My newspaper would probably deny this, and perhaps I'm being too sensitive; but I have found it to be true that the only letters-to-the-editor about your narrator that make it into print are the ones pointing out errors I've made. I know there actually have been over the years a few "We Like BLA" letters, because the staff used to forward them to me for my private delectation. (They don't anymore.)
The letter that this column was written in response to was a funny combination of praise and condemnation. It said something like: Bob sure is funny, too bad she's a Commie. So naturally the Sentinel printed it!
I'm not going to go into the gradations of politics where I live, but trust me, out here you are not so much left, right or center as right, further right, or out there circlin' Jupiter. It's why I don't talk politics! I talk gardening! But I guess I just don't look like a Republican and that's what the letter-writer was talking about.
Anyway, I seized gleefully on the occasion to explain about the endnotes to the column, the bit about playing quietly in the dirt. I lifted it from a guy named Voltaire and it encapsulated what I was trying to do politically when I first starting writing Bob, which was: stay out of politics.
And in any case, it gave me a chance to tell the fesse story. I love the fesse story!
A COMMIE IN THE CABBAGE PATCH: BOB’S LITTLE MANIFESTO
By Robin Ford Wallace
Choosing vegetables for one’s garden in the winter months provides the gardener a pleasurable and fat-free way to pass the long hibernal evenings, the opportunity to plan for maximum nutrition and efficiency, and the leisure to root out any potentially subversive influences that might transform the innocent seedbed into a hotbed of un-American activity.
As I flipped through the Stokes catalog this morning, a patriotic smile curved my lips as I added to my list: Corn. America is built on corn. Everything from breakfast cereal to face powder is made of corn in our mighty nation. Words like “sweet,” “robust” and “traditional” are used in the ad copy.
But as my eyes drifted through the glossy pictures, a worried frown creased my brow. What was this variety, “Strawberry Popcorn?” Oh, popcorn is all very well. What could be more American than shoveling the fluffy salted puffs into one’s maw while sprawled on the carpet on a Saturday night, watching an old John Wayne movie? But Strawberry?
Not to mince words, my dear, it was as red as Chairman Mao.
Give me vegetables that are green, I thought, the color of spring and U.S. dollars. Green beans, spinach, bell peppers. I paused, racked by a nagging doubt. Peppers turn red when mature. Well, lettuce then. Lettuce is reliably green.
But wait a minute: Is green not the color of the foam-mouthed environmentalist crazies who are destroying the very foundations of American life, according to the a.m. pundits? Good lord, what vegetable was safe?
Cauliflower, I supposed; white is associated with purity. But also with anemia, and pus. I have never been attracted to the big pale globes like bumpy bleached brains.
Flipping disconsolately, I found myself on the beet page. A sea of scarlet! I was flooded by visions of Bolsheviks brandishing their spoons menacingly above bowls of blood-red borscht as they chanted, “We will bury you.”
I fainted.
All right. I’m joking. Historically, flowers may have stood for one movement or another but vegetables do not generally get into anything more political than, say, soup. My point is, neither does your narrator.
I am reacting, with gentle hurt sarcasm, to a letter from a reader, published in the Sentinel last week, that, though praising Bob’s Little Acre, made reference to its narrator’s leftist leanings.
Let me make it clear that I am tickled pink by any mail at all, and that life has so humbled me that I am used to any compliments aimed in my direction being of the for-a-fat-girl-you-don’t-sweat-much variety. My favorite was from another reader who observed how fortunate it was that I was such a failure as to write for a small newspaper, that I might be enjoyed locally.
And to be fair, the accusation of political bias was leveled not at my horticultural maunderings but my news coverage. But this I find equally perplexing. How much leftist propaganda can feasibly be worked into a story about new hours for the county dump? Within the context of local politics, leaning left, right or center usually means you have fallen asleep, and are fixin’ to fall out of your chair.
I think if I have an agenda at all, it comes from Voltaire’s masterpiece, Candide, which I read in 10th-grade French class.
In the story, the young Candide and his friends set out in the world with a certain ism – in this case, optimism, the view that everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. But immediately they are caught up in a series of catastrophes including plagues, wars, shipwrecks, the great earthquake of Lisbon and auto da fe hangings.
One character is an old lady who was once a beautiful princess (before being kidnapped by pirates and sold into slavery, of course). When the other characters ask her to sit down and tell her story, she replies, “I will sit, but only on one fesse.”
In French, a fesse is the half of one’s derriere on one side or the other of its great dividing line. It is just like the French to have a word for this. It is just like the English not to.
But the old lady’s recounting of her tale is interrupted by the latest disaster. “Quick!” say the others. “We must escape. Can you ride a horse?”
“Yes,” she replies, “though only on one fesse.”
As they trot away, she finishes telling her adventures, one of which involves being holed up with an army surrounded by Cossacks. During the long winter siege, cannibalism provided the only nourishment, and her left fesse became dinner for the troops.
After many more such vicissitudes, the characters find themselves content to take shelter from the great conflicts of the world on a little farm where they grow vegetables. The secret of life, they discover, is to abandon isms and to cultivate one’s own garden.
I took the phrase for my own. Personally, I translate it: “to play quietly in the dirt, disturbing no one.”
And it is my only agenda, whether rolling in the dirt or dishing it out. Yes, I’m a little green – we gardeners can’t help it, it starts in the thumb and works its way up. But red? I may have borrowed Che’s cigar once or twice (though usually only as an afterthought, when I needed his machinegun), but I do not shelter from the sun under a little green hat with a star on it. I prefer the Aunt Loweezy style of chapeau, thank you, with roses and grapes and a pinecone spray-painted gold.
Well, I’ll get back to it, shall I? Gardening-wise, I will continue to tell fantastically boring stories about tomatoes and my brother Frank; news-wise, what I try for is complete sentences, and keeping the reader awake.
And if, in either capacity, I seem to lean left or right, please be assured it’s nothing more significant than a temporary imbalance caused by one missing fesse.
Robin Ford Wallace lives in Deerhead Cove, where she plays quietly in the dirt, disturbing no one.
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