A Nandina Jolly Christmas: Deck the Halls, Damn the Bankers and Vive La Revolution!

Have a Nandina Jolly Christmas, and Vive La Revolution!  A Blue Christmas at Bob’s

By Robin Ford Wallace

            Why holly?

            Why should holly, a vicious shrub, one might say the pit bull of the plant world, reign unchallenged as the botanical symbol of Christmas?  Why not, say, nandina?

            Nandina, like holly, is green during the winter and, also like holly, sports attractive red berries during the Yuletide.  But, unlike holly, nandina is a nice plant, adorned not with holly’s glossy green daggers but with smooth, gracefully elongated leaves that never in the plant’s long and distinguished history have drawn blood or tears from a barefoot child.

            Clearly, the answer is that nandina, for all its virtues, rhymes with neither “jolly” nor “oh by gosh by golly.”  Here, we must conclude bitterly, is one more reason to dislike Christmas carols, in that they have elevated the murderous holly to stardom while dooming the better plant to horticultural obscurity. 

            Yes, Gentle Reader, one clearly woke up this morning in one of one’s more contemplative moods, didn’t one?  These cogitations have in the past yielded such epiphanies as that tutti frutti is not a made-up word but Italian for ‘all fruits”; and that the scene in The Flintstones where Fred shouts “Wilma!” while locked out of the house is an homage to Stanley shouting “Stella!” in the same predicament in A Streetcar Named Desire.

            Perhaps someday these cerebrations may turn up something of actual benefit to mankind; meanwhile, though, the question I was contemplating before I got sidetracked by holly was:

            Why five?

            Last week’s Bob’s Little Acre, which – alas! – became mired in doomsday predictions even before it meandered hopelessly into a morass of hot pink underwear, was originally meant to explore the lore of numbers. 

We know that 10 became the bedrock of mathematics because it is the number of fingers we have to count on; and that 12 likely owes its significance to the dozen complete lunar cycles in each year; but why should 13 be bad luck and seven good?

            The answers to those mysteries may be lost in antiquity, but it is only recently that five has emerged as a “hot number,” particularly in the world of nutrition.  Previously we had the Four Basic Food Groups and the Three Square Meals.  Now suddenly we saw cookbooks with “healthy recipes of five ingredients or fewer,” and cooking contests along the same theme.

Why five?  Out of the vasty deep of BLA archives emerged the answer, an anti-processed-food precept by Slow Food guru Michael Pollan quoted years ago in this very space.  Pollan said we should avoid products that contain more than five ingredients, or that contain high high-fructose corn syrup at all.

Ironically, my “healthy” five-ingredient cookbook calls for, as one of the five, “1 white cake mix.”  Thus your narrator killed serious grocery store time counting the ingredients in a cake mix, losing track at 19, most of them with bewildering chemical names of which we may be reasonably certain dear Michael would disapprove.

Worse, Big Food has now hijacked the five-ingredient rule as its own.  You can now buy any overprocessed Mcjunk, from canned soup to ice cream, under the proud slogan:  “Only five ingredients!”

But still the restless intellect quests on:  Is not this “five jive” also responsible for the Five Tips gardening feature with which our local daily newspaper has lately been tormenting me into slobbering madness each Saturday?

The Freep’s Five Gardening Tips are generally useless and sometimes they are not even five.  One week they were:  Five To Plant For Cut Flowers, consisting of (1) roses, (2) tulips, (3) daisies, (4) cosmos and (5) mixed flowers. 

Would not “mixed flowers” bring the number up to six or seven at the least (she shrieked in mathematical indignation)?  It is worse than the cake mix!

Most weeks, though, in keeping with the newspaper’s concept of the gardening section (throw-away space between ad spots), the Five Tips don’t fool around with horticulture but devote themselves to selling products.  Thus last week’s theme was:  Five Christmas Gifts For The Woman Gardener On Your List.

The reader can imagine this woman gardener’s contempt for the pricey designer garden swag recommended; if Bob’s Little Acre has one message (and honey, it does not have five), it is that gardening is something you do, not something you buy. 

Oddly, though, this is not where I go into my yearly diatribe against the crass materialism of Christmas.  I lack the heart, having been in deep mourning all weekend for a material possession I can’t have.

“This isn’t like you,” said my husband.  “Do you really think a house can make you happy?”

The answer was:  Yes.  Rabid antimaterialist though I am, I’m afraid I fall in love with houses as suddenly and violently as with, say, men (though fortunately with similar infrequency). 

Anyway our present house has never altogether suited me – I married it on the rebound – and now I’ve found the one of my dreams.  But our bank informed me Friday afternoon that we must sell house one before borrowing for house two.  Despite our excellent credit history, the bank does not trust people of our income level to pay back loans.

What embittered me was that I had spent Friday morning in my journalistic capacity chronicling the fortunes of a local development where banks had in fact trusted $26 million in loans on mountainside land, mostly without roads, electricity or running water, to investors who had never even intended to pay it back.

Our financial system has gone wrong!  It is like the five-ingredient rule, meant to warn against processed food and used instead to sell it.  It is like a holiday meant to celebrate generosity and resulting instead in fistfights over Xboxes.

And it is like holly.  Sometimes it hurts.

Anyway, merry Christmas!  I intend to spend the holiday delivering cookies to the charming young people at Occupy Chattanooga.  The world needs change.

END

           

"Armageddon" Tired of All These Doomsday Predictions! Of 2012, 2013 and Brightly Colored Panties

    Missed this week's Sentinel deadline, but I had fnished this Bob against all odds last night and by God am posting it anyway. 
     I'm not really afraid of 2012.  I would be, but I can't fear that far ahead.  Right now I'm just afraid of snow.  Remember how Christmas dinner got disrupted last year by a blizzard?  Then, if 2012 arrives and we do make it around to spring (a friend astonished me last weekend by making plans for March; as far as I'm concerned March is still hypothetical), I will then be afraid of tornados.
    But my point here is it doesn't do any GOOD to be afraid.  It's not so much that it's virtuous to be brave; it's just that we might as well.

“Armageddon” Tired Of All These Doomsday Predictions: 

Wherein the Gardener Marches Bravely Into the Future In Bazooka Joe Panties

By Robin Ford Wallace

            A turtle, badly shaken, walked into the sheriff’s office and reported he had just been mugged by three snails.

            “What did they look like?” said the sheriff.  “Tell me exactly what happened.”

            “I don’t know,” said the turtle, shaking his head dazedly.  “It all happened so fast.”

            That’s a joke from an article I read recently about a scientist who researches the nature of time.  The guy’s a regular riot.  He gets his test subjects to go on scary carnival rides because he’s noticed time slows time down when you’re falling to your doom.  That’s why survivors say things like, “I saw my life pass before my eyes,” and also, presumably, why action movies use a lot of slo-mo.

            Me, I feel like the turtle.  My life is whizzing away in fast-mo.  I must say, though, it doesn’t worry me like it used to.  The way time flits by, how am I supposed to take it seriously?  

This is my least favorite season, with its bleak gray weather and blink-and-miss-it days.  But I don’t bother going into black depressions anymore.  I can’t react that fast!  The last few years, it seems like before I’m through sussing out which winter clothes will still do and which I’m too fat for, bingo, up come the jonquils. 

            But as this particular year rollercoasts to an end I’m frankly a little worried.  It’s not so much that I’ll pine for 2011.  That would be like missing gangrene, or junior high school.  It was a good year for growing tomatoes but otherwise?  Tornados and tragedies!  Good riddance to 2011 and the horse it rode in on.

            What we have coming up instead, though, is:  2012.  Those who follow such things know that according to the Maya Long Count Calendar, time will reset itself to zero in 2012.  And astronomers point out that at the 2012 winter solstice – Dec. 21 – the sun will be aligned with the exact center of the Milky Way for the first time in 26,000 years. 

What does this all mean?  Some people say nothing, others that we will enter a new age of love and enlightenment, and still others that the earth will colide with a black hole, a passing asteroid or a planet called "Nibiru," halting our planet’s own rotation for 5.3 days, displacing the earth’s crust and destroying civilization as we know it. 

All right, that is mostly being said by a woman in Wisconsin who says she is receiving the information through a communication device implanted in her brain by aliens during one of the periods they had abducted her. 

And she originally announced Nibiru would hit Earth on May 27, 2003.  About a week before that day she got on the radio and advised people to euthanize their housepets in preparation.  "A dog makes a good meal," she said helpfully. 

When Nibiru kept its distance, the Wisconsin woman admitted her story was a “white lie, to fool the Establishment.”   The Establishment, she said, had planned to impose martial law when the catastrophe did strike, trapping us in the cities where we would be crushed like eggshells.

Now that 2012 is upon us the Wisconsin woman has trotted Nibiru back out.  There is no accounting for Yankees.  I expect it’s got something to do with the winters up there.  But there are a lot of people, mystics and conspiracy theorists and Mel Gibson, who are saying even weirder stuff about 2012.

There is no accounting for Mel Gibson, either, but what happens if we do survive 2012 is:  2013.  I was worried about 2013 before I even heard about Nibiru.

“Triskaidekaphobia” is the word for the fear of the number 13.  It’s a ridiculous superstition that victimizes the ignorant, the primitive and certain Dade County Sentinel garden columnists.  

I developed triskaidekaphobia during the unhappiest period of my life: when I had a real job.  I had trained as a court reporter to support my writing habit only to learn that after a day of grinding out transcripts I was as capable of writing as I was of pinpointing the arrival of Nibiru.

The work oppressed me.  I would pray, “Please, don’t let anything terrible happen to me today.”  Because terrible things happened to me all the time.  Equipment failed!  Juries hung!  Once I got the top of my skirt caught in the top of my pantyhose and walked into a deposition showing my panties to a roomful of attorneys so reptilian their membranes nictitated.

            But I don’t suppose there was much to see really.  Cowed by life, I dressed in clothes so repressed somebody once asked me if I belonged to a sect, and even underneath I wore conservative black or dark gray “deposition panties.”  (It was only much later I realized I should have called them “legal briefs.”) 

The panty incident happened on the 13^th of one month, and so did the time my car slid down an embankment, and so did the time the tape recorder stuck and the steno battery went out on the same day.  It got to where I refused to go anywhere at all on the 13^th.

But we can’t all stay home the whole year of 2013!  Even supposing, of course, we survive 2012.

            So what to do?  Well, what can we do?  If there’s one thing that life, especially this annus horribilis, has showed me, it’s that whatever is coming comes anyway.  How does it help to wear depressing underwear?

            So let us march into the future with courage, cheer and panties the defiant pink of bubblegum.  Time does anyway fly, so at the very worst Jan. 1, 2014, will find us lying amid the post-Nibiru rubble muttering:

“It all happened so fast.”

END

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

A Thanksgiving Message: We’re Grateful for the Grocery, But Where is the Ench?

     Regular blog visitors, if any, will recognize this ‘un from previous postings.  I had been working on a vitriolic Radio-Free Robin on the Dade Board of Education’s book-bannin’ ways.  But I couldn’t get the tone just right – it’s hard to be amusin’ when you are talking about a war on books waged by people in charge of for crying out loud education!  Plus I thought maybe they’d reverse their decision at Monday night’s board meeting, and I’d have to say, “Never mind!”

     (Actually I went to the B of E meeting last night and the book banning was never even mentioned!  Despite the fact there has been nothing but media hype since I covered the ish Nov. 7 – the Times Free Press in Chattanooga picked it up and splashed their own story about it  across the front page of their Sunday edish, then they had an editorial about it the following Tuesday.  Most recently there were two letters in the Freep this Sunday as well as one last week in our rag. Anyway I wasted a couple of hours on our most tragically busy day of the week, leading me to create the adage:  “Some days you get the elephant in the room; some days the elephant in the room gets you.” )

     In any case, with the Thanksgiving holiday coming up I decided something light and cheerful was more appropriate nohow.  So I cobbled this together for this week’s print edition by adding a little new stuff to that piece about the Ench I had posted here as a Boblet back in maybe September.     

A Thanksgiving Message:  We’re Grateful for the Grocery, but Where is the Ench?

By Robin Ford Wallace

            When my friend Madelyn married her longtime boyfriend they did the thing quietly in a government

building.  But this was California, San Francisco in fact, so even the no-frills civil ceremony took on a certain

sparkle. 

Mad’s brother happened to be in town so they had the family element, and just when she started to wonder if they shouldn’t have added a religious component as well, who should march in but some Buddhist monks?  Perhaps they were applying for a permit of some kind, but this being San Francisco maybe they had just sensed from the air they were needed.

            Anyway I have digressed from my point, which is how happy my friend was.  In her email she wrote:  “And suddenly there we were, in San Francisco getting married, both of us grinning like idiots.”

            Years later another couple of friends got married, this time with a big sloppy wedding in a pasture so everybody could watch, and as the vows were spoken I could see the same uncontrollable happiness shining from the same moronic grins.  I was so happy for them I cried a little.

            But it was only this past September that I experienced that same unstoppable, uncontainable, stupid-making joy for myself.  I was so thrilled to be living in that particular minute in that particular place that I realized I, too, was grinning like an idiot.  I was exalted and exhilarated and ecstatic and –

            – walking into the Ingle’s Market, which had recently reopened after four months’ closure following the tornados.

            Did you think I was going to tell you about my own wedding?  That was roughly 100 years ago, and though I was of course very happy to have been vouchsafed a husband against all odds, what I remember about the Big Day is mostly social angst and bursting out of my (size 8) wedding dress during the reception.  I expect it was the canapés.

            Anyway, back to the Ingle’s.  It was the day after the torrential rains of Labor Day, which had turned the air so unseasonably cool you had to wear a jacket.  I had just trotted around Cloudland Canyon with my dogs for the first time since the summer got so hot.  The leaves had already turned color from the drought, so it was like finding the door into autumn.  I felt that I was living at the throbbing heart of the universe.

            Then on the way home, I was able – finally! – to pop into the Ingle’s at the foot of the mountain to pick up what I needed for supper.  During those months after the tornado I’d had to detour to one of the other grocery stores in town, and though I knew I was lucky not to have lost anything worse in the storm – my house, say, or someone I loved – the hole left where my pet grocery store was supposed to be was like a nagging sore that wouldn’t heal.

            Now, finally the lights were back on, the parking lot was repaved, and when I approached the doors swung wide automatically, opened either by an electric eye or friendly invisible servants – I should care which? – to welcome me back.  Ingle’s was open, God was in his heaven and all was right with the world.

            I’ll admit, the new self-checkout stations they put in during the renovation worried me a little at first.  I heard customers grumbling:  “They’re not opening the real registers to encourage us to use the self-checkouts.”

“What that encourages me to do is go back to Wal-Mart, hon.”

So I fretted a little, and made tentative plans for an Ingle’s grand opening follow-up article called “The Agony and the Ecstasy:  Is Dade Ready for the Challenge of Self-Checkout?”

            But that was a minor concern, one that was swept away in the tide of joy, welcome and store-brand ration-style dog food I had found no substitute for anywhere else.  It’s embarrassing to be so happy about a grocery store but I’m old enough by now to understand you take your happiness where you find it.  Plus did you see what they did with the produce department?

It don’t get no better than this, I thought.  And that’s when I noticed all was not perfect in paradise:  The “Ench” was gone!

There used to be a bench on the sidewalk beside the newspaper boxes.  Somebody must have sold advertising on it because it was festooned with the names of local businesses.  But somebody else had very carefully, very meticulously, removed the first letter of every word, so what you read was:  ENEVA’S ESTAURANT,  I think maybe OORE’S UNERAL OME, but the one I particularly remember was ONY AND ELLY EATHERS OOFING. 

I expect maybe my sense of humor is fairly basic but that always killed me.  I can remember dozens of time I’d stop by the Ingle’s on the way home from some awful meeting where somebody had hurt my feelings, or from some dreary day that had demonstrated to me the utter futility of going on, and I’d pass the “Ench” and see ONY AND ELLY EATHERS OOFING and practically pee myself all over again.  There is nothing like ONY AND ELLY EATHERS OOFING to cheer a girl up.

Am I the only one who misses it?  If not, I urge fellow concerned citizens to join me in persuading Ingle’s to BRING BACK THE ENCH!

As Thanksgiving approaches I realize how profoundly grateful I am for all I still have, my life, my loved ones, the friendly little town I live in, the raw almonds in Ingle’s new bulk goods section.  

But I would be ust a ittle appier f Ngle’s ould ive ack the Ench!

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

Oldie: A Little Light Flower Fiction

I’m posting this oldie on the blogsite because I looked it up to quote from in the Radio-Free Robin I’m writing and noticed it wasn’t already on here.  It’s really not my best work but I’m putting it up for a couple of reasons. 

First, after the Dade board of ed’s decision to commence banning books being taught by its English teachers, I got interested in profanity and sexual content in literature, and I was going to use the opening paragraph to prove that even a garden column can be objectionable if you try hard enough.

Second, the guy with the ski poles I mentioned toward the end of this column as being a man I knew slightly later became a better friend.  Some local readers may recognize him.  I thought it was interesting that I was dead wrong about the antiaphrodisiacal effect of the trekkers.  He does all right in that department ...  

A LITTLE LIGHT FLOWER FICTION

By Robin Ford Wallace

            It was a happening kind of night at the Heliotrope, a working-class dive where angiosperms stopped to vegetate an hour or two after a hard day down at the plant.  Herb walked into the bar wilted from a 12-hour shift photosynthesizing, but when he saw Iris sipping a mimosa at the bar he suddenly felt fresh as a  daisy.  As he considered the lily, his stamens became turgid.  Whoa!  This babe was in full bloom!

            “Hey, sweet pea,” said Herb, planting himself on the stool beside her.  “How’s about a little cross-pollination?”

            This is the beginning of a story I started some years ago, for reasons that I now forget.  Perhaps it was to take advantage of the literary market’s glaring paucity of racy fiction about plants; or perhaps I simply misunderstood the meaning of the term “garden writer.”  In fact, I’m not sure I’ve got it right even now. 

Regular readers of this feature, if any, have no doubt figured out by now that it’s not a normal gardening column.  One reason for that is your narrator’s dislike of much mainstream garden writing, which, if  you take out the merchandising plugs and the fantastically boring quotes from interviewees, often boils down to something like:  Flowers are pretty and you ought to grow some.

            So perhaps I go too far in the other direction, telling fantastically boring stories about my relations and making up tawdry little tales of horticultural romance.  But I am hardly the first to think of stories starring plants.  Folklore is full of them. 

In Greek mythology, Narcissus was a handsome young man the nymphs were all crazy for, but he spurned their affections and instead fell in love with the best-looking thing he’d ever seen, his own reflection in a pool.  The reflection appeared to feel exactly the same way, but as a practical matter consummation was not in the cards, so the young man pined away and the gods turned him into the narcissus flower. 

I probably would have turned him into something rather worse, but the reasoning of the Greek gods was always oblique.  Grant them amorous favors, for example, and you are likely to get turned into a white cow, when really you would have preferred jewelry or a new car.

            Sweet William and Black-Eyed Susan were apparently a hot item in another story, which confused me because I thought Sweet William was the one who died for love of Barbara Allen.  Well, maybe old Bill flitted, as it were, from flower to flower.

            Forget-me-nots, I read, were named when a medieval German knight, going to the banks of the Danube to gather the small blue flowers for his lady love, was carried off by a flash flood.  As he was borne off by the torrent, he tossed the bouquet to his squeeze and shouted, “Forget me not!”

            I was leery of this legend.  For one thing, a more practical exclamation would have been, “Help!”  And secondly, whatever he said, it stands to reason it would have been in German. 

I’m sensitive on such issues, having believed until rather late in life that Napoleon’s last words were “Able was I ere I saw Elba.”  Finally it struck me that if you were going to squander the last moments of life composing a palindrome, you would probably do it in a language you could actually speak.  But I looked it up, and the word for forget-me-not in German is Vergissmeinnicht, which means the same thing.

            I read a charming French story in which the main characters were a bluebell and a poppy.  It involved shepherd lads they wanted to marry, evil rich men who wanted to marry them, and very little that had much to do with them being a poppy and a bluebell, a fact which, if dwelled upon, would certainly limit their romantic possibilities.

             I completely understand this human compulsion to make up ridiculous stories about flowers.  There is so little else we can do with them.  They are so wildly attractive we want to eat them, or something, but that would be counterproductive and so we instead spin tales.

            And flowers do lend themselves to anthropomorphism.  Zinnias look to me like tall, friendly country girls who wear too much makeup and call everyone “hon.”  Pansies would be those small, mean women who smile sweetly and then say terrible things behind your back, and roses impossible prima donnas who are allergic to everything and are always demanding that you turn the thermostat up. 

            At this time of year, my favorite flowers are wildflowers, and at any season my favorite stories are ones that embarrass people I know, so I will conclude by telling a flower story of my own.

A couple of weeks ago I was at my favorite wildflower spot when I met a man I know slightly.  With him was a woman he was courting, and I thought how clever he was to bring a date to this place where bluebells and poppies bloomed riotously among lush white bloodroot, reducing your narrator, and indeed most women, to girlish shrieks and swoons of admiration.  The sly dog.

            But in his hands were those ski poles that hikers use to hike really fast, and instead of dallying among the flowers with his lady, he took off up the mountain at 90 mph, leaving her to follow as best she could, eating his dust.  Perhaps he sought to impress her with his speed, but if I’d been in her shoes I don’t think he’d have made much time.  Among poppies and bluebells, ski poles distinctly limit romantic possibilities.

            Well, I seem to have wasted some serious column inches here telling flower stories without imparting much useful information.  I had better close with something pithy.  How about:

            Flowers are pretty.  You should grow some.

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

Of Sweet Potatoes, Potatoes Not So Sweet, and an Evil Woman Named Ruby

     Jerry says I can't count on people to know the Ruby song:  We have officially reached farthood and what we take for popular culture nobody around us has a clue about.  He cited as evidence the failure of a young friend to recognize the "Green Acres" theme song.  (Gasp.)  But I was shaken up myself at Halloween when a sweet young thing of 25 I was volunteering with at the Canyon didn't know the Roller Derby Queen song even though -- brace yourself -- she had dressed up for the holiday as:  A Roller Derby queen.  

     I mentioned this to my friend Mary who's three years older and SHE DIDN'T KNOW IT EITHER.  So apparently the only two people who know the damn thing are me and Jim Croce and he's dead.

     FYI, youngsters, the RDQ was 5 foot 6, 215, a bleached-blonde mama with a streak of mean.  Most notably, she was built like a refrigerator with a head. 

     Now.  Ruby.  "Ruby" was a Kenny Rogers song wherein a paralyzed man watches helplessly as the woman he loves whores herself up to go out and "take her love to town."  He wants to shoot her but, as luck would have it, he can't move.  I'm not quite sure why I always found that so funny. 

     Anyway it's one of those ear worm songs you can't expunge from your consciousness, and I have never met a woman named Ruby without suspecting her of being Evil.   

   

Of Sweet Potatoes, Potatoes Not So Sweet And An Evil Woman Named Ruby:

Wherein A Gardener Takes Her Love To Town

By Robin Ford Wallace

            You’ve painted up your lips and rolled and curled your tinted hair.

Ruby, are you contemplating going out somewhere?

            OK, OK.  I get the idea.  Turn the damn thing off.  Infidelity is bad enough.  Country music just makes it worse.

Country music makes everything worse.

“Ruby” in particular has got to be one of the smarmiest songs ever written.  “You’ve painted up your lips,” indeed!  As if a little makeup means a girl is “taking her love to town.”  Honey, this is the South.  Nobody goes to the dump without lipstick. 

Nobody over 40, anyway.   I never painted much when it was a matter of gilding the lily but now that we’re talking sows’ ears and silk purses I get through buckets of the stuff. 

Not just lipstick, either, but the works, eyeliner and foundation and that gop you put on underneath to fill in the cracks.  They used to call it concealer, which sounded furtive and possibly illegal, the cosmetic equivalent of gun silencers or hush money, but I could live with that; who at my age has nothing to hide? 

Nowadays, though, they’ve changed the name to “primer” and they’ve put cutesy little brushes or rollers on the bottles so as you stand there in front of the mirror basically spackling yourself you feel not so much that you are primping as that you are shoring up your crumblin’ façade.  God, I hate getting old!

And that’s what all of it is about, the tubes and the brushes and the Age-Defyin’ Revlon, not so much feminine vanity as the reverse, a merciful reluctance to subject innocent humanity to the ruts and potholes left on a girl’s face by time’s winged chariot.  The line in the Ruby song that irritates me the worst is:  “The wants and the needs of a woman your age, Ruby I realize.”  Ha!  Like Kenny Rogers has any clue how it feels to be female, and aging. 

Not that it’s any of Mr. Rogers’ business but yes, my wants and needs do include hair tint of some vaguely convincing shade, not too light because blondness in a person of my coloring really does have a certain “Want a date?” connotation, not too dark or my face looks like the Parthenon.  Not as in classic beauty, I mean, but as in white and 2000 years old.

But let’s stop beating that particular horse.  I’m not mad at Kenny Rogers, I’m mad at you. 

Did it ever occur to you that our little problem might not be the fault of my painted lips, tinted hair and general air of geriatric sluttiness?  That some itsy-bitsy part of the blame might be yours for leaving me high and dry when I  needed you most?  “Still need some company,” my sagging butt!  I could have used some this summer. 

How many times did I seek you out in June, lips curved in pleasurable anticipation?  You weren’t there.

And in July, when I reached for you in the sweet-smelling hay, what did I find?  Nothing much.

And in September, when I gave it one last, desperate try?  You just lay there, doing precisely and profoundly nothing.

As you have for years now!  Really, is it any wonder I looked for comfort elsewhere?

I didn’t have far to look.  There, right where you should have been, was your natural replacement, ruddy and robust while you were wan and white, strong and sweet while you were anemic and atrophied, above all there for me when you were MIA.

So yes, I’ve moved on, so you might as well put a cork in the “Ruby” crap.  I am not an Evil Woman and unlike the man in the song fate has not left you a crippled invalid.  

Fate has instead left you a hopeless vegetable.

            Specifically, a potato.

All right, Gentle Reader, if you have not inferred by now that our subject this week is the relative merits of the Irish potato and ipomea batatas, the sweet potato, I would remind you, gently, that this a gardening column.  Sort of.  What else would we be talking about? 

Here is the situation:  This summer, for the third year in a row, my potato crop failed miserably, while meanwhile my sweet potatoes ate New York.  So from necessity I began using sweet potatoes for many dishes I usually make with white, such as my famous roasted potato chunks.   

One day I used such pathetic few white potatoes as we harvested this year to make a batch of the chunks, and eating them I realized I actually preferred the sweet potato version.  White potatoes require hefty infusions of garlic and herbs.  With sweet potatoes, add salt and olive oil and you’re done.

Also this summer I learned that sweet potato leaves are edible.  You cook them like spinach or any other greens, and they’re not just good for you, they’re good, too. 

Irish potato foliage just lies there and withers.

It was thoughts like that one that led to my feelings of disloyalty.  Longtime readers may recall that in “Sex, Lies and Potatoes,” I dotingly misquoted:  “Ah, Spud, shall we be true to one another?”

            Apparently not.

Anyway, here is how you make the chunks:

            Peel or scrub sweet potatoes and cut into biggish cubes.  Toss with salt and a couple of tablespoons of olive oil.  Roast for 30 minutes in a 400-degree oven alongside whatever else you are cooking.  If you let the edges burn a bit they are particularly good.

            Compare these with the blander Irish potato version and I warn you, no matter how big a spud fan you are, you, too, may end up taking your love to town.

END

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

Radio-Free Robin: That Side was Made For You and Me

     I was trying to get this "Radio-Free Robin" column done in time for last Wednesday's Sentinel because Friends of Cloudland Canyon State Park was going to have an information table at Trenton Tree City's "Trees for Dade" concert in Jenkins Park this Saturday.  I didn't have any idea what kind of information we'd pass out but I did want to write something on the importance of public lands.  Then I got busy doing real news -- no snorts of derision, please; for those of us for whom Dade is the center of the universe it is, too, news -- and I didn't finish in time for the event. 
     But really that's just as well.  As it happens nobody else soldiered up to man the table (maybe thinking I would, since I'd suggested it) so FOP didn't even participate in the event.  And anyway you know me, I got to thinking about NO TRESPASSING signs and Woody Guthrie and pretty soon my piece was about hobos and my Uncle Bus and the American character so I don't know how much of a case I made for public lands anyway.  
        The title of the piece is from the often-left-out verse of the Guthrie song about the NO TRESPASSING sign.

And On The Other Side, I Didn’t See Nothin’:  That Side was Made For You and Me

By Robin Ford Wallace

            My Uncle Bus was an actual hobo.

            His real name was George Washington Ford.  That was a mouthful so they called him Buster, which in turn got foreshortened to Bus.  That’s the story of the name but when I was a child I imagined it was because he was always traveling around the country on Greyhounds.

            I remember Bus with dark curly hair around a bald spot, wearing green wino pants and a flannel shirt, in need of a shave.  He was thin and walked with a limp, having been shot during World War II.  He got a pension for that and with it he financed his travels and his whiskey.

He’d come stay with us sometimes and he was like a cartoon, always putting on airs that contrasted weirdly with his hobohood.  We lived in a town called Smyrna but Bus called it Sumatra, I think because it had more syllables.  He affected to adore opera and once when they were young Bus told my father as he set out on his wanderings, “I’m off to study with Einstein.”

            He was a character all right and I wish I could say I appreciated him.  I didn’t though, I had a prissy girl-dread of him.  When I came last to supper I had to sit next to him and he made horrible eating noises, little subvocal cries of joy mixed in with smacks and heavy breathing and clicks from his dentures:  “Mmm.  Yeah.  Oh boy.  Click.”  I would cringe myself inside out.

            Probably Bus was rusty at eating because he devoted most of his practice time to drinking instead.  Once when Bus popped a beer in the morning my father fussed at him: “I’m not asking you to stop drinking.  I’m only asking you to wait until lunch.”

            Bus famously replied, “Lawrence, why torture ourselves?”

Bus wasn’t much of a role model and I didn’t grow up to be much of a hobo.  One of my favorite comic strips features a cat and a dog who have dug out under the fence.  Emerging into the great world beyond, the dog shouts, “We’re free!  We’re free!”  The cat says, “We’re homeless.”

I am the cat.  I recall thinking during a once-in-a-lifetime dream vacation through Europe:  “Only nine more days.”  Constant travel makes me feel lost, and constipated.  Anyway gardeners are never really happy without their little acre of dirt to roll in.

            Still, there’s enough hobo in me that I walk and walk and walk.  And lately I’ve noticed that a lot of places around here I used to do that are gone.  Private dirt roads have been gated, and I had to give up my favorite walk on a quite public paved road after a couple with vicious dogs moved in.  Their dogs would attack my dogs, then the couple themselves would come out and attack me:  “Stay home where you belong!” they said.

            I’m hobo enough to resent that.  And I’m not the only one.  One of our elected officials told me how a representative of one of the new luxury developments here complained to him about trespassers.  “Your Dade County locals need a little reeducation on where they can and can’t go,” he said. 

The elected official found that just as charming as I did.  Reckon he’s part hobo too?

            I think most of us are.  Uncle Bus and my father came from West Virginia, a state where big conglomerates called land companies used confusing legal instruments called “broad sheet deeds” to swindle mountaineers out of acreage they’d farmed for generations.  This they sold to lumber companies and mining companies, and both began raping the land.  As for the poor hillbillies, they were either displaced or enslaved. 

I’m not saying it was corporate greed that made Uncle Bus into a hobo.  My father said it wasn’t even the war wound, that Bus was always peculiar.  But corporate gobbling of the resources caused a vast statewide hobohood as West Virginians took off for pastures new.  My old man ended up teaching school in Georgia and the other brother selling insurance in Ohio.

Much the same thing happened all across America in the Great Depression.  Banks foreclosed on farms and homeless families went a-hoboing.  And long before that, the notorious land enclosures in the British isles made the rich richer by robbing ordinary people of their livelihood, sending many hoboing across the ocean to colonize the New World. 

So really, from the beginning America has been a nation of hobos, tossed out of one place and roaming around looking for a better one, only to bump into signs that say Stay Out!  Private Property!  

            Where am I going with this?  Where else?  Please join me in supporting our public lands.

Private property is sacred in America, but from the very beginning our nation was smart enough to set aside tracts that no one can chase us off of because we all own them in common.  Personally, I walk off my hobo restlessness at Cloudland Canyon State Park.  My friend Greg has a slightly worse case and he walked up one side of America and down the other on the Appalachian and Pacific Crest Trails. 

It’s wonderful we can do that in America and it’s probably also an essential outlet for the hobo side of our national character.  Greg said on the AT the only way to tell recreational hikers from the homeless was Gore-Tex.   

So in a way my Uncle Bus is a symbol of America just as much as that other famous uncle, the one in the star-spangled top hat.  When I close my eyes I see them together, Bus with his wino pants and his proffered whiskey bottle, saying:

“Sam, why torture ourselves?”

            Robin Ford Wallace generally plays quietly in the dirt, disturbing no one.  Things change.

Boblet: Of Composting, and Other Rot

            It’s now official:  No one listens to a word I say!

            My adored friend Mary, who swears she loves Bob’s Little Acre and never misses a single one, told me on Saturday she had bought a composter.  It was fairly pricey but she felt confident it would do the job because it came highly recommended by another friend of ours.

            Who – get this – also swears she reads Bob’s Little Acre.

            For crying out loud, folks!  What do you think I’m doing, sitting here in the mud blathering on just to hear myself talk?  

I know that not even the most devoted Bob reader will agree with every little opinion espoused by its narrator, not even BLA’s abiding message, which is that gardening is something you do, not something you buy.

But strictly from the perspective of thrift, shouldn’t people at least remember that  I’ve written not one but two columns testifying to the utter uselessness of commercial composters?

The first column I wrote was about my early experiments with composting, when I had a secret lust for one of those barrel composters advertised in the back of gardening magazines.  The second was years later, when someone had actually give me one, having become disgusted with it himself.

That composter never composted anything – or at least, nothing I put in it ever composted until I gritted my teeth and emptied it, maggoty and rancid, onto the ground, where hay on top and worms on bottom eventually did what they have been doing for millions of years.

We still have the damn thing, sitting out in “Jerry’s Little Acre,” the Tobacco-Road motif section of our yard given over to my husband’s detritus, about which I nag him bitterly and without effect and over which we may eventually divorce.  He says he’s found a new sucker – I mean, given the composter to another gardener – and is just waiting for an opportune occasion to deliver it. 

Meanwhile, it sits there useless and unattractive and going nowhere, so durable and eternal you wonder how in hell anybody ever got the idea that heavy-duty industrial-grade plastic was a suitable medium for organic decomposition.

Well.  I begin to sound a bit shrill, even to myself.  It shouldn’t surprise me by now not to be listened to.  I am married.  In any case, I have given myself the satisfaction of reposting my first compost article below, as well as the second column which I don’t believe I have ever put on this blog site. 

I don’t suppose anyone will pay any more attention than they did the first time.  I expect everyone thinks I am just talking a lot of rot.

END

ANYBODY WANT TO BUY A FABULOUS PATENTED COMPOSTUMBLERÒ?

ANYBODY WANT TO BUY A FABULOUS PATENTED COMPOSTUMBLERÒ?

By Robin Ford Wallace

            “Cadillac DeVille, ’05, White.  Loaded.” 

That, in 8-point type, on a tiny scrap of newspaper, is what I read one sunny morning in August.  I cussed.

            Not that I’ve got anything against Cadillacs, and not that I’m ungrateful, at my age, to be able to read 8-point with the naked big browns, if only in bright sunlight.

But the scrap of paper shouldn’t have said anything at all.  It shouldn’t have even been a scrap of paper.  I had just pulled it from my fabulous patented ComposTumblerÒ, where, according to the user’s manual, it should have turned into “nutrient-rich, sweet-smelling compost in as little as 14 days.”

It had been two months.

In the past, all my compost had been made using the stodgy old-fashioned method – step 1, empty kitchen garbage onto dirt, step 2, walk away – and it had never been perfect.  It had little white flecks in it that were still visibly eggshells, and sometimes tiny colored ovals where I’d forgotten to take the tags off fruit.  So heaven knows, I had no unrealistic expectations about compost.  

But it shouldn’t try to sell you a Caddy.

The ComposTumblerÒ is a vented barrel suspended on a raised framework, with a crank that you turn to make it go round and round.  The idea is, the motion mixes and aerates the organic matter inside, magically transforming kitchen garbage into “black gold.”  If you have ever flipped through a gardening magazine, you’ll have seen glossy ads depicting the ComposTumblerÒ being smilingly cranked by an impossibly clean gardener looking smug and scientific.

In 2005, I wrote in this very space about the fabulous patented ComposTumblerÒ.  Composting is the province of dirt and worms, I wrote, not of revolving plastic barrels.  With withering sarcasm, relentless logic and a bewildering array of Shakespearean references, I concluded that if you were dumb enough to buy a fabulous patented ComposTumblerÒ, you were too stupid to garden and should probably take up cross-stitch.

            But of course I always kind of wanted one.

What can I say?  I’m no more immune to advertising than other mortals, and it looked so scientific. 

            So I was thrilled when I was given a fabulous patented ComposTumblerÒ by someone who had been dumb enough to buy one.  It might not work, but what was the harm in trying?  

            Avidly, I read the compost recipes in the user’s manual.  I tried to measure out just the right amount of a useful but unlovely substance produced by my neighbor’s horses.  I soaked newspapers.  I added kitchen garbage, then I turned the crank 40 revolutions per day, looking smug and scientific.

Result:  A perfectly legible car ad, slightly smeared with horse poop, and a sore shoulder. 

What was to be done?  My philosophy is: if at first you don’t succeed, stalk away and drink a beer sullenly.

            Problem is, when I stalked away, I left the top off the fabulous patented ComposTumblerÒ for a day and a night.  If nature abhors a vacuum, it purely loves a barrel full of garbage with the top off, so next time I checked on my nutrient-rich, sweet-smelling compost, something long and evil was in there wiggling.

            I consulted the user’s manual.

            What I needed, I decided, was bulk.  The more decaying matter in the barrel, the greater the heat.  The heat generated by a full barrel, said the manual, was enough to kill weed seeds; if so, I reasoned, it would also kill long, evil wiggling things.

            So I mowed my nation-like lawn with the bag attached to the mower, stopping every 37 seconds as the bag filled to dump the grass clippings into the fabulous patented ComposTumblerÒ.  Then I added water and turned the crank, looking scientific but possibly a little less smug.

            Result:  Two sore shoulders.  The barrel was now so heavy, cranking took both hands.  And the odor!  Despite the advertising, I had never really expected my nutrient-rich compost to smell like Chanel, but now turning the barrel took even longer because every time the ventilation hole came slowly around to nose level you had to stop and vomit.

            What to do?  My problem-solving methodology can be found above. 

When I could finally bring myself to approach the barrel again some weeks later, the mass inside had compacted.  Cranking it, one felt that a fat person had gone in there and died.  It was crank, crank, crank, THUNK, crank, crank, crank, THUNK, as my “black gold” shifted like a body in a car trunk.

            I knew what had to be done and I did it.  Two weeks later. 

Anyway, finally I gathered my courage.  Teeth gritted, eyes narrowed, knuckles white on shovel, I opened the lid to break up the mass.

            And shrieked girlishly as tendrils of black slime slid from the lid into my hair.  Then dropped the shovel and ran like a hare as I saw what was inside.

            The long evil things were not dead.  They were now longer and more evil.  They were in there coiling like pythons. 

And that’s where matters now stand with my fabulous patented ComposTumblerÒ.  I may have to hire somebody to deal with it for me, possibly an exorcist.  Or I could just move.

Compost is a matter of allowing organic matter to decompose.  The function of technology is not to help things decompose but to stop them from doing it.  That’s why they invented freezers.  Compost has nothing to do with technology.  It has to do, like everything else in gardening, with dirt.

That was my advice in 2005, and this time I will take it myself.  So don’t be surprised if you open the classified section of this newspaper and see, in 8-point:

“Fabulous patented ComposTumblerÒ, ’06, Gray.  Free to a good home.”

Oh, I almost forgot: 

“Loaded.”

END

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