February 2010 Archives
It is an equivocal time, spring, especially if one is inclined to see the darker aspects of all seasons. Things are sprouting madly. 'Things' include not only garlic and Swiss chard, but snails and aphids. There is a biological race underway in my garden, and the sheer concentration of those on the flora team makes for vulnerability. Plant defenses are much like my own. In the absence of mobility, there is prickliness, thick skin and toxins. Root for the home team. They stand and fight.
However. Given that I am relatively mobile compared to a head of red lettuce, why not seize the advantage and launch various chemical agents against the attackers? Organic chemicals, of course. Harmless to humans, and not quite harmful enough to pests. But worth a biochemical try. I have a European friend who disapproves of snail killing. Illustrating an interesting and essential difference in the experiences of the New and Old Worlds. Explaining that snails are an invasive species, that they wreak ecological havoc on the fragile California native plant population, none of this pulls much weight. The European experience, of lands civilized and domesticated so long ago that wilderness is utterly remote, makes a living creature a living creature. As they say, we are coming from different places.
I am coming from the shoe guy. He is Chinese and replaces the last of the Caucasian generation of cobblers. Which means little in the long run, for there will not be a new generation of Asian shoe guys. Our chats have revealed this, rambling exchanges and stumblings around the second-language barrier, a sense of conversational gaps as large and empty as much of his premises. Someone has been working on shoes in this mercantile location since 1902, according to a sign over the door. Inside sits a dusty and clearly disused Singer sewing machine, a treadle model. A wall of unclaimed shoes. Dangling leather belts. Shoelaces, shoe sole inserts, shoe powder, shoe arch supports, shoe polish, shoehorns and, probably back in a corner, shoo flies. Don't bother me.
He doesn't at all, actually, and in fact I find enormous comfort in the inefficiencies of his operation. He never writes down my phone number, issues no claim check to customers and seems to have a sliding rate scale whose movements upward and downward reflect his own internal barometer. More important, he has agreed to work on my shoes. My old shoes are so old that they are no longer manufactured. Anywhere by anyone. They have certain quadriplegic-friendly characteristics, particularly their size which allows for my plastic leg brace and a tongue sewn into the shoe in such a way that no amount of one-handed leg maneuvering can drive inwards toward the toe. So he happily repairs them without commenting on their internal skeletal failure. The leather is separating, and disintegrating, but the guy has a sewing machine and glue, and something about this process has great appeal for me. I am held together by similar forces. And the soul likes old things. In Menlo Park this is as old as things get.
I am old and my experience of this town is old and getting older. I'm rocketing my wheelchair up Santa Cruz Ave. to get to Amici's Pizza before Alan does. We are going to have a Jewish middle-aged guys lunch. This will begin by a ritual acknowledgment of the pizza and its calories. In this moment, although we are not quite davening, we are atoning for the fat-carbohydrate enormity of what we are doing, showing that we are conscious, nobody's fools and accept the guilty perils ahead. To show we are savvy, there's also a broccoli salad. No calories there, Alan says. Except for the olive oil, I point out. He pokes a fork in the liquid accumulation on the bottom of the salad plate, pointing out that it is a suspension, with the shiny floating globules in the minority. Water is thicker than blood, I want to say but don't.
But all that lies ahead. For the moment, I am high on the main street, the main guy on the high street. My wheelchair is at full bore. Nothing, not even the cracks in the footpath, can stop me. Ahead I see a blond toddler atop her tall young dad. She is a good 7 feet above me, but I wave anyway. Neither respond. He is talking to her. Where is Taylor? Can she see Taylor? I want to tell them both that I can't see naming anyone Taylor. It used to be a surname. But I used to be a toddler myself, and so many things have changed.
I do try to keep up. Friends insisted that 'Avatar' was part of the zeitgeist. One had to see it, for it would be talked about for a long time. Oddly, this may be true. The film does solidly establish 3-D. It is worth seeing for that alone. I have never seen Al Jolson portray 'The Jazz Singer,' but it did up the ante in terms of sensory input and was, in contemporary parlance, a game changer. The game is changing much faster these days, of course, but at least briefly 'Avatar' does break new ground. Most gratifying, it portrays a sort of war between the forces of, for want of better words, sustainability and the rape-and-plunder corporate state. Yes, it is ponderous, heavy-handed and middlebrow, but as these things go, quite endurable. The thing cost half a billion dollars. Plenty of bang for buck, but hardly that much imagination for buck, but you might as well go see it. I now qualify for the senior matinee. They make you give back the 3-D glasses. Check it out.
Midday traffic on Caltrain having dwindled to a nothingness, I see my chance and take it. The disabled seat is empty. Not the space for wheelchairs, but the actual seat that asks occupants to surrender it. Not to a foreign power, and one must note that World War I ended in a railway carriage, but to a cripple. Or as the sign puts it 'persons with disabilities.' I rarely have the chutzpah to demand separate spaces for both my wheelchair and my tush, but the train is empty, so what the hell. A formidable rain is falling, the economy is falling and I am now falling into an empty seat, perching my leg on the opposite wall. That's the thing about this seat. It faces a wall, or a bulkhead in airline parlance. Keeping the right foot elevated is among my life ambitions, and with the rain and the decline of all things, the rails and I head south.
I have been to see my accountant. He has given me a bill. No, it is not a bill, but it feels like a bill, and that is one of my essential and structural flaws of character. Things are only how they feel. Unless I think terribly hard and wrench my consciousness toward reality. No, Bill, my accountant's appropriate name, has not given a bill, but the IRS will, unless I preempt them with a $32,000 check on 15 April. Why, Bill wants to know, did Marlou put the money in the trust? I stare at him dazedly. My eyes glaze over at such times, matters of financial instruments and accounts and taxation first confusing me, then putting me to sleep faster than a fairytale potion. So we dissect this matter. What is the problem, I ask?
The money should have stayed in Ohio, Bill says. In a sense, I agree with him. The 401(k) money would have had a warm summer of corn stands and fireflies, a harvest autumn and a bracing winter. Instead, it took up residence in the Schwab offices down the street from me, here in our region of colorless climate. The question is why. My response is why not? What I really say is that I got a check payable to Marlou's trust and deposited it there. And there it has stayed, sheltered from the rain but not, of course, the tax man.
Bill wants to know what she was thinking. I tell him the truth, that she was lying in a bed, our bed, secondary brain tumors spreading in her brain like mushrooms after a storm. And at least someone, our friend Laurel, I think, remembered this State of California retirement account, run by some company in Cleveland. Which under the circumstances, and the circumstances were dire, seems to have been as much as anyone could manage. I spare no oncological detail in my account of these matters, because I want to get Bill off my back. Which happens quite nicely. Now he wants to know the cost basis of certain transactions in Marlou's retirement savings. I want to know what a cost basis is. He tells me, and I feel reasonably pleased, although the financial lingo seems unnecessary. Not to worry, I will get him his cost basis.
The trackside Peninsula slips by, rain streaking the windows, clouds hanging dark. Bay Meadows was once a racetrack, a vast greenery all in an oval, muddy horse path around it, with covered bleachers and bars and a restaurant or two, and now it is in a fascinating state of post-apocalypse. The place is being demolished for something more commercially viable and, doubtless, less aesthetically pleasing. An enormous pile of timber and beams sits in the former place of the grandstand. Across the way, a temporary lake has formed in a depression. Odd how the train is so empty. But things, including racetracks, change.... Startled awake...I was dozing...a dream fragment lingers with underworld fright. Marlou has died. That was the dream. Nothing more. But stark and savage as a child's primal fear. Marlou has died. As though I didn't know. And perhaps I didn't on some level.
A newfound anger is assailing me with the approach of Marlou's yahrzeit, her death's anniversary. It is hard for me to feel this, yet it is a clarifying experience. It puts things in their proper perspective. The weeks leading to her death so disoriented me that they truly felt like months, the days and nights in a rolling state of crisis. And, yes, on some soul-saving level they angered me. My life already had enough challenges. I had every right to shake a fist at the heavens, scream and kick the shit out of something nonsentient. But at the time I didn't. Now, the anger has a liberating quality. It's like crawling out from a collapsed building. It demonstrates that you have a right to be somewhere other than beneath heaps of rubble.
As for this fragment of a dream, being startled by Marlou's death, what does this mean? That as Jung concluded, the human soul cannot conceive of its own death...and by inference, the death of someone close? This mystery only deepens as it clarifies. There's more to come, but at least things are changing.
What does it mean when it takes an entire day to fumble about with life until one sits down at the keyboard and has a go at another blog? What does it mean when despite the most advanced anti-squirrel netting money can buy, the expensive seedlings recently purchased, for reasons no one can recall, have been nibbled into miniscule stubs? It means things are out of sorts. It means Marlou's photos are still up and staring at me from prominent positions in the sitting room and the office. And I remember this short Jewish guy from my senior year at Berkeley who was dating someone I knew and shared observations on this thing.
This thing. And that thing. It was an era of things. I had a thing for her. She had a thing for someone else. Which was why we were into this thing. What were we going to do about this thing? Something. The short Jewish guy and I were discussing the mirror thing. When one took LSD and stared at one's self in the mirror this thing happened. Whatever it was, the activity was remarkably engrossing. That there was an image of yourself staring back at the image of the person looking at the image, and when you thought about it, which you did, it was a remarkable thing, this thing. One thing after the next. Yeah, the mirror thing, the Jewish guy agreed, yeah, it was quite a trip. In retrospect, the trippiness of the mirror thing seems full of youth, and pleasantly so. People who do not know who they are and, if lucky, want to find out, and so find themselves staring at themselves in mirrors and finding the whole experience remarkable. Which, it is. LSD or not.
Which brings us to the photo thing. The shots of Marlou each reveal something different. She was quite beautiful. She was quite warm. She was courageous. She was, that is the point. And now she is not. And this is the sort of photo thing that billions of people have experienced, the puzzlingly vivid sense of a spirit and then of its absence. Marlou had one portrait posed, taken after her first chemo, a scarf around her head in homage to Vermeer. In her brutally realistic assessment this was, she thought, the last time when she would look beautiful. The disease and its chemical combatants would take their toll, she reasoned, so it was time to get a memorial portrait done.
It is a beautiful portrait. But not my favorite. Qualities of character come out in the other photos, particularly the later ones, the ones closest to her death. She had a lot of soul, and in her last photos, and her last months this is what comes flooding out, the living essence of a person. Struggling, despairing and hoping that the living could go on a bit longer. Perhaps it's the human condition distilled, and framed.
The photo thing. I am one half of the photo thing, and it's hard to say what occurs on my side of the glass. There are changes. Marlou's photos are no longer overwhelmingly painful to regard. I can stand looking at them. I can think about their qualities and even their meaning. She is gone, and someday I will be gone. And something of me will live in the regard of people staring at my photo. Until no one remembers. Because we all collapse into a great biosystemic forgetfulness, absorbed into the roots of trees, blown about the deserts, adrift in the oceans. Until we find bits of ourselves staring at fellow pine needles, dusting a dashboard in the Grand Canyon visitor center or staring at a Japanese gill net. Go figure.
Meanwhile, my patience remains low, but my concentration is gathering force. I recently read a book. Not unprecedented, but difficult in the last year or so. Mentally sticking to things has not been easy. As for the impatience, its source is often elusive. But it is generally a signal that something unpleasant is going on inside me. Something painful, which this does not stop me from self-flagellation. I may be impatient with others, but I am positively full of denunciations for myself. Things go wrong, don't they? And when they do, it's my fault, isn't it? I've tried to probe the psychological roots of this. As a child, perhaps I needed fantasies of control. I wasn't good enough, but I would make myself better. Who knows? All I really know is that Lorna, the neighbor woman who rolls in in the mornings to help me get dressed, has been holidaying at her mountain cabin. Leaving me to dress myself. Using whatever shortcuts I can. One of which relies upon talcum powder, and more on this later. Here's what every solitary quadriplegic should know.
Keep your socks on. I am not speaking metaphorically, but offering genuine sartorial advice. Don't take your socks off at night. Leave them on, because putting them on one-handedly the next morning may drive you over the brink. Just the thought of crossing one leg over the other, stretching the opening of a sock between thumb and fourth finger, and trying to loop the entire thing around your toes...it is utterly galling. So leave your socks on. Just overnight. Overnight is not forever. Well, it is sometimes, but for the time being let us put that aside. For now, we are buying time. One can shower later in the day when help is about. A friend, neighbor, someone. A sock-putter-oner, whoever that person may be. And, yes, in dire moments, just leave the socks on for the entire day. Which adds up to 24 hours and never did a sock or a foot any harm.
Underwear. On bad days, it's just another encumbrance. Especially if you aren't doing anything too physical or too public, just dispense with it. At least this was my decision one day last week. After all, it occurred to me, there was talcum powder. I had awakened with my socks on, slipped into trousers, slipped into shoes without orthotics and jammed my feet on the wheelchair footrests, thoroughly prepared to roll into downtown Menlo Park for a double latte. Final task, pour talcum powder into my open fly, thereby satisfying many of the functions of underwear with one shake of a handy container.
Before you scoff, consider that this quadriplegic has achieved at least the outer semblance of attire in approximately 1/3 the normal time. Done and ready for caffeination. The latter being the mourning person's drug of choice. Thus, the little shake of talcum powder, and in two shakes, out the door. Of course, it is morning in the a.m. sense of the word, a pensive and distracted time for me. Which explains why in tipping the talcum powder, which happened to be Walgreens jumbo size...on sale in a two-for-one special...yours truly did not aim with the precision required of the moment. Instead of through the fly and down around of the male equipment, the powder went spilling down the zipper and across the lap.
Which occasioned at least five minutes of personal self denunciation. I was stupid, a fool, a failure, an idiot. And once I had that out of my system, there seemed a fairly simple remedy. Roll outside and give the trousers a quick brushing. Which would have been fine, but at precisely that moment my neighbor Buffie emerged on her way to the carport. I tried to roll my wheelchair back inside, but I had already maneuvered myself close to the chrysanthemums, intending to give them a white dusting. Oh, hi, she said. Hi, I said, I spilled something. She nodded. Buffie has a seven-year-old, after all, and has seen worse things, many worse things. She nodded, genuinely unimpressed by the white powder I was brushing off, and told me about her latest adventures in the world of finance. In fact, she kept talking, while I kept cringing, until I stopped. She simply didn't care.
Nor should I. Which was information that could only be discovered when a person went outside, tuned in to someone else and forgot for one long moment about the mirror thing and the photo thing and the death thing.
Rouge d'hiver. Doesn't the name sound cool? Particularly when attached to a head of lettuce. Years ago, more than I wish to admit, I grew the stuff in my raised beds in another part of Menlo Park, in another marriage, in another mood. And lettuce, having very little interest in moods, burst forth from the ground in this way that is uniquely rouge d' hiverish, which in this case means leaves as light as crepe paper, extraordinarily delicate. And, one must add, quadriplegic-friendly. No one needed to cut this lettuce. The stuff folded around a fork as though it wanted to be eaten. Winter lettuce, red at that, and supposedly French. A company named Shepherd's Seeds, all haute and boutiquey with a beautifully illustrated catalog, sold me several packets of rouge d'hiver, and then promptly went out of business.
Rouge d'hiver did not go out of existence, of course. This guy Shepherd did not own the recipe. There's still red, there's still winter, and there's still France. So there's got to be this light, utterly delicate lettuce, so fragile that it's easy to see why the stuff is not available at my local Safeway. Fortunately, in the almost two decades since I first planted the stuff, the web has arrived, and a quick Google search turns up several sources of the seeds. More interesting is why it took me so long. In fact, why now? What is it about the rainy month of February in Menlo Park, 10 months after my wife's death that has me tracking down one particular lettuce? I'm not staying up all night thinking about this one, but the question has snagged just enough cells in my brain to sort of work its way to consciousness.
René had them. Rouge d'hiver available from Renée's Seeds near, if I recall, Santa Cruz. Not that it matters. Not that it registers, actually, for although Renée must have substantial ground to be raising and harvesting seeds, the precise location of her acreage eludes me. Nevermind, for these days everything moves from screen to mailbox, first the e-mail variety with your confirmation, then the tin version, with very little respect for the landmass. I am deeply respectful, however. It's awe-inspiring, these cute little lettuces, once seeds as insignificant as bits of cracked pepper, now salad candidates, and you did it, you made them grow. You are cool. You with your rouge d'hiver, which all your foody friends gush over. You're not just a backyard gardener, but a source. You are the man.
I have a morning helper, a young former-Stanford man who has dropped out of making money and taken up the cause of Catholic Social Services which, courtesy of some exchange arrangement with Jewish Family Services, half explains why he volunteers to help me get dressed in the mornings. His name, significantly, is also Paul. On a recent Friday, Paul walked in the door on one of those sunny winter days that make one think of gardening. So, what the hell, once the socks were on and trousers at a decent level, I decided it was time, time to rip open René's postal shipment of rouge d'hiver and sprinkle the suckers over the tilled earth. So I wheeled to the door to the pantry and told Paul where to poke about in search of gardening hand tools. And, while he was at it, might as well pull out a few packets of leftover seeds. Which didn't take long. And there they were, dated 2009. Rouge d'hiver, two packets, one open.
And then it came back to me, well halfway. How I had gone through the same sort of web search last year, found seeds, ordered them, and, I am certain, planted them. And they produced perfectly ordinary red lettuce. Not the singularly light, gossamer of a lettuce I had grown years ago. Just a solid red lettuce. I didn't so much recall this, as deduce it. So Paul and I didn't even get to Renée's shipment. Oh, it's there, all right, and I'll have a go at it. For now, I felt obliged to sow last year's seeds just to see what would happen. Why? Beats me. I know what would happen. I know what will happen. This is a small-scale version of the film Groundhog Day.
There's going to be a lot of this sort of thing, I can tell. Like it or not, time moves in years, and things are coming back to me, painful and unpleasant. How it was when Marlou began dying. There's something about such an experience that is so overwhelming that it can't be taken in. I remember at the time how poignant it seemed to be putting in a winter garden. My brother insisted. I wanted to do it, and he was going to help. The twin impressions, trying to make things grow and trying to accept that things die, hung over the whole process. The squirrels got the first seedlings. Then came the netting. Then came the spring. In the warm days everything burst into life including, though I have virtually no memory of this, the rouge d'hiver.
So the memories are coming around, which is inevitable, and while challenging, not entirely unwelcome. Whatever got missed the last time will get faced this time. Something in me needs to see what happened, acknowledge and, perhaps, let go. And so I planted last year's seeds. God knows how many will come up. But that seems to be one of the many mysteries I am probing. And there's more to come. After all, I still haven't even opened Renéee's package. Maybe her rouge d'hiver will turn out to be the right one.
Rouge d'hiver did not go out of existence, of course. This guy Shepherd did not own the recipe. There's still red, there's still winter, and there's still France. So there's got to be this light, utterly delicate lettuce, so fragile that it's easy to see why the stuff is not available at my local Safeway. Fortunately, in the almost two decades since I first planted the stuff, the web has arrived, and a quick Google search turns up several sources of the seeds. More interesting is why it took me so long. In fact, why now? What is it about the rainy month of February in Menlo Park, 10 months after my wife's death that has me tracking down one particular lettuce? I'm not staying up all night thinking about this one, but the question has snagged just enough cells in my brain to sort of work its way to consciousness.
René had them. Rouge d'hiver available from Renée's Seeds near, if I recall, Santa Cruz. Not that it matters. Not that it registers, actually, for although Renée must have substantial ground to be raising and harvesting seeds, the precise location of her acreage eludes me. Nevermind, for these days everything moves from screen to mailbox, first the e-mail variety with your confirmation, then the tin version, with very little respect for the landmass. I am deeply respectful, however. It's awe-inspiring, these cute little lettuces, once seeds as insignificant as bits of cracked pepper, now salad candidates, and you did it, you made them grow. You are cool. You with your rouge d'hiver, which all your foody friends gush over. You're not just a backyard gardener, but a source. You are the man.
I have a morning helper, a young former-Stanford man who has dropped out of making money and taken up the cause of Catholic Social Services which, courtesy of some exchange arrangement with Jewish Family Services, half explains why he volunteers to help me get dressed in the mornings. His name, significantly, is also Paul. On a recent Friday, Paul walked in the door on one of those sunny winter days that make one think of gardening. So, what the hell, once the socks were on and trousers at a decent level, I decided it was time, time to rip open René's postal shipment of rouge d'hiver and sprinkle the suckers over the tilled earth. So I wheeled to the door to the pantry and told Paul where to poke about in search of gardening hand tools. And, while he was at it, might as well pull out a few packets of leftover seeds. Which didn't take long. And there they were, dated 2009. Rouge d'hiver, two packets, one open.
And then it came back to me, well halfway. How I had gone through the same sort of web search last year, found seeds, ordered them, and, I am certain, planted them. And they produced perfectly ordinary red lettuce. Not the singularly light, gossamer of a lettuce I had grown years ago. Just a solid red lettuce. I didn't so much recall this, as deduce it. So Paul and I didn't even get to Renée's shipment. Oh, it's there, all right, and I'll have a go at it. For now, I felt obliged to sow last year's seeds just to see what would happen. Why? Beats me. I know what would happen. I know what will happen. This is a small-scale version of the film Groundhog Day.
There's going to be a lot of this sort of thing, I can tell. Like it or not, time moves in years, and things are coming back to me, painful and unpleasant. How it was when Marlou began dying. There's something about such an experience that is so overwhelming that it can't be taken in. I remember at the time how poignant it seemed to be putting in a winter garden. My brother insisted. I wanted to do it, and he was going to help. The twin impressions, trying to make things grow and trying to accept that things die, hung over the whole process. The squirrels got the first seedlings. Then came the netting. Then came the spring. In the warm days everything burst into life including, though I have virtually no memory of this, the rouge d'hiver.
So the memories are coming around, which is inevitable, and while challenging, not entirely unwelcome. Whatever got missed the last time will get faced this time. Something in me needs to see what happened, acknowledge and, perhaps, let go. And so I planted last year's seeds. God knows how many will come up. But that seems to be one of the many mysteries I am probing. And there's more to come. After all, I still haven't even opened Renéee's package. Maybe her rouge d'hiver will turn out to be the right one.
Rouge d'hiver. Doesn't the name sound cool? Particularly when attached to a head of lettuce. Years ago, more than I wish to admit, I grew the stuff in my raised beds in another part of Menlo Park, in another marriage, in another mood. And lettuce, having very little interest in moods, burst forth from the ground in this way that is uniquely rouge d' hiverish, which in this case means leaves as light as crepe paper, extraordinarily delicate. And, one must add, quadriplegic-friendly. No one needed to cut this lettuce. The stuff folded around a fork as though it wanted to be eaten. Winter lettuce, red at that, and supposedly French. A company named Shepherd's Seeds, all haute and boutiquey with a beautifully illustrated catalog, sold me several packets of rouge d'hiver, and then promptly went out of business.
Rouge d'hiver did not go out of existence, of course. This guy Shepherd did not own the recipe. There's still red, there's still winter, and there's still France. So there's got to be this light, utterly delicate lettuce, so fragile that it's easy to see why the stuff is not available at my local Safeway. Fortunately, in the almost two decades since I first planted the stuff, the web has arrived, and a quick Google search turns up several sources of the seeds. More interesting is why it took me so long. In fact, why now? What is it about the rainy month of February in Menlo Park, 10 months after my wife's death that has me tracking down one particular lettuce? I'm not staying up all night thinking about this one, but the question has snagged just enough cells in my brain to sort of work its way to consciousness.
René had them. Rouge d'hiver available from Renée's Seeds near, if I recall, Santa Cruz. Not that it matters. Not that it registers, actually, for although Renée must have substantial ground to be raising and harvesting seeds, the precise location of her acreage eludes me. Nevermind, for these days everything moves from screen to mailbox, first the e-mail variety with your confirmation, then the tin version, with very little respect for the landmass. I am deeply respectful, however. It's awe-inspiring, these cute little lettuces, once seeds as insignificant as bits of cracked pepper, now salad candidates, and you did it, you made them grow. You are cool. You with your rouge d'hiver, which all your foody friends gush over. You're not just a backyard gardener, but a source. You are the man.
I have a morning helper, a young former-Stanford man who has dropped out of making money and taken up the cause of Catholic Social Services which, courtesy of some exchange arrangement with Jewish Family Services, half explains why he volunteers to help me get dressed in the mornings. His name, significantly, is also Paul. On a recent Friday, Paul walked in the door on one of those sunny winter days that make one think of gardening. So, what the hell, once the socks were on and trousers at a decent level, I decided it was time, time to rip open René's postal shipment of rouge d'hiver and sprinkle the suckers over the tilled earth. So I wheeled to the door to the pantry and told Paul where to poke about in search of gardening hand tools. And, while he was at it, might as well pull out a few packets of leftover seeds. Which didn't take long. And there they were, dated 2009. Rouge d'hiver, two packets, one open.
And then it came back to me, well halfway. How I had gone through the same sort of web search last year, found seeds, ordered them, and, I am certain, planted them. And they produced perfectly ordinary red lettuce. Not the singularly light, gossamer of a lettuce I had grown years ago. Just a solid red lettuce. I didn't so much recall this, as deduce it. So Paul and I didn't even get to Renée's shipment. Oh, it's there, all right, and I'll have a go at it. For now, I felt obliged to sow last year's seeds just to see what would happen. Why? Beats me. I know what would happen. I know what will happen. This is a small-scale version of the film Groundhog Day.
There's going to be a lot of this sort of thing, I can tell. Like it or not, time moves in years, and things are coming back to me, painful and unpleasant. How it was when Marlou began dying. There's something about such an experience that is so overwhelming that it can't be taken in. I remember at the time how poignant it seemed to be putting in a winter garden. My brother insisted. I wanted to do it, and he was going to help. The twin impressions, trying to make things grow and trying to accept that things die, hung over the whole process. The squirrels got the first seedlings. Then came the netting. Then came the spring. In the warm days everything burst into life including, though I have virtually no memory of this, the rouge d'hiver.
So the memories are coming around, which is inevitable, and while challenging, not entirely unwelcome. Whatever got missed the last time will get faced this time. Something in me needs to see what happened, acknowledge and, perhaps, let go. And so I planted last year's seeds. God knows how many will come up. But that seems to be one of the many mysteries I am probing. And there's more to come. After all, I still haven't even opened Renéee's package. Maybe her rouge d'hiver will turn out to be the right one.
Rouge d'hiver. Doesn't the name sound cool? Particularly when attached to a head of lettuce. Years ago, more than I wish to admit, I grew the stuff in my raised beds in another part of Menlo Park, in another marriage, in another mood. And lettuce, having very little interest in moods, burst forth from the ground in this way that is uniquely rouge d' hiverish, which in this case means leaves as light as crepe paper, extraordinarily delicate. And, one must add, quadriplegic-friendly. No one needed to cut this lettuce. The stuff folded around a fork as though it wanted to be eaten. Winter lettuce, red at that, and supposedly French. A company named Shepherd's Seeds, all haute and boutiquey with a beautifully illustrated catalog, sold me several packets of rouge d'hiver, and then promptly went out of business.
Rouge d'hiver did not go out of existence, of course. This guy Shepherd did not own the recipe. There's still red, there's still winter, and there's still France. So there's got to be this light, utterly delicate lettuce, so fragile that it's easy to see why the stuff is not available at my local Safeway. Fortunately, in the almost two decades since I first planted the stuff, the web has arrived, and a quick Google search turns up several sources of the seeds. More interesting is why it took me so long. In fact, why now? What is it about the rainy month of February in Menlo Park, 10 months after my wife's death that has me tracking down one particular lettuce? I'm not staying up all night thinking about this one, but the question has snagged just enough cells in my brain to sort of work its way to consciousness.
René had them. Rouge d'hiver available from Renée's Seeds near, if I recall, Santa Cruz. Not that it matters. Not that it registers, actually, for although Renée must have substantial ground to be raising and harvesting seeds, the precise location of her acreage eludes me. Nevermind, for these days everything moves from screen to mailbox, first the e-mail variety with your confirmation, then the tin version, with very little respect for the landmass. I am deeply respectful, however. It's awe-inspiring, these cute little lettuces, once seeds as insignificant as bits of cracked pepper, now salad candidates, and you did it, you made them grow. You are cool. You with your rouge d'hiver, which all your foody friends gush over. You're not just a backyard gardener, but a source. You are the man.
I have a morning helper, a young former-Stanford man who has dropped out of making money and taken up the cause of Catholic Social Services which, courtesy of some exchange arrangement with Jewish Family Services, half explains why he volunteers to help me get dressed in the mornings. His name, significantly, is also Paul. On a recent Friday, Paul walked in the door on one of those sunny winter days that make one think of gardening. So, what the hell, once the socks were on and trousers at a decent level, I decided it was time, time to rip open René's postal shipment of rouge d'hiver and sprinkle the suckers over the tilled earth. So I wheeled to the door to the pantry and told Paul where to poke about in search of gardening hand tools. And, while he was at it, might as well pull out a few packets of leftover seeds. Which didn't take long. And there they were, dated 2009. Rouge d'hiver, two packets, one open.
And then it came back to me, well halfway. How I had gone through the same sort of web search last year, found seeds, ordered them, and, I am certain, planted them. And they produced perfectly ordinary red lettuce. Not the singularly light, gossamer of a lettuce I had grown years ago. Just a solid red lettuce. I didn't so much recall this, as deduce it. So Paul and I didn't even get to Renée's shipment. Oh, it's there, all right, and I'll have a go at it. For now, I felt obliged to sow last year's seeds just to see what would happen. Why? Beats me. I know what would happen. I know what will happen. This is a small-scale version of the film Groundhog Day.
There's going to be a lot of this sort of thing, I can tell. Like it or not, time moves in years, and things are coming back to me, painful and unpleasant. How it was when Marlou began dying. There's something about such an experience that is so overwhelming that it can't be taken in. I remember at the time how poignant it seemed to be putting in a winter garden. My brother insisted. I wanted to do it, and he was going to help. The twin impressions, trying to make things grow and trying to accept that things die, hung over the whole process. The squirrels got the first seedlings. Then came the netting. Then came the spring. In the warm days everything burst into life including, though I have virtually no memory of this, the rouge d'hiver.
So the memories are coming around, which is inevitable, and while challenging, not entirely unwelcome. Whatever got missed the last time will get faced this time. Something in me needs to see what happened, acknowledge and, perhaps, let go. And so I planted last year's seeds. God knows how many will come up. But that seems to be one of the many mysteries I am probing. And there's more to come. After all, I still haven't even opened Renéee's package. Maybe her rouge d'hiver will turn out to be the right one.
