Year: 2012

October Blessed

Mellow Fruitfulness

Here in D.C. where the locals don’t even look up when the Presidential chopper thrums over the rooftops, the glory of autumn is sometimes enough to make even the most jaded policy wonks take a moment to inhale the elixir of crisp leaves and hushed fog that signals a tilt in the planet.

It’s time to stop and smell the apples.

And, as far as I’m concerned, you can keep your Golden Delicious, your Galas and HoneyCrisps. MacIntosh is better as a computer, and Romes aren’t worth the seizing any day.

The richness of Virginia’s apple heritage is sometimes overlooked, especially now in these days when Big Agra dictates an algorithm for marketability based on ease of production, transportation and storage at the expense of taste and texture.

Yes, I’m talking about Stayman. Not the new-fangled Stayman-Winesap hybrids, which ruin the best features of each of those two honored heritage cultivars, but the true old Stayman apple, which grows on a tree a little too big for the practices of modern mass fruit production. A Stayman tree has character, like the apples it produces. It’s a taste once acquired never forgotten.

During the last six years while I was living in the Pacific Northwest, a region that takes pride in its apples, I despaired of finding a true Stayman apple. They simply don’t grow them out there. And when I came back to Virginia to visit, I was alarmed by the disappearance of the roadside stands where I used to be able to count on finding Staymans and Yorks for my pie baking. I was told that times had changed and no one was planting the old varieties anymore.

But this week the farmer who drives up each weekend from Ruckersville and sells his produce at the corner near our building had a big bin of Stayman apples.

I do believe in Virginia, Santa.

This year, my October runneth over. The D.C. area has a lot to be excited about.The Nationals, with the best record in Major League Baseball, are in the playoffs, the first time D.C has had a baseball team advance so far since 1933. And Baltimore, our sister city, not to be outdone, earned a wildcard entry into the playoffs. Football still dominates the sports pages here, but local baseball is finally enjoying some respect.

And of course there’s that election year buzz, crackling and spitting like a downed power line across the road. That never gets old.

The slanting light spilling through the golden tree canopy that remains a defining  feature of the city in spite of the damage from the June derecho casts an enchantment that, to those susceptible, redeems the abrasive jangle of political agendas.

After all, in a few weeks the election will be over, and we can get on with our pies.

The Harp Unstrung

A Couple of Harpers in 1955

My father died last week.

He had been in poor health for years, suffering with various aches and ailments, undergoing treatments, countless examinations. He was pretty fed up with it all by the time he reached his 89th birthday, when we all came to wish him well, to encourage him to hang on for his 90th.

He didn’t argue with us, but you could see his heart wasn’t in it. All his old friends had already passed on. His failing body denied him the ability to work on his model trains, much less enjoy driving his car or sailing a boat. A lifetime of reading fine print had ruined his eyes. He still loved us, but he just wanted to stop. Yet his body kept going, the old heart pumping, the lungs pulling in air. His bones were still strong, even as his flesh melted away when he refused to eat anymore.

My father was a strong-willed man all his life. His opinions were firm, his beliefs not easily swayed. He worked hard for everything he had. His long career in law began in the early 1950s when he attended law school at the University of Virginia on the G.I. Bill. Like many of his generation, he already had three small children by that time. By the time he retired he had become a judge, and had seven children, a different wife, a handful of grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

You’d think he would have been a happy man.

But my dad was never able to stop being a father. And being a father for him meant trying to make his children do what he thought would be best for them. I understand this is a common trait among caring parents.

After my dad took my mother to court to have me declared legally emancipated when I was 18, we didn’t speak to each other until the day I called to invite him to my wedding, a little more than a year later. He replied, “Are you asking me or telling me?” At first I didn’t understand the question, but then he made it clear that he expected to be consulted about the man I chose to marry, even though he’d legally washed his hands of me.

Suffice it to say, our relationship was never easy from the time I left home. For years, in the beginning, before I had children of my own, I used to have conversations with him in my head, trying to explain why I felt entitled to lead my own life, make my own choices. I would write letters and never send them. I thought things would never change.

Then my father began a new family and had a new daughter. He delighted in her perfection, her obedience. Her devotion to him was unwavering and he rewarded her with his unlimited support. Hearing about her successes, I was glad he had the pliant squeaky-clean daughter he’d wanted. When she married a very successful man, whose job took him all over the world, my dad was at first happy.

But slowly, slowly, the old man recoiled from the praise heaped on his new son-in-law. Perhaps he felt the sting of being replaced as the alpha male in his daughter’s life. For whatever reason, he began to call me. At first I was taken aback by this. It had been so long since he’d expressed an interest in my life. But when he heard that I was taking college courses again, trying to finish my degree – 30 years in the making – he was enthusiastic and, yes, I could hear it in his voice, even proud of me again.

Slowly, as I learned the humility that only having children of your own can teach you, the conversations with my father became less difficult and more rewarding. We found common ground based on our experiences as adults. We seldom touched on the trials of the past, the divorce, politics, the reckless ’60s, the flaming ’70s. We talked instead of life itself, of how it warps and wounds, how it teaches and heals, how the long road may be rocky, but the views sometimes make it worth all the struggle.

I am grateful that my dad and I recovered the love we started with. He was a wonderful father when I was a young child. In one of the last conversations I had with him, when he was so weak he seldom left his bed, he talked to me of his childhood in Brooklyn, of his first model train setup, of his early boyhood friends, of his beloved Culver Lake in the mountains of Northern New Jersey. He said, “My childhood there was a wonderful childhood.”

That’s what he gave me. Maybe that’s all any parent can hope to give a child. All too soon they grow up and get swept away by the countless unpredictable forces at work in world. If I could talk to my dad today, he would understand exactly what I’m talking about. I’ll be missing him the rest of my life.

He’s moved beyond reach, but I still have things I want to say to him.

Burning Blight

So I see that Ang Lee has made a movie out of Yann Martell’s brilliant fantasy The Life of Pi.

This seems a bit ambitious to me, but then, Ang Lee is a genius, so perhaps he can handle it. Yet when I read the book about a boy who survives 227 days in a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger, I heard much discussion about what, if anything, the tiger symbolized. Was it a metaphor for death? A figment of the boy’s fevered imagination? Or some divine manifestation of the power and majesty of God?

I wanted to believe the tiger was real. You know, like Calvin’s Hobbes but with claws and teeth.

Friends told me I was hopelessly naive. No doubt they were right. Yet now I’m curious to see how my reading of the novel compares with Lee’s visualization.

In fiction, as in life, point of view can clarify or obscure. When you’re high up, looking down, the patterns of human behavior are easier to observe, but only when you’re down on the ground, in the boat with the tiger, can you get a feel for the hunger, the anger, the despair in people’s eyes.

For most of us, our point of view limits our ability to understand one another, and, as history and the daily news remind us, the inability to empathize can be fatal. When point of view provokes point of gun, everyone loses.

This is what the tiger means to me.

The tiger is the cornered beast, the itchy trigger finger that lurks deep in the psyche of every soul. And we are all in this boat together.

Unless we tame our tigers, the outlook is bleak. As the fires of bigotry and religious fervor rage hotter across the world, we would do well to remember that absolutes rarely are. Everything depends on perspective. Now more than ever, as the world tilts toward chaos, it’s imperative that cooler heads prevail.

It’s harder to make peace than to provoke war. But to stir up hatred for political gain is the lowest form of evil – the methodology of fascists.

So let’s all take a deep breath and look this tiger in the eyes and try not to make any sudden moves. We could still make it to the shore if we don’t panic.

But never forget, tigers can swim.

Lay Down Your Weary Trowel

Peach Chairs

Aaah. Summer’s end. Time for that final dip in the pool, walk on the beach, drink on the deck. Bittersweet, perhaps, but there’s something pleasurable about reaching the end of the row, the turn in the road, the fresh new page.

Labor Day is a freestyle holiday, relatively new as holidays go. Its traditions were never set in stone. It’s more of a do-your-own-thing kind of affair, which seems quintessentially American to me.

While the original concept back in the 1880s seems to have been grounded in some sort of political maneuvering to keep restless workers and labor movements from getting out of control, the modern holiday has succumbed to the default state of so many of our so-called holidays. It’s another marketing opportunity.

However, for those of us who garden, Labor Day marks the beginning of the end and the end of some beginnings. Autumn labors are of a different stripe than the joyful, optimism of spring planting or the fretful battles of summer against bugs, blights and drought. The harvest season looms.

This year I said goodbye to my garden in Seattle. As yet I don’t know where my next garden will be. But in the interim I have found peace and pleasure admiring the gardens in D.C. It’s an international community here, and that’s reflected in the gardens.

Whether they grow vegetables or flowers or herbs or fruits, all gardeners speak the same language. They get it.

Earth comes first. Always has, always will. If we take care of it, it will take care of us.

Garden Talisman