Wealth, Poverty, the Human Condition – Oh, And Did I Mention Asparagus?
By Robin Ford Wallace
Oh, hello there, darling. My secretary said you’d rung. I’m down here in the garden, cutting asparagus. Do join me!
But I’d leave that jacket with the butler. Of course it’s only April but in the sunshine it’s already hot. In fact, I’ll ring for the maid to bring us something cold, shall I?
T.S. Eliot said April was the cruelest month but personally I cannot imagine anything nicer. A month that contains not only wildflowers but asparagus? Well, Eliot was a common little man and I expect he drank.
Cutting asparagus in the spring gives a girl the same cozy feeling she gets from opening dividend checks. Make that one little investment, darling, and every year it pays and pays.
Ah, here’s Matilda to take our order. Champagne for me, I think; one’s feeling distinctly bubbly today. But I expect you’re more at home with beer, aren’t you?
SPLAT!
That, Gentle Reader, was the sound of an oak tree snapping in the April 27 tornado, crashing down like 100 feet of the clumsiest metaphor your narrator ever wrote, and burying her vegetable garden under tons of hardwood, brush and poison ivy vines.
Not to mention knocking crap out of the latest Bob’s Little Acre.
As you may have gathered, it was to have been a column about asparagus. My friend Mary wanted to start an asparagus bed and had asked my advice. Where I was going with all the maid-and-butler stuff was to show that though asparagus since ancient times has been rich-people food, the poorest home gardener may easily ascend the socioeconomic ladder, at least gastronomically, by putting in an asparagus row.
But the column was already in trouble! Your narrator seems congenitally incapable of imparting useful horticultural information without tossing in some profundity or another about the human condition, to the point that a simple statement such as, “Tomatoes benefit greatly by a side-dressing of manure,” might keep the regular reader awake for a week, muttering, “What? What?” to a cold and answerless ceiling.
In this case, I was trying to churn out some wisdom about poverty versus wealth in America. Mary is a starving artist and struggles to pay the bills each month, but she has 5000 years of culture at her fingertips and can order lunch in Italian without breaking a serious sweat. So what does poverty mean, really?
But after I’d started the column I happened to drop by the house of a better-heeled friend as she harvested her own asparagus. My friend doesn’t have maids and butlers but that day she did have two paid workers helping her in the garden, and she also had asparagus so plump and bursting with vitality, it made mine look like one of those tubercular Poe heroines standing next to the Campbell Kids. She gave the credit for it to mushroom compost and her clever yardman.
And that wasn’t the only problem with the column. I was also trying to work in a way to tell you about the day that Mary cooked the lobsters.
It was late last summer, and Mary had been feeling poor so she’d splurged on live lobsters from the Bi-Lo. Lobsters reminded her of her idyllic childhood in the Northeast, when summers were spent in Maine. Meanwhile I’d been lonely and had called, and when she told me her plan I invited myself over to her farm, buying my own lobster on the way.
Because it was so hot, Mary was wearing only an elastic-waisted skirt pulled up under her arms, which for some reason looked very elegant, and she boiled the lobsters alive, saying over her shoulder with merry sophistication, “I hate to murder them but they’re so delicious.”
We ate them at a table out on the lawn, washed down with red wine, and the memory sustained me through the long and terrible winter that followed.
Not the memory of the lobsters. The lobsters were a nightmare! They escaped from their boxes and before Mary murdered them chased me around the kitchen while I jumped on chairs and shouted, “Eek.” Then eating them was like joining the Manson Family. You had to keep cracking open their pitiful little bones, and sometimes green slime slid out. I’d have been much happier with a hot dog!
No, what sustained me was the memory of the whole golden afternoon, the intrinsic coolness of having a place to go where people make art and eat rich-people food when they’re feeling especially poor and generally live their lives in a Hemingway novel, and where if I knock they let me in. Mary’s rich because she’s got the 5000 years of culture, and I’m rich because I’ve got Mary, and of course things like Shakespeare and my garden and –
SPLAT!
OK, so I don’t have my garden. Maybe the whole moral of the story, if there is one, is that it’s a joke to get all smug and complacent and ring-for-the-butler-darling when the universe routinely smacks us down as swiftly and inexorably as in the pivotal scene of “Bambi Meets Godzilla.”
Epilogue: I never finished the asparagus column. Mary went ahead and planted her asparagus patch without benefit of my wisdom, and I think she made it too small. If anyone is still interested in my advice here it is: You can’t be too rich or too thin or have too much asparagus.
But who cares what I think about asparagus, much less wealth, poverty or for God’s sake the human condition? I’m a garden writer without a garden, just a blob of human jetsam crouched down here muttering amid the one row of vegetables spared to me after the storm, some straggling yellow straightnecks that, any minute now, the squash borers may very well –
SPLAT!
END
Robin Ford Wallace lives in Deerhead Cove, where she plays quietly in the dirt, disturbing no one.
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