's, assistance.  Never mind that the assistant, currently not in sight, will assist.  He'll be along in a few minutes, the gardener says.

A new epoch has begun.  One has cleared the hurdle, and now one is into something else.  It's not unlike passing through Homeland Security at the airport.  The outcome is likely, and the only known variable is time.  Still, when one emerges, having established non-terrorist bona fides, it's another world.  Okay, it's not Alice in Wonderland.  But it's duty-free in San Francisco.  It's different.  There's progress.  Something else is about to happen.

Do I need to make it happen?  This is always an issue for me.  With the after image of the Unreliable Mother a more or less constant presence, I tend to nudge people too much.  Are you really going to do that?  When are you going to do it?  Have you done it yet?  Are you going to do it the way you said you were going to do it?  And so on.  Still, I've got a physical exam this morning, e-mails to answer, critical matters in hand, so I'm back at my desk for several cliffhanging minutes.  Is it happening?  Is he doing it?  Should I ask the assistant myself?  And what, dammit, is the assistant's name?

Desk matters in hand, I roll to the raised beds, the suburban agricultural heartland.  And dammit, if Guillermo or Miguel or whatever his wife calls him, isn't hard at work.  The cover crop, the combination of annual grass and legumes that Marlou's nephews helped me plant in October, is no more.  The gardener's assistant has pitchforked the greenery underground, the roots skyward, and the natural, organic decomposition of vetch and rye is already under way.  There are still clumps of green grass sticking out, but I grab a couple and determine that they have been properly uprooted.  

I don't have to intervene.  The thing has happened.  The growing season has begun.  The gardener's assistant, shy and self-effacing, takes my $30, and I thank him profusely.  I want to tell him that lechuga y tomates will soon sprout from this soil he has tilled, but I will tell him later.  In August, he will get an annual bag of vegetables, but for now its cash and goodbye.  I'm off for my doctor.

Another hurdle, and I leap it without much effort.  Who put this extra five pounds on my waist, I demand of the physician.  Eat less, he says.  Exercise in the mornings.  Buy low.  Sell high.  There's the usual prostate impertinence, but the result is okay, and I'm out of there.  In fact, within hours I am even out of Menlo Park, sitting at that other park, South Park, San Francisco.  My friend Jim and I are enjoying the inexplicable 70° in an outdoor café and talking about a new age of green, energy-efficient yoga studios.  

This is Jim's obsession and his discipline, which I quite understand, having one of my own.  Mine is the thing that propels me, middle-aged memory be damned, from the train station in Menlo Park directly to the Romanian hardware store.  I order a vast amount of black plastic sheeting and two bags of blood meal.  There is garden method in this apparent madness, and yes, I have lined up a workforce.  My brother and his wife appear Saturday morning.  The plan will unfold.  Suffice it to say that the lettuce-and-tomatoes chitchat with the gardener was all window dressing.  Long before the lechuga, there will be the spinach.  If all goes according to plan, the ground will be bursting with young spinach plants before my brother's plane heads back to Seattle.  There will be spinach.  Will Marlou have an appetite?  I don't know.  Someone will make a spinach garland or a wreath.  Either way, it will happen, this winter crop in the non-winter.  There will be spinach.