Great-Great-Uncle Milroy and The Not-so-Great Beach Vacation

This is not the usual sort of thing but a family story I wrote for the edification of my niece Tess, who recently had her first child.   I put it here for anybody to read who would care to.  rfw

To Tess:  Your Great-Great-Uncle Milroy and The Not-so-Great Beach Vacation

By Robin Ford Wallace

Tess, this is a story I am writing for you.

Or, I should say, it is a history.  I think etymologically they are the same word, but one we use for a tale we have made up and the other for something that has actually occurred.  Your other aunt told me you were interested in Ford family history now that you are starting a family of your own.  Good luck with that!  She who pens these words has made no study of, nor claims any expertise in, Ford lore beyond her personal memory; but is, alas, the only reliable source of unvarnished truth in her generation of Fords.  Not to insult anybody. 

Well!  My idea here was to give you a family story you were in on, but probably too young to remember.  What I want to tell you about is a beach vacation from hell that happened in the summer of 1987.  That was the summer before I was married.  I was 30, and I believe you were 3.

I don’t know how well you remember your great-grandmother, Dot.  We always called her that, she was never called anything else, to the point that your father, Jack, once said wonderingly of some other little boy, “He calls his Dot ‘granny.’ ”  In point of fact, she was more like a Dot than a granny.  She was a snappy little woman, not quite five feet tall and she never weighed 100 pounds.  She’d been a beauty in her time and was vain about her legs; she would wear high heels whenever feasible.  She didn’t cook for squat but would feed us when we came from the fish place down the road, and she smoked long white cigarettes.  

Her husband, Deb, our grandfather, had died early on – he was only 62 or 63 – and some years later she married a man also named Jack.  Dot and her Jack had what seemed to me a racy and luxurious sort of retirement together.  I remember them talking about going to “the club,” and when I would see them on these weekend occasions they were always drinking what they called highballs, meaning some sort of booze over ice, and mixed with Fresca.  Once I saw Jack put vodka into his glass of iced tea, which even now strikes me as a perversion.

  Dot had a brother named Milroy.  I think he was a year or two younger than she was.  He was my mother’s uncle, not mine, and he lived in Iowa, and given those two factors I always thought of him as a “distant relation.”  He visited often enough, though, that we were all familiar with him and with his wife, Grace.  What they were famous for in the family was how she waited on him – he was always sitting there saying, Grace, get me a cup of coffee, Grace, bring me this, or Grace, do that.  It made all the other women want to scream GRACE, MAKE HIM DO IT HIMSELF. 

Which makes him sound languid but actually I remember him as one of those go-go high-energy little men.  What did he look like?  I pride myself not just on my militant adherence to the truth but on my razor-sharp memory.  I can still recall conversations we had over your crib when your parents brought you home from the hospital.  But visually I suck.   What I find is that, after the passage of years, I file people into a limited number of physical types from Central Casting, so that I remember a boyfriend your Aunt Laura had in the early 1980s as pretty much identical to the husband of a young friend I have now, which I expect is insulting to both of them.  What I remember Great-Uncle Milroy looking like is Teddy Roosevelt but maybe shorter.  Sometimes I even think of him with a monocle though realistically I’m pretty sure he just wore glasses.

I’m carrying on about Uncle Milroy like this because he has the central role in this story.  Not that he’s the hero, more like the iceberg in Titanic.

That summer, Uncle Milroy had been out seeing the U.S.A.  He had some kind of camper-trailer he towed around and parked for extended periods of time in the yards of his relations.  I believe he’d been staying with Mom – your “Gammaw” as you called her then, before you could pronounce it properly – just prior to the beach trip, because I recall asking your Uncle Frank, “Doesn’t he have a house of his own?”  And Frank replied, “I don’t think he remembers.”  In any case, he and Grace had also been visiting Dot and Jack – who lived in Thompson, Ga., not far from Augusta – and the four of them rented a cabin on Tybee Island and asked us to join them for a long weekend.

By “us,” I mean your Gammaw, my mother, and her children.  She and the old man were splitsville by then, him having left her for the preacher’s wife as you know.  Mom had been through a bad patch following the divorce, worse than anything that came after, but during this period she had pulled out of it pretty well and was trying to look after herself a bit.  Among other things she had bought herself a red convertible, I think a LeBaron.

She wanted to drive that convertible to the beach and she wanted as many of us to go with her as would consent to it.  Tybee is of course just off Savannah and that’s where her sister lived, Aunt Kitten and her eight grown children, so that the beach weekend was by way of being a family reunion. 

Mom always felt deficient in the family reunion department.  All her sister’s vast brood, with, later on, their own spouses and multiple children, would show up at Dot’s dos smiling and bearing food, while Mom’s four ducked out on her from sullen teenhood on.  This was so distressing to Mom that years later, when Dot died after an extended limbo of Alzheimer’s and was buried in a 7 a.m. graveside ceremony, poor Mom cried a little and then turned to us beaming, saying:  “I can’t tell you how proud I am that all four of my children came to the funeral.”          

  But back to Tybee.  None of us ducked out of that one.  Your Uncle Frank came, minus the wife and child (this was during the roughly five minutes he was actually married, but things there had already begun spiraling toward entropy).  Your Aunt Laura, also minus spouse (though less ominously), came with baby Jacob.  Your father, Jack, did not come, but he sent you – the apple of your gammaw’s eye – with your mother, Lisa.  And I came minus Jerry. 

Why were we all so attentive, for once?  Was it because we were worried about Mom after her great unhappiness, or was it the lure of a free beach holiday?  I’m not altogether sure and anyway shouldn’t speak for the others.  But I can say in my own case I might have been uncharacteristically willing to reune because I was bursting with pride at having snared myself a husband – I expect you consider Jerry and me as solid as Rushmore but for a while there it was strictly touch and go – and also at having starved myself down for the nups to the point my wedding gown was a size 8.  (I am sorry to tell you I came bursting out of it like Pontchartraine during the reception and have not seen a size 8 since, at least from the inside.)  I do remember thinking that a seafood dinner out would be the perfect opportunity to wear my new backless pastel floral-print sundress.       

            And I remember thinking it would be luxurious.  Ha!  Mom had told us there was plenty of room.  I think she was sincere, and just as surprised as the rest of us that we would all be staying in a two-bedroom cabin.

            The two bedrooms went, of course, to Dot and Jack and Milroy and Grace, the oldest generation and, incidentally, the ones footing the bill.  As for all of us Fords, we had to sleep together in the living room.  I believe Mom got the couch and the rest of us sacked out on the floor.  That was seven people counting the two little ones, you a toddler and Jacob a babe in arms.

            But the first evening, while we were all still fresh and had had plenty of sleep in our own beds, it was all right.  We did go out to dinner at a seafood place and I did wear my backless-pastel-floral-print.  We had a choice of two restaurants, for some reason, and the first one didn’t serve seafood any way but fried.  We of the younger generation didn’t want to eat there, me in particular because back then fried shrimp made me vomit uncontrollably.  I think Laura and Frank didn’t want to eat there because they didn’t want to share the living room floor with me vomiting uncontrollably.  But the older generation did want to stay there, Uncle Milroy in particular, and he objected to the place we went to in the end, which served grilled and steamed seafood.

            “This ain’t the way we do shrimp in Iowa,” he said.

            “Uncle Milroy,” Frank pointed.  “I had not realized Iowa was famous for its seafood.  It is landlocked, is it not?”

            That was 28 years ago and I still enjoy saying, when something has made me go hrumph, “This ain’t the way we do things in Iowa.”  

            In any event we got our steamed or grilled shrimp and I didn’t vomit uncontrollably that night.  I might just as well have, though, for all the sleep anybody got.

            Seven people are just too many people to sleep peacefully in  a room together, and the floor is not the ideal place to do it; and then of course there was the talking thing and the snoring thing and the crying-baby thing.  Finally, there was the dawn-awakening-Tess thing.  You awoke at the crack-o and said to your mother, “Can we get up now and go to the beach?”  And she said, “No, we have to lie still and be quiet?”  And you said, “Why do we have to lie still and be quiet?”  And she said, “So everybody else can sleep.”  And so on.

            But I don’t know if anybody else was really still asleep by that point.  I wasn’t.  I was lying there listening to this polite little conversation and thinking what an unusual voice you had.  Jacob had a high, piping voice when he was a tot but you never did.  Some words you couldn’t pronounce properly, of course, but you talked like a very small adult, in a  voice as deep as mine or your mother’s.

            So.  Everybody was still sleepy but the older gen shortly leapt up and into action so we living-room proles had to, too.  We had a nice day at the beach.  I mean I’m sure we did.  I don’t remember much except that maybe there had been a storm out at sea somewhere because the waves were high and unpredictable.  I was walking in the surf, carrying you on my shoulders, I don’t think any more than ankle-deep, when this mighty tsunami of a wave came barreling up and engulfed us.  You were very brave and didn’t cry and didn’t lose hold of me.  But both of us got water in our eyes and up our noses, and after we had finished coughing you said, politely but with a certain froideur: “Next time, I would rather not go undle.”

            That’s something I still say too, about swimming and finances mostly.

            The Savannah cousins all came that day and reuned, and we were all in and out of the cabin and on and off the beach.  In any case, that night we did not go out to a restaurant but had spaghetti the older folks had made – specifically Milroy, I believe, because he was quite proprietary about the pot the next morning, which is the story I’m going to tell you next, the one that has really stuck with me through the years. 

After dinner I’m sure we had a good time, playing cards and drinking beer I expect – I don’t remember but that’s what we did.  And despite the sleep deprivation we were already operating under, once again we didn’t get settled down on our respective patches of floor until quite  late.

That’s why it was such a sick surprise when Uncle Milroy got up at 6:00 the next morning and began scraping out the spaghetti sauce pan with a metal spoon.   

            SKRAWK SKREEK KREECH SQUAWCH

            Everybody’s eyes flew open and there was the same expression of wounded rage in all of them.  I think Frank cussed and rolled over.  Others moaned.  Uncle Milroy would have had to be deaf and blind not to notice the misery he was causing with his teeth-assaulting cacophony, but on he scraped.

            SKRAUCHHHHHHHHHHHHH

            To this day, when I cook chicken in the oven in some sticky sort of marinade (and I do that quite a lot; I am famous for my Hot and Sticky Ginger Chicken), and the liquid burns up leaving a crusty residue on the bottom of the roasting pan, and I can’t get it off with a sponge or even steel wool, I set my teeth resolutely and say:

            “I shall have to Milroy it.”

            And I get out my spoon and Milroy away until the pan is clean again.  But I must make it clear here that I always do this in the privacy of my own kitchen, one mile down a dirt road, disturbing no one.   
            Back to Tybee:  In mute agony, your mother and I picked up our pillows and went down to the beach where we lay down on air mattresses, covered ourselves with beach towels and shut our eyes.  I don’t remember whether your mother took you or left you with Gammaw.  I didn’t care.  All I wanted was sleep.

            But no more had your mother and I shut our eyes than the earth shook.

WHUMP!

Our eyelids reopened in fresh agony.  A stocky pole had been driven into the sand between us.  On either side of it were two feet, in white socks and black shoes.  Above them were two hairy white legs.  Our swollen eyes traveled up these and registered:  Uncle Milroy.  He had followed us from the cabin and was solicitously placing a beach umbrella over us.  So it would have been churlish to cuss but nobody was grateful.

Your mother and I presently gave up trying to sleep and went back to the cabin.  I think Frank had decamped by then.  I don’t remember specifically but he doesn’t figure in my subsequent memories and buggering off is what Frank does.  He brings his own car and when the going gets tough he mumbles something about some work he has to do and whoosh, he’s out of there. 

At the cabin everybody was being excessively polite but clearly wishing to pull a Frank.  I don’t know whose idea it was to go to Hilton Head, but what was evident is that we had to go somewhere where Uncle Milroy was not.  So Mom and I, Laura with baby Jake, and Lisa with you, all piled into the red convertible and put the pedal to the medal.

Except that I was at the wheel so it wasn’t as if we were going very fast.  I remember your mother’s gentle complaint about my driving.  Somebody said something about Hilton Head being an hour away and I said, “How could anybody make it that quickly?”  And she replied, “Fifty-five miles per hour?”  She would roll her eyes when I stopped at every railroad crossing and I had to explain to her about trains with Klingon cloaking devices.  (Actually, I remember that your father is just as nuts about railroad crossings as I am, and the other two sibs probably are too.  We witnessed a fatal car/train collision when we were children and the Burnt Child Shuns Fire.)

For the most part, though, it was a pleasant road trip except that everyone was so sleep-deprived.  Here is another Tess memory from it.  You asked Mom some question.  I wish I could remember what it was but I can’t.  But it was an intelligent little question and possibly a hard one to answer, because Mom hesitated.  So I volunteered everything I knew about the subject, putting it as succinctly as I could for a child of your age.

Which had given Laura time to consider the matter, and after I had rendered my two or three minutes of information, she added a couple more paragraphs of supplementary exposition. 

You listened gravely to all this, but when Laura got through with her thesis and asked if that cleared things up, you said, with great dignity, “I was not asking you two.  I was asking Gammaw.”

Anyway.  We changed drivers a couple of times – everybody wanted to drive the red convertible – and that probably accounted for the fact that we finally got to Hilton Head. 

We didn’t like it.  It wouldn’t shock you, I’m sure that it’s been a thriving resort during your whole memory of it, but none of us had expected the overpriced tinselly-touristy paid-parking and paid-beach place it had become.  We couldn’t afford it and anyway we found it hideous.

And we also found:  Uncle Milroy!  He came to greet us as soon as stopped the car.  He had been tailing us in his own car the whole time, like Jimmy Stewart tailed Kim Novak I think it was in that old movie, for miles and miles and she never noticed, so that you protested, “Doesn’t anybody ever look in their rearview mirror?”  Apparently not, because Uncle Milroy must have pulled up behind us every time we stopped at a gas station to ask directions.

And that’s the last memory I have of that weekend.  I have the general impression of all of us running with our arms up in the air and screaming like in the culminating scene of some horror movie; only instead of screaming, “The rocks are alive!” or “Help!  The Blob!” we’d have been screaming, “Milroy!  Milroy!  Milroy!”

But I’m sure that precise scene didn’t exactly happen and the actual end of the story is that we all returned to our respective homes and finally got some sleep.

Years later, Mom told me that Aunt Grace had died early and that Uncle Milroy had eventually remarried, this time to a woman he waited on hand and foot.  I had stopped being mad at him by then, but I did hope she was mean to him..

END

The Girl With The Silken Sepals

I posted this short-short story on Facebook as a link to The Chattanooga Pulse, where it took second prize in that paper's annual contest of fiction under 500 words; but for people who don't do FB (and really, because this is just where I archive my stuff) I include it here as well.  Plus, the story began as a wisecracking riff in an earlier Bob's Little Acre.  For the Pulse contest, I decided to give it a real plot -- sort of -- which was all built around the last line.

If you, like me, took botany in college to avoid dissecting cats in Bio 101, you will have already known that "angiosperm" is the generic name for flowering plants.  Otherwise, now you do.  But I didn't know until I looked it up for this story what a spadix or spathe was.  They are, respectively, the little standy-up-thing on a jack-in-the-pulpit and the big hoody thing that encloses it, collectively making the jack look like someone who if he was in a park with your children you would just as soon the cops hustled him on about his way.

Anyway, I loved the words and couldn't resist using them in my story.  I in fact considered calling my hard-boiled detective Sam Spadix.  But since I didn't know the words before I wrote the story I decided I couldn't expect anybody else to, and anyway when you only have 500 words to work with you don't want to waste any explaining why a jack-in-the-pulpit is called Sam.

Here's the story:

The Girl With the Silken Sepals

By Robin Ford Wallace

The Flowerbed was not my regular habitat but that’s not to say there was anything wrong with it.  It seemed a nice enough joint, well-drained, just a quiet little place where your working-slob photosynthesizer could kick back with a cup of something cool after 12 hours in the hot sun.  You know.  Vegetate.

There was a rose tending bar, heavily perfumed, maybe a little past full bloom but not going to seed just yet, thank you very much.  Zinnias perched on toadstools looking fresh as daisies, big heads bent toward their drinks like that was all in the world they cared about.  But guys would flash a stamen at them across the room and though they pretended not to see it was safe to bet there’d be some cross-pollination later on. 

Not for me.  I was here on business.  I sat there in my brown-stripe trifoliate, spadix tucked discreetly into spathe, trying not to do anything that screamed UNDERCOVER.

Then I looked up and saw:  Her. 

She wilted, sobbing, over an iced mimosa.  She was lovely, slender and long-stemmed, a rich purple-blue flecked delicately with gold.  I moved from the bar to her table as naturally as a heliotrope turning toward the sun. 

“Cheer up,” I said.  “What are you, a weeping willow?”

“Don’t be ranunculus.”  She gave me a drop-dead look.  “Anyone can see I’m an iris.” 

“I know.  You’re practically waving a blue flag.” 

That made her laugh, a low sweet sound from deep in her pedicels.  “All right, Jack, I like your styles.”  She gave me a smile that made my stamens turgid.  “Mind if I call you that?  You can tuck your spadix into your spathe all day long, I can spot a jack-in-the-pulpit from 100 yards.  It’s that holy look.  What are you, an undercover cop?”

I managed not to flinch.  “OK.  Call me Jack.  What do I call you?”
            “I’m Angie O’Sperm.” 

“An Irish iris?”

“No,”  she said bitterly.  “I’m just an all-American garden variety.  Wanted to be a flower showgirl but I was a late bloomer and missed my chance.  Instead I ended up in this lousy joint hustling hostas for the Nightshade Family.”

“The Nightshades own this place?”  My anthers perked up, lobes cocked.

“Oh, yes.  Their roots run deep here.”

I leaned forward.  “Listen, Angie, I can help you get away from those stinkweeds.”

“Would you, Jack?  Yes, I believe you would.”  She smiled.  “God, look at me.  I’d better go fix my face.”

She disappeared into the back and I sat there grinning foolishly until a familiar voice said behind me:  “Considering the lilies, Jack?”

It was my partner, “Sweet” William Bloom.  “Not just any lily. Bill.  Wait till you see her.  There she comes now!”

Bang!  Bill shot.  Angie dropped like a whacked weed.

“No!” I shouted.

“It was you or her.”  He rolled her over so I could see:  She had a pistil. 

“The Nightshades were on to you,” he said.  “Sorry, Jack:

“She was a plant.”

END

The Story of the Iron-Fisted Glove

The Story of The Iron-Fisted Glove

By Robin Ford Wallace

This is a true story that happened when I was a court reporter. 

I was called in to take a deposition in a lawsuit between two men who had started a business together, one of those sleazy paycheck loan places that cheat the poor.  A man in Cleveland, Tenn., I think it was, had started one and made a fortune.  This was not that one.  This was a copycat business and I don’t think it ever got off the ground.

I forget the names of the parties but let’s call them Chump and Spike.  I remember them both as being rather short men but Spike was a little shorter than Chump, one of those small, fast-talking men, clever-looking, blond.  Chump was the plaintiff and Spike the defendant.  Chump was suing Spike to get some money back he said Spike had defrauded him of. 

This is the story Chump told during his deposition:

Chump and Spike had known each other a long time.  They were best friends.  They had been fraternity brothers in college and I think best men at each other’s weddings.  They would go over to each other’s houses for dinner or out for pizza.

Then Spike convinced Chump to go in with him on the payday loan business.  Chump put in as much money as he had and he borrowed a whole lot more.  So he was responsible for repaying the loan, but almost as soon as they started the business Spike began closing him out of it.

This was a start-up business but the way Spike set up the corporation he was the CEO and he paid himself a six-figure salary from the beginning.  Spike hired the employees and was in charge of them and he didn’t allow them to give any information to Chump.  When Chump asked how the business was going the employees explained Spike had forbidden them to discuss it.  It’s been a long time but I think maybe Spike even had Chump escorted off the premises once. 

It shortly became evident the business was losing a lot of money.  Chump began calling Spike every day and Spike stopped answering his phone.  In the end the only way Chump got any response out of Spike at all was to hire a lawyer and start the civil suit.

One of the attorneys at this point asked Chump:  “Well, you were an equal partner with Spike in the business.  Why didn’t you just demand to see the financials?”

“You don’t understand how Spike operates,” said Chump.  “He rules with an iron-fisted glove.”

I, the court reporter, had been plinking right along, taking down Chump’s story quietly, but that made me look up.  What Chump meant was that Spike ruled with an iron fist or that Spike had an iron fist in a velvet glove, but he’d gotten the expressions mixed and made up this weird combination.  Well, maybe he was upset or maybe he just didn’t know any better, but in the course of the deposition he said it at least one more time, that Spike ruled with an iron-fisted glove.  So that’s how I have always thought of this story: The Story of the Iron-Fisted Glove.

There was then a long discussion of money and I can’t remember how much it was that Chump said Spike had gotten out of him, or what all he had tried to get it back, though I do believe the salary that Spike was paying himself out of Chump’s money was $180,000.

Anyway, after Chump had told his side of the story the lawyers conferred with their clients and we all had a break.  I went to lunch or to the bathroom or something. When I came back, I saw Chump and Spike in the hall together. 

In a deposition setting you don’t usually see the defendant having a heart-to-heart with the plaintiff.  Usually by the time people initiate legal action they’re not on speaking terms and in any case they’re paying attorneys the big bucks to state their side of the argument. 

But talking they were.  Spike was leaning forward, speaking fast and earnest, using his hands a lot.  Chump was leaning against the wall, his hands in his pockets, his eyes big and hurt like a child’s but hopeful, too, one might say wistful. 

We’d been scheduled next to take the deposition of Spike and we didn’t do that.  It got postponed somehow and if it was ever taken back up they used a different court reporter.  If I’d remembered their names I could have looked it up later and seen what happened to the lawsuit.  I didn’t do that; I never did back then because I was always too busy with the next case, really too busy even to be interested.

So I don’t know what happened in the end but what I think happened that particular day is that clever little Spike managed to convince Chump to give him another chance to screw him.  Spike had betrayed his trust and robbed him of his money and shut him out of the business and his life, and all poor old Chump wanted was his buddy back.  You could see it in his eyes.

I thought it was odd then but later I learned it is not all that rare in human relations.  Get involved with a manipulator and even at the end, after the scales have fallen from your eyes and you see that you’ve been played for a chump, managed with an “iron-fisted glove,” if you will, you still find yourself asking:

“But can’t we go back to the part where you loved me?”  

END

How I Became A Child of Light

How I Became a Child of Light, and Dangerously Insane

By Robin Ford Wallace

A few years ago I’d never even heard the word “meme,” and the spellchecker on my old-fashioned version of Microsoft Word still doesn’t like it.  Yet by the numbers, memes are now the chief beacons of morality, spiritual enlightenment and social change in the troubled seas of daily life.  

Memes feature a picture, like maybe of the Dalai Lama sitting there wisely in his little draperies, or Mother Teresa or Martin Luther King or the Buddha, or a sunset or a flower or a fluffy little dog or dead movie star; and underneath there’s a quote telling you things like Choose Love, Because Hate is Too Great a Burden, or Don’t Feed the Wolf of Hate, Feed the Wolf of Love, or Be a Child of Light.

These memes are not such to strike anybody to her knees, weeping and promising God to change, or in fact calling unto the Almighty at all, except for maybe a muttered “Oh Jesus Christ” here and there.  I ask you:  Wolf of Love?

But throw enough of them at a girl and they eventually start chipping away at her.  Or they did at me.  I don’t know when it happened precisely but sooner or later I caught myself thinking:  Well, of course I want to be a Child of Light, who the hell wouldn’t?

Historically, I’ve tended to be more of a Kid of Black Hole.  I think if you’re going to be any kind of writer, you’ve got to accept a certain level of negativity.  Organizing a thoughtful piece on practically anything means thinking the subject all the way through, and given the human condition – we are talking your sentient mortal biomass in your infinite and incomprehensible universe here – thinking too hard always ends in staring gloomily out at the night through a yellow cloud of  Schmertz and cigarette smoke.  

Then too, just by the nature of the work, you’ve got to be a loner, and unless you’re very very lucky you’re also going to be poor.  Throw in underdeveloped social skills and incidences of divorce, suicide and substance abuse I am guessing to be way above the national average and you will agree it’s not precisely a Child of Light formula. 

But then came the memes.  I’d duck out of Word and into FB in a fit of work avoidance and come back thinking:  Am I Seeing In The World What I Carry In My Heart?  I’d be depressed by something and I’d think, But I’m Like A Ship, And All The Worries I’m Floating In Can’t Sink Me If I Don’t Let Them Inside.  Or I’d be mad at someone and realize anger was generating lines in my face.  So:  Maybe Hate was indeed Too Great a Burden?  Maybe I really had better start feeding that Wolf of Love?

But the meme that really got me was the Child of Light.  It was dead winter and outside my window, not to mention inside my black little soul, all was dark and cold.  But the meme featured sunshine, summer, flowers, I forget what all, maybe even some fairies and shit.  I thought:  Bob Want.  How Get?

How indeed?  I made a rule:  Whenever I had a negative or hateful thought I had to jump up and sing a song about sunshine.  It would surprise you how many there are.

“Sunlight – on my shoulder – makes me happ –eeeee” –

“Good Day, Sunshine!”

“You are the sunshine of my life …”

So I began to be a lot more cheerful but a lot less, not to put too fine a point on it, sane.  I’d be typing along or reading the newspaper quietly when a tiny frown would crease my brow, evidence of some dark thought therein; then the reading lamp would crash over and the water glass smash as I leapt to my feet bellowing, “I’m in love and it’s a sunny day!”  

            All this was bad enough but then, as it happened, I got Angelina Jolie’s Maleficent from Netflix.  This is a modern spinoff from the fairy tale Sleeping Beauty, based on the tenet that the evil queen wasn’t all that evil, just embittered by having been betrayed in love at an early age.  It was all kind of fluffy, and if the original story had happened within the time frame of the spinoff they’d have had to call it Napping Beauty, or maybe Take Five. 

            But I loved it!  Angelina looked seriously good in the horned headdress, I want one, and moreover the message of forgiveness and healing at the end was just what my Child of Light campaign needed. 

See, before Maleficent becomes Evil, she’s a good fairy with magnificent wings who flies around in the morning sunshine exchanging pleasantries with all the little animals.  So now, when my renditions of “Let the Sunshine In” are not enough to chase away unhappy thoughts, I imagine my jowly middle-aged self underneath those big beautiful wings, flitting around with a little basket over my arm, saying things like:

“Good morning, Mrs. Bee.  Making lots of honey today?”

And:

“Ah, Lady Bug!  And how are the children?”

Those lucky enough to be near me always know when I'm having one of my Happy Fairy moments because I extend my arms and go flap flap flap.  And that’s in addition, I mean, to shrieking, “Keep on the sunny side!  Always on the sunny side!”

So what I’m trying to become is a Child of Light and what I seem to be becoming instead is a traffic hazard; and sometimes when people stare I ask myself:  What If the Journey is Not About Becoming Anything, But About Unbecoming What I’m Not Supposed to Be? 

But then I think to myself, The Older I Get, The Less I Care What Others Think Of Me, And The More I Enjoy Life.

And I keep flapping.

END

Bob Goes On A Diet: An Explanation of "Short Versions"

 Since I’ve been that sorriest specimen of humanity, the out-of-work writer, I’ve tried various cornered-rat survival tactics.  The next seven “short-version” blog entries represent one such.  They are vintage Bob’s Little Acres put on a crash diet, because I was trying to whore up to the syndicates, which want a maximum column length of 600 words.

Repeat readers know it takes me 600 words to say good morning and how’s them hemorrhoids, Mabel?  There have been times I introduced my subject around paragraph 7!

Sadly, though, brevity seems to be not just the soul of wit but the wave of the future.  Such work as I have managed to scare up recently included a 500-word feature (Yes, I said, “500 … word … FEATURE”) and a request to cut a 1200-word piece down to 700.  The whole exercise reminds me of the old rule of composition:

            Tell ‘em what you’re going to tell ‘em; tell ‘em; then tell ‘em what you told ‘em. 

            Nowadays you get the added instruction:  “Choose one of the above.”  You don’t need to be Horace Greeley to figure out which one wins out every time.

            So the old rule was you needed a beginning, a middle and an end.  Now you get the middle if you’re very very lucky.  This is good for me, I reckon, because I used to take forever coming up with just the right intro and I was even crazier about how to say goodbye.  Now?  For my 1200-to-700 miracle, I turned the whole piece into an alphabetical list.

            I haven’t heard yet about that one, and the syndicates are also still playing a little hard to get.  In the meantime, though, I thought I’d post these short-version Bobs on the blog for anybody who wanted to read them.

            It may interest you that I have now taken 318 words to explain to you why I shortened things down!

Introduction to Bob's Little Acre: The Short Version

Welcome to Bob’s Little Acre!  Sit Down.  Not There

By Robin Ford Wallace

There is a saying that nowhere is one closer to God than in a garden. 

Duh.

For those of us whose idea of heaven is rolling in the dirt with a trowel in our hand, it is a statement of the obvious.  Indeed, to stumble across a perennial blooming in the spring, a year after we’d forgotten planting it, convinces us there is something in the universe bigger than we are, that drinks less beer.

But we have not been introduced.  How do you do? 

My name is Robin but the family always called me Bob.  They also called the patch of dirt I gardened Bob’s Little Acre, from my name and from the Erskine Caldwell novel.  It was a literary sort of family and I became a literary sort of gardener, who can squeeze a Shakespeare quote out of a turnip. 

I began gardening as a small, dirty child to whom happiness was in direct and dependant proportion to level of filth, and horticulture a natural progression from mudpies; and in the fullness of time I expect to become the kind of old woman who stumps through the garden in rubber boots and housecoat, booming out such pronouncements as:

“There is nothing like llama excrement for the cultivation of really superior asparagus.”

But where are my manners?  Please sit down.  Not there.  That is in fact the asparagus row, which I have just amended with a generous application of –

Well, never mind.  The llama is, I believe, herbivorous, and as such the ultimate product of its rather complicated digestive system is of no particular olfactory unpleasantness.

But back to Bob’s Little Acre, my garden and by extension this feature, which is a gardening column.  Sort of.

I write it after some years of experience, not yet having reached the rubber-boot and housedress stage, perhaps, but grown far too canny to swallow the happy horse patootie routinely dealt out as gardening wisdom.  That is why I write it.  The world is a wide and wicked place but nowhere is the truth more outraged than in the garden.

“Plant corn on Good Friday,” say old men at hardware stores, whose only agricultural qualification is the possession of overalls.  “You will need the following implements, available on aisle 2.” 

“Prune roses by St. Valentine’s Day to stimulate spring growth,” say gardening magazines on page 7.  “Remember, roses bloom on new wood.”  But turn to p. 41 and you will learn that roses only bloom on old wood, and you had better wait for St. Pat.

“Add lime yearly to correct pH,” write county extension agents.  That trumps every time, because no one has the faintest idea what it means.

You will not find that kind of ruminant excreta in Bob’s Little Acre.  At the heart of the column is the tenet that most of what we know about gardening, much less the universe, is lies, advertising or male answer syndrome.  Without outraging the confines of modesty, I may say that Bob’s Little Acre has become to the county extension agent what Woodward was to Nixon.

The other core precept here is that, though your narrator is as helpless to resist luridly illustrated seed catalogs as the next gardener – a girl must get through the winter somehow – gardening is not commercial.  It is something one does, not something one buys.    

So.  Spring approaches, and with it the siren call of dirt.  I invite you to return to Bob’s Little Acre each issue and roll with me.  

Only do stop brushing at your clothes.  I expect it will wash out. 

            Robin Ford Wallace lives in Deerhead Cove, where she plays quietly in the dirt, disturbing no one.

Hay Gardening: The Short Version

Hay There!  Ruth Stout, Deep Mulching, Beer, Pizza and You

By Robin Ford Wallace

When is the best time to start your garden?  NOW! 

Forgive me if I sound like one of those prim financial pundits who urge you to begin your child’s college fund before you finish developing your own secondary sex characteristics; but if you wish to use the deep-mulch method, as I do, the best time to start is last fall.  Lacking that, you had better get down to the garden this minute. 

I would help but I am afraid my pizza has just arrived.  I will instruct you from the porch, if you will first be kind enough to fetch me a cold beer.

Thank you.  Now, start by marking out your garden.  Next: take hay – old, spoiled hay is fine, and can usually be had for cheap or free – over the plot one foot deep.  It is not necessary to till first, or even to dig up the grass. 

Hmm.  I thought I told them green olives, not black.  Is it youthful inattention, or centuries of inbreeding?

But back to the hay:  Yes, I said not to till, and no, I have not partaken of enough beer to impair my faculties.  This is the famous deep-mulch method Ruth Stout, grandmother of organic gardening, described in her No-Work Gardening Book.  Ruth was the sister of Rex Stout, author of the Nero Wolfe mysteries, and wrote just as entertainingly as her brother. 

Her idea was simple:  Instead of tilling, ones uses a thick layer of hay to smother grass and weeds.  This perfect mulch, via its constant composting process, also adds nutrients to the soil, improves friability and fosters earthworms. 

            I started using the Stout method in 2001, when, for reasons I no longer remember, I bought this house.  The home site had been made by bulldozing a flat place on the side of a mountain, incidentally scraping it bare of trees, undergrowth and any vestige of topsoil.  It was a sun-baked little acre of red clay, covered by patchy tufts of pasture grass, except where it wasn’t.  The last earthworm had died of loneliness. 

That October, I buried the garden area in 12 inches of hay.

            Mulching in the fall gives the hay a head start.  In the beginning it is high and fluffy, with weeds underneath.  By April, the weeds are gone and the hay has compacted and composted.  Underneath is a moist black layer you might call dirty hay, or hayey dirt.

            To start transplants such as tomatoes or peppers, you simply part the hay and stick your plant in, drawing the hay back around it.  It keeps the ground moist so you need not water, chokes out other growth so you need not weed, and nourishes the garden so you need not fertilize.

            To put in seed crops such as corn, squash, okra or beans, you just mark out rows, then push the seed down through the mulch with your finger.  The big seedlings push up  through the hay without breaking a sweat, and so do root crops like potatoes and asparagus.

            If you do not start until spring, the hay will still work as long as you give it three or four weeks its miracles to perform.  I frequently make new flowerbeds this way. 

            Does the hay method work?  It has worked so well for me that I not only have rich black dirt where the red clay used to be, earthworms enough to start a bait store, and bumper crops of vegetables, I also have the leisure, while others sweat behind their hoes, to sit here on the porch swilling beer.

And no hurry, but I am ready for another.

            Robin Ford Wallace lives in Deerhead Cove, where she plays quietly in the dirt, disturbing no one.