Tomato Death

I really don't mind facing backwards on the southbound train from San Francisco.  In fact, I barely notice.  Seeing what has passed, watching it pass and evaluating its passage, somehow this is my thing.  How to explain that I check my watch when finally sliding up to the computer screen and note that an entire hour has passed since Caltrain deposited me at the Menlo Park platform.  Okay, so I purchased a bottle of Calms Forte at the local Walgreens.  Naturally, in pursuit of caffeination, I hurtled up to Peet's.  Having got my order wrong, the iced drink arrived steaming hot...so I decided to drink it there in air-conditioned comfort.  Before bouncing my wheelchair way home, with a minor detour into the back garden to watch the tomato die.

A sad thing, tomato death.  This particular one seems foredoomed.  Like all garden stories it is richly metaphorical, mythopoeic and laced with portent and inevitability.  My neighbor somehow installed a hydroponic vegetable garden.  Why a person would do this eludes explanation.  California is blessed with soil, sun and water from one source or another.  More to the point, hydroponic vegetables grow in a liquid suspension that unpleasantly smacks of science fiction.  Like some pathetic race of humans who live in orbiting spacecraft and do not develop hard bones, hydroponic vegetables do not develop hard roots.  They throw out a feeble, undersized and extremely tender set of tendrils that lazily absorb liquid nutrients like a sponge.  Splendid until you decide to buzz off to Europe for a month or two, as my neighbor did, suggesting as she departed that I might just want to have a go at the hydroponic tomato plant on her garden terrace.  She had turned the requisite pumps off.  The plant had already began to turn itself off by the time I intervened.  Not that there was any real intervention possible.  Paul, my volunteer morning helper, dug a hole and rather skillfully inserted the pathetic roots into the one of my raised beds.  Jane soaked the thing with a garden hose.  Within a few hours of exposure, the California sun had set the plant on a terminal path.  Still, I keep trying to water it.  Throwing good irrigation after bad.  Surely, Jane says, the plant will remember that it has to grow roots, get its botanical act together, survive.  This raises profound questions about resilience, life's efficient culling of the unfit and the time required to rebound.  I don't hold out much hope.

Although rebounding is much on my mind.  Rolling out of Peet's, I could not help noticing.  The wedding ring.  It is still there, unnoticed and unremarked for months at a time.  I have sought advice in this matter.  What is the normal thing?  What does a person do?  Take it off or change fingers or what?  Either no one knows or no one is telling.  More telling is that the thing stays on my finger.  I am letting this ring have a life of its own.  It will decide.  It will tell me.  There are reasons why I live in California.

This seems one of those moments when one cannot look to the outer world for answers.  I get to decide.  And what am I deciding?  When enough respect has been given to the dead?  When a marriage is truly over?  When a person and a relationship have become more memory than reality?  How does one choose?  What happens if one chooses wrongly?

This is one of the good things about being an intuitive type.  You know.  The day comes, and you know.  Until then, all you know is you don't know.  So you wait.  Unfortunately, one can get too good at waiting, this is the downside.  Also, the world is deficient in role models.  The vaunted American man of action stands all around you getting rich.  You, the American man of inaction, slides.  If not toward poverty, something unimaginably worse.  Time passes.  What to do?  Let more time pass, of course.

It is a supremely delicate matter for me, this question of Marlou's aftermath.  I keep scanning the faces of others, principally Jane's, for signs of disapproval.  I do not find them.  It's okay, it seems.  Back from a month abroad, sleeping again in the marital bed, a.k.a., death chamber, strange feelings arise.  And no one is telling me they shouldn't arise.  No one but me.  If I think about it, and I am, this is one of the great gifts of my life.  The people who are closest to me are not pushing.  Or prescribing.  Or proselytizing.  They're making way.  And for what?  For me to be moody, that is the simplest description.  My dark and somber outlook is the subject of a certain amount of humor among friends.  For me it is a matter of much uncertainty.  The one certain thing being: it will end.