Blue Velvet: The Swamp Thing, Democracy and Masochism

     Out-of-town readers will probably not grasp the local politics in this one, which I wrote as a Radio-Free Robin, or political column; and local readers, presumably, can wait and read it in the Sentinel.  So why do I bother?  I guess because I haven't posted anything here in so long!  As this column points out, I've been tied up covering the election in Dade, including the highly charged sheriff's race mentioned here.  In the course of that I got attacked by supporters of both candidates; but my friend Mary assured me I was equally poisonous to both, and was seriously screwed whoever won.  How fortunate that I plan on committing no crimes ...

Blue Velvet:  The Swamp Thing Pontificates about Democracy and Masochism

By Robin Ford Wallace

 “Heet me.”

That’s a line I half-remember from a movie called Blue Velvet I sort of saw in the 1980s. 

In Atlanta back then there were establishments called cinema drafthouses where for a buck or two you could drink beer and watch second-run films.  It was cheap entertainment, but the big negative was that during the workweek, when a girl got up early, one beer and a darkened room would send her off to Dreamland before the credits had faded.

So from Das Boot all I remember is a handsome blond U-boat captain with blue eyes and a black sweater looking through a periscope and saying, “Goot, goot.”  Then the next time I opened my eyes there was water pouring in and it emerged I had slept through World War II. 

All I retain from Out of Africa is Meryl Streep Accent No. 432 – “I hod a farm in Offrica.”  My date told me that later on Meryl makes a few wisecracks while gnawing on a carrot, then dives down a rabbit hole.  But then, this was the same guy who told me all Japanese were issued cameras at birth, which, incidentally, I believed for two years.  (Reader, I married him, and you still couldn’t beat it out of him with a stick.)

Blue Velvet was a detective movie – I think – and as I recall the Italian torch singer who says, “Heet me,” is suffering from survivor guilt, her husband and child having been kidnapped as part of a convoluted film noir plot.  That’s all I can tell you because I would only wake up when somebody screamed. 

Anyway, the reason I’m saying “Heet me” myself is that I’ve concluded only masochism can account for my devotion to the democratic process.  What an election year! 

Regular readers may remember with what reportorial verve this newshound lunged into local politics in January –  “White House, Shmite House!  Practically every elected office in Dade is up for grabs!” 

Now, post-election, what you see lying whipped and beaten before you, with its tongue hanging out, is more hangdog than newshound, though it does manage the occasional feeble tail wag, because – 

IT’S OVER!

There comes a point when it doesn’t matter who wins, just that the hurting stops.  I can see myself dancing around in prewar Germany, singing, “We just elected Hitler, tra-la-la.”

Reader, I caught as much grief as the candidates!  One week I’d be attacked for bias toward one hopeful and the next for my slant toward his opponent.  There was a man who said I did drugs and a pleasant middle-aged matron I thought was going to break my nose.  One week I got denounced publicly three times.

It made me remember wistfully how I once wrote in a Bob’s Little Acre about witchcraft that peasants with pitchforks and torches would make me feel pretty and popular.  Wrong!  My idea was that negative attention was still attention, but the reality is that I’m feeling less homecoming queen and more Swamp Thing than ever, thank you very much.

Still, since I can’t possibly get less popular, here’s some stuff I can now get off my swampy little chest:  I did not, either, lean toward either sheriff candidate.  I had issues with both.  What we had was one guy going around saying the president planned to impose martial law in Dade and another guy who had done it himself.

So what I had against the candidate who wanted a second crack at sheriffing was:  the first crack.  Maybe some people enjoyed driving from roadblock to roadblock meekly showing their papers.  I can’t say it did much for me.  And there may be perfectly good reasons for law officers to beat up harmless citizens who had broken no laws; but I’m not bright enough to think of any.

What I had against the other candidate was:  fundamental concepts of honesty and truth.  How can you trust a guy to testify in capital cases when he spends his campaign promising to defend Dade from a federal invasion aimed at stripping citizens of their right to bear arms?

I think there’s a class of things grownups believe in only halfway, not because they’re feasible but because they enjoy believing in them, like the Loch Ness Monster and that somewhere there’s a pair of jeans that won’t make their thighs look fat.  I think the federal invasion falls into that class.

A candidate in another race said that people vote their pocketbooks.  Ha!  I think it’s more likely they vote the messages they receive through their fillings from outer space.  If they voted their pocketbooks, poor people wouldn’t vote for rich people who despise them, and candidates who go bankrupt because of crushing medical bills would support a president who is trying to reform health care, not go around telling people he is fixin’ to steal their Bible and shoot their dog.   

There’s lots more:  Why, if candidates believe in equal rights for all citizens under the law, do they say “gay marriage” the same way they say, “The dog had diarrhea in the living room?”  And how can serially married candidates say, “Put your God first and your wife second?”  Shouldn’t it be, “Put your God first and your third wife second?”

But we’re out of room, so let me just end by paraphrasing Churchill that democracy is the worst form of government, except for those others that have been tried; and add from my own observation that if it works at all, it works here at the local level.

 Anyway, it’s heady stuff, and if life ever offers to deal me in for another hand of it, I expect I’ll wince a little but I’ll still say:

“Heet me.”

 

END

Insects and the Single Girl Part I: In Which Bob Dances the Flamenco

      You'll note this is just Part I.  I have too much to say about insects, and too many metaphors in which they are useful, to exhaust them all in one go.  But here I have finally finished the first episode 1.   A consummation devoutly to be wished!  XX

Insects And The Single Girl:  Part I, In Which Bob Dances The Flamenco

       By Robin Ford Wallace         

 

Behold, Gentle Reader, the figure atop yonder hill, silhouetted by the sinking sun.   Head thrown back against the flaming sky, both hands raised, leg bent at knee, the shadow claps and stamps as if in time to some unheard rhythm. 

Is this some character of romance?  Some doomed soprano of Italian opera?  Some flamenco dancer with flashing black eyes and rose between teeth?

Hello?  It’s me, Reader.  You were expecting maybe Carmen Miranda? 

No, this is not an opera, it’s Bob’s Little Acre, where roses abound but where no one chews on them but the Japanese beetles.  Then what, you may ask, is all this happy horse patootie about dancing?  It happened like this:

            Some readers know your humble narrator only as that fun-loving farm girl who fills both lawnmowers and frosty mugs with yellow fluids that come from cans.  They may be surprised to learn that their HN’s day job as a crusading journalist keeps her locked in a constant death struggle between the forces of darkness and the keen brave light of civilization. 

Not the worst job I’ve had, honey, I used to wait tables, but the thing about your classic battles between Good and Evil is sometimes a girl loses them.  Faithful readers will know which one I mean, so I won’t beat that horse, though I may not be able to resist the occasional waspish rejoinder.  Oh no!  Here one comes now:

Golly!  I wish I were as smart as those people who don’t need libraries!  

            CLAP!  CLAP!  CLAP!   

            And that, Gentle Reader, is the first part of our flamenco.  It’s something I learned from one of those self-help-for-psychos columns.  Brace yourself for a backlash of positivity: 

Happiness is a choice!  Self-pity is a disease!  We forgive those who wrong us not because they deserve forgiveness but because bitterness gives us those ugly lines around the mouth.

Yes, Gentle Reader, I used to sneer at this kind of crap, too, but adversity has made me a believer.  Rage and indignation must be pleasurable on some level, because we find them as hard to give up as cigarettes or heroin; but in the end they do us just as much good.  How much healthier to banish wrath and sail through life with a beatific smile that repels anger, spreads goodwill and smoothes out the flaws in our lipstick!

Still, hard as a girl tries to be Ms. Sunshine, negative emotions do creep in.  When that happens, what the psycho advisor says is:  Clap your hands at them until they go away.   

Laugh if you will, GR, it works!  Since I learned this trick, I’ve clapped away enough rage to fill Sing-Sing.  Yes, one gets mistaken for an epileptic, and yes, people who annoy one sometimes think one’s applauding them; but it is simpler to deal with stares of incredulity than murder charges. 

Here, though, is another thing about your classic battles between Good and Evil: Anger comes in dead handy.  I remember from my formative years the gently contemplative look on David Carradine’s face as he sailed through the air in slo mo, kicking bad-guy butt on Kung Fu; but me personally, when I’m storming the gates of Hell I’ll take the grapes of wrath over the milk of human kindness every time.  Anyhow, how’s a girl supposed to feel as she watches those in charge of education marauding through town like Cossacks, banning books, closing libraries, stamping out the keen brave light of civilization wherever it –

CLAP!  CLAP!  CLAP!

Well, you see the problem.  These past few months I’ve been clapping more or less full-time, determined to return to the serene earth mamahood you used to see depicted so winsomely on bottles of Herbal Essence shampoo.  How ironic, then, to find when I limped home in defeat:

War!  It was high summer, and while I was off storming Hell, insects had swarmed in to occupy my acre of Heaven.

Armies of ants!  Waves of weevils!  Squadrons of squishy squirmers that squiggled from the squash, eliciting from your narrator a high-pitched

“EEEEEEEEE!”

Sorry.  There’s something about the larval life stage that brings out a girl’s girlie side.

But here’s the thing about your classic battles between girl and insect:  You can’t win.  Of the billions of pounds of insecticide used in agriculture, only a tiny percentage ever makes contact with an actual bug.  So why poison fish, birds and ourselves? 

Still, there are limited-engagement measures the gardener can take.  This spring, I used floating row covers for my squash, and they really did prevent borers from inflicting sudden death.  The name sounds graceful and science-fictiony, but really they’re just cheesecloth-like sheets you keep over your plants from seed to blossom, in my case weighted down at the sides with rocks and propped up in the middle by a volunteer potato plant.  It looked like Tobacco Road but my squash was still there in August to be invaded by the squishy squirmers. 

Also this year I proved my friend Mary’s trick for killing ants:  Dawn dishwashing liquid, the blue kind.  What’s funny is the label says, “Dawn saves wildlife,” when with just a couple of squirts in a gallon of water you can commit multiple genocides.    

For Japanese beetles, it is meanly satisfying to hard-prune your roses and burn the clippings.  For other bugs – well, there’s always the other part of our flamenco:

STOMP!  STOMP!  STOMP!

Which brings us, with sick inevitability, to our concluding metaphor: that in life we stomp what we can and clap at the rest.  If it’s a war, we mostly lose it; but I’d rather think of it as a flamenco.  It sucks but a girl keeps trying, backwards and in high heels.

So.  May I have this dance?

END

            Last night the Dade County Board of Education finished murdering the Dade County Library.

            What the board did is slash all funding from the schools.  The school system is supposed to share the burden of the library with the county and city.  The library director says the library can muddle through another year on the lesser funds but at the end of that time the state will pull its own support because of its “maintenance of effort” requirement.     

            The only hope left for the library is that the county will take over the local funding, perhaps through dedicating a percentage of a millage rate point as suggested on a nonbinding straw poll question on the July 31 primary.

            I, like everybody else who cares about the library, have been living, breathing and vomiting the issue, and I wrote this “Radio-Free Robin” piece before I knew what the miserable outcome of last night’s board of ed meeting would be, urging readers to vote yes on the straw poll question.  

Counterrevolutionary Cookies:  A Recipe for Saving the Library

By Robin Ford Wallace

            A man I know recently entertained me with stories of a job he’d had during the Cold War

writing propaganda for Radio-Free Europe.  The program he worked on was a cooking show aimed at

converting housewives in Soviet satellite countries to American-style capitalism. 

            In a show about making cookies, for example, one of the radio hostesses might say, “Darn!  I’m out of sugar.  Excuse me while I buy more AT THE STORE RIGHT AROUND THE CORNER.  I’ll only be a minute.”

            The point was to demonstrate to the poor little Soviet mamas, who had to wait in long lines at centralized distribution centers for their groceries, how easy and quick it was to get anything you wanted in a free-market economy.  The radio show would resume with:

            “That looks heavy.  Let me help.  How much sugar did you get, anyway?”

            “Oh, it was so cheap I bought 50 pounds.  But meat was on sale too, so I stocked up.  At our house WE EAT MEAT THREE TIMES A DAY.”

I challenged my friend on the morality of selling a political system through hunger pangs.  Presumably these had been impoverished peasantries before Communism and it wasn’t likely they had eaten all that well while being chased by Cossacks up and down the frozen Steppes. 

My friend could have argued that BSing housewives was a more peaceful way to change society than, say, hydrogen bombs.  But whether he was wrong or right, or whether his counterrevolutionary cookies did any good in the world, is not the point. 

The point is, I’m jealous!  Why can’t I have a cool job like that? 

What my friend was writing was, essentially: come around to my way of thinking and you’ll eat more cookies.  I could do that.  I want to do good in the world, too, and I am crazy about chocolate chips. 

Instead I’m stuck with journalism, which confines a girl to the stark and cookieless truth.  I’ve got to sit here churning out articles about the county commission’s newest anti-tobacco-chewing ordinances when I’d much rather tell you the guys had been naked-wrestling in there.

Oh, I get accused from time to time of misquoting somebody or – and this is my fave – “twisting my words.”  At least one person who’s tried that one on was subsequently arrested, having presumably been misunderstood by the FBI as well; and I think the most recent one was just mad at me for revealing she didn’t know something she should have known if she’d been staying awake.  How far, after all, can you twist, “I have no clue?”      

Anyway, whatever detractors may say I have no experience writing lies beyond the weight I fill in on driver’s license applications.  But I bet you I could churn out propaganda just as thick as anything my friend wrote about cookies.

Say, for example, I wanted to promote yes votes for the straw poll question on July 31’s primary ballot, which asks if Dade County’s public library should be granted a secure funding source, here is the radio show I would write:

First a newspaper reporter, maybe a female one, maybe one with a breathy voice who says “you know” every third word, would say:  “What do you think of this straw poll question about giving the, you know, library a secure funding source, Mr. County Executive?”

Then a man with a friendly, folksy, Dade County kind of voice, the kind of voice that is always talking about two-headed calves, or offering you a bobby pin to get the wax out of your ear if you don’t hear good, would answer:  “Why would folks vote themselves what might turn out to be a tax increase?  Anyway, we don’t need that here in Dade County.”

He would go on to explain that we didn’t need that here in Dade County because since the dawn of time, funding Dade’s library has been the joint responsibility of the county, the city of Trenton and the school board.

The reporter would ask, “But what if one of them didn’t pay up?”

The county executive would repeat the word “responsibility,” then offer her a bobby pin to get the wax out of her ear since she doesn’t hear good.

Now:  Enter a new schools superintendent with an out-of-town accent so thick that when he talks about bullying in the schools, our girl reporter scratches her head and wonders, “What’s wrong with bowling in the schools?”

The out-of-town superintendent hires an out-of-town consultant and, together with an out-of-town attorney so clueless he once tried to reassign a polling station on Sand Mountain to a voting district on Lookout, they decide to save money by – guess what? –cutting off all funding to the Dade County library. 

Alarmed, our girl reporter scurries around questioning the board of education, most of the members of which say, “Libraries?  We don’t need no stinkin’ libraries,” and the chairperson of which says, “You twisted my words!”

            OK, OK.  I’d better stop here for fear of confusing the reader.  Campy and unbelievable as it sounds – and honey, if you want camp, you should have seen the sole anti-funding speaker at the public hearing capering for the cameras as she defended the right of her grandchildren to grow up in a county free of libraries – this is no radio play but what really is happening. 

As I write on Monday morning, I don’t know yet whether the Dade County Board of Education will kill the Dade County Public Library or not.  But whichever way it turns out, nobody could have written a better radio play to demonstrate that the library needs a secure funding source.

In conclusion, Gentle Reader, vote yes on the straw poll question, and I’ll give you this cookie.   

END

 

The Lawnmower Man (Including Some Comments on Public Education)

 

By Robin Ford Wallace

            I submitted this to the Dade County Sentinel as a “Radio-Free Robin” – which is to say a political sort of opinion piece.  I don’t know if they’ll print it or not.  I specifically didn’t ask.  It’s a little meaner and nastier than the Sentinel usually gets on public officials  You want to know, it’s a little meaner and nastier than I usually get my own self.  But anyway ...        

Last spring I took my lawnmower to a man who said he could fix it.  He didn’t own a shop, you just went to his house, but down in his carport he had all these other lawnmowers of every age and model, which for some reason made me think he knew what he was doing.  It was only later that I thought to ask myself:  But did any of them work?

A week later I checked with the man and he said the lawnmower wasn’t ready; he had had to order a part.  The next week he said the part had been out of stock.  The week after that he said it had come but it was the wrong part.

It went on like that week after week until he stopped answering my phone calls.  Then I would drive over to his house and he’d hide inside and pretend he wasn’t home.

As more weeks passed and the grass grew ever higher, so also mounted my hopelessness and rage.  I began to realize if I ever saw the Lawnmower Man again I would probably have to kill him.  Thus I persuaded my husband to drive over there and confront him as opposed to bringing me cakes in the Big House.

When my husband came home he didn’t have our machine but the Lawnmower Man had given him a loaner from his supply in the carport.  This one looked as if it came from the early days of mechanization.  It had big metal plates and levers that didn’t control anything, and rods and wires coming off it at random.  My husband, an animation artist by trade, speculated it was powered by mice running in circles inside the engine, moving the rotors with their little feet.

But he said this was not the oldest nor the weirdest machine in the carport.  He’d seen a James-Bond-movie lawnmower down there from the 1960s, with no wheels because it was a hovercraft meant to float a few inches above the grass on an air pocket.

It couldn’t possibly have worked but neither did the mouse-powered model.  It did crank up after a fashion and I followed it down the hill while it took a few sickly bites of grass, then gave a sad little cough and died underneath the willow tree where our old dogs are buried.

After that I think there was another loaner before we finally got our lawnmower back, and then I believe there was some difficulty about the bill; but even I get sick of hearing myself complain so I’ll cut to the chase:

Somewhere in there I started feeling less bitter toward the Lawnmower Man because I realized he had performed a useful function:  He had made me happier in my marriage.

My husband has piles of rotting lumber and scrap metal scattered here and there that would get us condemned if we lived within the city limits of any municipality with a speck of self-respect.  For 10 years he had a set of dismembered monkey bars rusting in our front yard.  Two men with a truck came and asked if they could have it.  I said yes, I thought God had sent them, but my husband chased them down shouting, “No!  No!  No!”

And forcing him to take things to the dump is a case of the rabbit and the briar patch.  He only brings home more.  

On the other hand, he doesn’t have a carport full of old hovercraft. 

Furthermore, my husband’s motto about procrastination is, “Never put off until tomorrow what can be put off indefinitely,” but he really will empty the kitchen trash the seventh or eighth time you ask him.  So the Lawnmower Man made him look good and I felt happy and blessed.

Why am I telling you this?  Not to beat up on the Lawnmower Man, whom I never saw again, but to draw a parallel between him and current leadership of the Dade County school system.  I was thinking that, like the Lawnmower Man, this administration makes me feel warm and fuzzy about every administration that came before.

The first time I saw Dade’s new superintendent of schools was last fall when he was menacing English teachers at a book-banning he’d arranged for a New York Times bestseller that had won the National Book Award.  The superintendent had triumphantly notated “bad” words and “offensive” parts that he thought proved the book was without merit.  He seemed genuinely puzzled anyone would anyone want to read a book like that.   

Now this same new superintendent is trying to make a name for himself as the man who killed the Dade County Public Library.  For decades, the B of E has funded the library jointly with the county and the city of Trenton.  Now times are tough, so the super is recommending not reducing library funding but dumping it altogether – and he fields public outrage with the same seeming blank incomprehension:  Libraries?  What do libraries have to do with education?

Does anybody else see a connection here?

I’ve heard this administration accused of nepotism, cronyism, bullying and incompetence.  My beef is more basic: that it has no reverence or respect for books and learning.

There’s a saying that chefs eat their mistakes and doctors bury them.  What boards of education seem to do is sit picking their noses as they watch theirs destroying civilization as we know it.  Try questioning board members about the super’s funding decision and they dive for cover like timid woodland creatures fleeing a forest fire. 

Or they do when I ask.  Ask them yourselves, Dade County!  And ask hard.  Do you really want education in Dade County in the hands of the Lawnmower Man?

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

    I haven't been writing Bob for a while, for reasons too numerous and riddled with self-pity, sloth and other undesirable character traits to name.  One of them, I am happy to report, is genuine horiticultural zeal.  My dear, you should see my River O' Flowers this year!  Maybe I'll post a pic.
     But I'm back up and running now, and in fact planning a new blog, this one for -- brace yourself -- real local news.  STAY TUNED FOR EXCITIN' DEVELOPMENTS!
    

Moah Coffeh?  How to Freeze Tomatoes, Save Time and Avoid Love Triangles

By Robin Ford Wallace

Here is a story a friend told me, that happened in the 1950s.

            A man she knew had decided to move to the country and spend his retirement raising tomatoes.  He had also decided his wife would can them.  Somehow he had gotten the idea that their return to Nature would transform the Little Woman into a full-scale farmwife complete with floury hands and bib apron.

            It did not.

            One evening the man approached his house from behind after a long, satisfying session in the vegetable patch.  From that vantage point he observed a stream of tomatoes sailing gracefully through the air from his back door and into the woods beyond. 

Just visible in the doorway was the dainty white hand, complete with diamond rings and long red fingernails, that was propelling Nature’s bounty back the hell to Nature where it belonged.  That’s what the Little Woman thought of farmwifery! 

I like the story because it shows that even before the advent of feminism women made their own choices.  A girl couldn’t become a doctor or an astronaut, maybe, but she still got to make up her own mind whether she was a glamour-puss or an earth mama. 

Me, personally, I was born late enough to run for senator but as it happens I am the perfect 1950s farmwife throwback.  I don’t own an apron but I adore that blood-red lipstick they wore then and by God I could can for the Olympics.  Nothing makes me happier than cooking from scratch and growing the scratch.     

One summer evening about 9:30, in fact, I was snuffling around in the hay for potatoes so I could start supper when it struck me I had carried the thing a bit far.  I had reverted beyond 1950s farmwife all the way back to hunter-gatherer.

That’s why it’s ironic about my lettuce this year.  I didn’t plant it.

How did it happen that someone who starts chili by planting jalapenos six months before dinnertime is too lazy to transplant a few lettuces?  For the answer we return, of course, to the 1950s.

 Specifically, to the old Bette Davis movie where she plays twins.  Remember that one?  One Bette is shy and outdoorsy, the other a flashy vamp.  Still, the sisters are close, so Shy Bette (the trusting fool!) takes her new boyfriend home to lunch with Vamp Bette. 

Vamp Bette of course goes into slut overdrive, fluttering her eyelashes and saying flirtatious little things like, “Moah coffeh?”

 Which the boyfriend (the stupid sap!) finds irresistible, so he dumps Shy Bette and marries Vamp Bette.  Then one afternoon the two sisters go sailing.  A nor’easter blows up and –

            Why am I telling you this? 

Oh, lettuce. 

Salad is a very big deal at Bob’s Little Acre.  Not only is it the daily Fat Girl Lunch Special, I’m so proud of my garlic vinaigrette that when we have dinner guests I push salad like Bette pushed that coffee.  (Only I don’t say, “Moah salad?”  I say, “Eat salad or I’ll kill you.”  Everybody has a different vamp style.)   

So I used to kill two hours every week washing lettuce.  Then this year, Ingle’s started selling Harvest Farms Certified Organic Triple-Washed Spring Mix lettuce blend, in fully recyclable plastic tubs, yet.  At first I thought it was too expensive, but before long higher math kicked in and I realized the time it saved more than made up for the money, even figuring my labor at well below minimum wage.  (Writers dream of minimum wage!) 

So I got spoiled, and this spring every time I tried transplanting my lettuce seedlings I remembered how much worse it was washing lettuce from the garden.  You have to pick out the grass blades, police each leaf for caterpillars or God forbid slugs, rinse with another suspicious scrutiny, spin dry – and that’s always supposing you manage to pick it before it bolts. 

            WHAT’S NEXT?  CHEWING DOESKIN TO MAKE OUR OWN CLOTHES?  WASHING THEM IN THE RIVER, AGAINST A ROCK?   

            That’s my evil twin.  She looks just like me except for the long red fingernails, but unlike me she is prefers to spend her leisure time not slaving in the kitchen but sipping drinks adorned with tiny umbrellas. Those lettuce seedlings drove her berserk and before I could stop her she had thrown them the hell into the compost where they belonged.

            Why am I telling you this?  Because, horticulturally, everybody’s twins.  The hoe may make your heart sing while the canner sends you screaming for the fingernail polish. 

So even the most militant from-scratchers should know a few shortcuts.  Here’s one for those tomatoes:  If you have room in the freezer, you can freeze them, whole and unprocessed, instead of canning.  Just put as many as will fit into plastic bags and seal.  When ready to cook, set the bag in tap water 10 minutes and the skins come off easily.

            All peppers can also be frozen raw, and my friend Mary, who showed me the tomato trick, also freezes chopped summer squash without blanching.  She says you just whack the bag against a counter to break some off to use in stir-fries.

            You can freeze chopped herbs instead of drying them, or – get this – don’t.  Pick them when you need them and otherwise leave them to live out their herby little lives unmolested.  Don’t think of it as waste, think of it as the Prime Directive. 

Above all, don’t plant any crop beyond your own breaking point.  If you grow something that requires the help of an unwilling spouse – as I learned with shell peas one year – you’re practically begging for trouble from your evil twin, and all I can say to you is:

              “Moah coffeh?”

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

     I've been having one of those unhappy discombobulating kind of days --  the newspaper deadline fell on the same date as the IRS deadline for cryin' out loud!  And believe me, that's the tip of the iceberg.  Anyway, somehow I haven't gotten around to finishing my latest piece, another diatribe on asparagus, capitalism and the joys of menstruation. 
     Or, anyway, about asparagus.  In any case it isn't done yet, and I was feeling awful for not having posted anything up here recently when I happened to realize I'd never put this classic Bob on the blog.  Or I don't think I did.  (I told you I was discombobulated.)  What I did to check was Google "Bob's Little Acre," "space aliens," and "crop circles," and nothing came up.  (Or nothing familiar did.  Try Googling it yourself sometime.  Who knows what you'll find?)
     Anyway after I read it I felt even more discombobulated.  It mentions my puppy then who is a 70-pound dog now and a friend then who hasn't spoken to me in over two  years now, but even six years older and uglier I still find the ways of the universe just as puzzling.  Hell, more so! 
     And furthermore, the column reminded me I haven't planted my beets ....
 

THE ACCIDENTAL GARDEN

By Robin Ford Wallace

            “If you study the logistics and heuristics of the mystics, you will find that their minds rarely move in a line.”

            This is a line from a Brian Eno song that my husband is always quoting me, perhaps in an attempt to convince me he knows what “heuristics” means, or how to spell it.

             Or perhaps he means to express an artistic contempt for straight lines.  This puzzles me, as he

is always expressing similar contempt for the not-so-straight lines I make when laying out my garden

rows.

            Straight lines in the vegetable garden serve a purpose.  If you plant beets in a row in the garden, what comes up, if it’s in the row, is not guaranteed to be a beet but is more likely to be than anything that is not.  It’s not great odds but as good as you get in this racket.  Then you keep weeds to a minimum by a wholesale slaughter of everything in between the rows, on the principle that if it’s out of line it’s probably not a beet.

            But I’m not a straight-line kind of person.  I set out from point A with every intention to travel to point B, but somehow I always go wrong, the road turns to dirt, and I end up in Alabama. 

Thus it is no surprise that my life path has not led from the bottom straight to the top.  Instead, I have zigzagged, dipped and nose-dived like a tri-plane under fire, finally crash-landing to my considerable surprise onto a dirt road in Alabama, from whence I write you this garden column.  Sort of.

In any case, the straight lines in my garden tend to morph into something else, not only because of my imperfect grasp of geometry but because of my puppy, Roosevelt, the Holy Terrier, who enjoys nothing more than tumbling through the garden with a stake in her mouth, twine around her legs and evil in her heart.  So rows are constantly restaked and beets stray from the straight and narrow through no fault of their own.    

            Fortunately, straight rows are not the only options available to the gardener. You can grow plants in patches and raised beds or even use them to create crop circles to signal to aliens in outer space.  This is a free country. 

My friend Paula once had a garden shaped like a kayak.  Or two, rather.  She had a pair of kayaks in dry dock in her back yard.  They hadn’t moved for so long, their best chance for hitting the water again was global warming melting the polar caps and providing Marietta, Georgia, an outlet to the sea.

But Paula found that her lawn ornaments had a horticultural use:  They had killed the grass underneath them, so she moved them and planted peppers and tomatoes in her new, ready-made plots, repositioning the boats where she wanted more arable farmland.

            This accidental approach to garden design is one to which I am also addicted.  I use jellyrolls of spoiled hay for mulch, and when a bale is used up it leaves behind it a black circle of beautiful compost in which I can never resist planting something. 

This is why I have circles of plants everywhere, not necessarily positioned with aesthetics in mind but where the hay bale stopped rolling when it fell off the truck.  Thus I have a circle of breathtaking gladiolas at the bottom of the hill where it would take the FBI to find them. 

I’m not arguing in favor of circles.  They just happened, and if they mean something to aliens observing us from space I don’t know what it is but I hope it’s something along the lines of Send Cash or Bring Beer.  If I used square hay bales instead of round, my garden would look like a quilt and I suppose I’d be just as happy though I can’t speak for the aliens.

But somewhere I read that it is flowerbeds laid out by the Golden Mean, or Golden Ratio, that are most pleasing to the eye.  I looked the Golden Mean up and it is:  1.61803399.  In case you don’t know what that means, I also learned that the whole should be to the larger part as the larger part is to the smaller part. 

Do what?  I think it would be easier just to borrow one of Paula’s kayaks.

The Golden Mean must be something along the same lines as Feng Shui, another concept I have never grasped.  Paula’s big on it, though.

Paula adores buying furniture but she can’t bear to throw any away, so when she gets new things she just puts them in front of the old ones.  No one has seen her actual floor for seven years, though there are trails from room to room through stacks of books and magazines and other things in piles, so you can navigate if you know what you’re doing though I wouldn’t try it in the dark.

Anyway, in one corner of the dining room, where there was a molecule of clear space on a sideboard, Paula put a little indoor fountain, and she explained to me it gave the room Feng Shui.  Personally, the tinkling just stimulated my bladder.

So maybe I’m not an aesthetic concept kind of person any more than a straight-line person.  In fact, the more I work at it, the more random my garden seems to get.  A space alien observing Bob’s Little Acre with its patches and circles and eccentric rows would have to conclude it developed more through chance evolution than intelligent design.

Sometimes it puzzles me just as much as I’m sure it would the space alien.  Oh, not just how those gladiolas got to the bottom of the hill but how I came to be gardening this particular little acre on this particular dirt road in Alabama.  Not by a straight line, I can tell you. 

Maybe it’s just where I landed when I fell off the truck.

END

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

 

The Great Lies of Gardening

      Somebody asked me where to find this, the first Bob ever written, in spring 2005, and I couldn't find it -- but I'm sure I posted it some damn place.  Anyway, here it is again, with the caveat that the style has developed a bit since then.  This acts like it is for cripe's sake, a gardening column!

THE GREAT LIES OF GARDENING

BY ROBIN FORD WALLACE

There is a saying that nowhere are you closer to God than in a garden.  For those of us whose idea of heaven is rolling in the dirt with a trowel in our hand, the adage is a statement of the obvious.  To stumble across a perennial blooming in the spring, a year after we’d forgotten we planted it, convinces us there is something in the universe bigger than we are, that drinks less beer.

But there, I have noticed, the parallel between religion and gardening does not end.  For all gardeners have their dogmas and their creeds, and they will look you straight in the eye and tell you theirs is the only way – despite the fact that each is saying exactly the opposite as the one before.  If you got together a group of gardeners to discuss how to grow asparagus, you would probably hear more contradictions than you would at a scripture interpretation forum attended by Baptists and Muslims.  

At a rose pruning seminar, I learned that you must prune your climbing roses only after the first flowering, because roses bloom on old wood.  Then we split into groups to watch the individual experts prune.  The expert I was watching stressed the importance of pruning climbing roses in early March so that they would have time to grow strong new wood for the flowers to bloom on.   When I got home to my own roses, I stood there with my clippers like a surgeon wondering which organ to remove. 

In the end, though, I remembered noticing that no matter what they said, all the experts seemed to prune by the general rule:  Take no prisoners.  Given a pair of secateurs, every one of them turned into Lawrence of Arabia during the second half of the movie, the part where you wish it was in black and white.  If their roses could survive that, I imagined mine wouldn’t mind a few timid snips here and there.  

I’ve learned by now to ignore most of the experts’ advice and there’s nothing wrong with my roses, either.  All my friends admire them extravagantly, at least the ones who are Japanese beetles. 

So I’ve become the gardening equivalent of an agnostic, mostly because of the direct contradictions that I hear from different gardeners, some of them married to each other, and read in gardening articles, some of them in the same magazine.  I call them The Great Lies of Gardening, and I will share a few here:

q       You must water only in the morning.

q       You must water only in the evening.

q       You must water (you idiot) in the afternoon.

Morning proponents say if you water in the evening you are exposing your plants to fungal infection and disease.  Evening waterers say if you water in the morning it will just evaporate during the day and do your plants no good.  Both agree that you must never, even if someone is threatening you with a gun, water in the afternoon.  It is perfectly natural, they say, for plants to conserve moisture in the hot sun by letting their leaves wilt. 

Meanwhile, afternoon waterers say what are you, stupid?  The time to water your plants is when they need water, in the hot afternoon when they’re drooping from thirst.

Now, on to some lies of tomatoes:

q       You must plant two to a cage.

q       You must plant one to a cage.

q       You must remove all suckers.

Now, here I will say that one doctrine that even I, the gardening agnostic, adhere to is that the best way to grow tomatoes is in cages.  Not the ones you buy at gardening centers, those are always too small, but big ones that you make from concrete reinforcement fencing. 

But as for spacing, I think the reason some people tell you to plant two to a cage is that they start too many tomato plants and they don’t know where else to put them.  And I think the reason others say to plant only one per cage is that they have supreme contempt for those who lack the self-control to start a sensible number of plants.    I have been in both camps, and I can tell you I don’t see much difference in one versus two, unless you plant a red variety in with a golden, in which case you’ll spend the summer hopelessly confused as to which ones are ripe.  Trust me.

Whether you plant one or two, the tomato vines grow to fill all available space – unless, I presume, you remove the suckers.  I have been growing tomatoes for 25 years and my crops are famous.  I supply my neighbors, I give them to people I don’t even like, I give them to people who beg me to stop.  And what I have to say about removing suckers is:  What are suckers?

I never have figured it out.   “Sucker” sounds bad, like a tumor or something, but whenever I ask people what it means, they say, “like, a branch,” and I end up scratching my head.  Aren’t plants supposed to have, like, branches?  

There are many more lies than I have space to tell.  Broadly, the rule is that any definite statement about how to grow anything is bound to be untrue, even if your grandfather said it.  This year, with garden phlox, I triumphantly disproved a Germinate In Total Darkness lie I read on the back of the seed packet .  They came up fine in full sunlight.

It is only fair to say, though, that the seeds also came up in total darkness – just as the old-wood and new-wood rosarians both grow lovely roses, just as morning, afternoon and evening waterers all manage to save their gardens from drought, just as other gardeners manage to grow a few tomatoes in between nervously policing their plants for suckers. 

So perhaps the Great Lies of Gardening are really not lies.  Perhaps the only lie is: This is the only way.

END

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

Bob Reviews The Brother Gardener

The Brother Gardeners:  Before Spring, Let’s Curl Up With One Last Good Book

By Robin Ford Wallace

            “Now is the winter of our discontent

Made glorious summer by this son of York.”

Yep, me again, starting off with a Shakespeare quote in partial and tardy justification of all the money my parents squandered on my liberal arts education.

I put in the whole sentence to point out that Richard III does not actually begin Act I by whining about the weather.  What he is trying to get across is something like:  “Oy.  Am I tickled that my brother (York) is now king of England.”

Nobody remembers that, though, because the positive side of the quote is so pallid compared to the negative.  Next to “the winter of our discontent,” “glorious summer” is like saying, “So.  Nice weather we’re having."

Not that this has been a winter of discontent.  It’s hardly been any kind of winter at all and it’s fading as we speak.  But look out!  Here comes another quote:

“If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.” –  Cicero.

That’s right.  Winter is a better time for reading about gardening than actually doing it.  So before this one bursts into glorious summer, let’s curl up with one last good book.  The Brother Gardeners, by Andrea Wulf, a wonderful, wonderful garden history writer – who knew there was such a thing? – is subtitled “Botany, Empire and the Birth of an Obsession,” and it describes how American plants changed both the the English landscape and the character of the English people.

In the early 18^th century, Ms. Wulf tells us, English gardens were stiff, geometrical affairs featuring high hedges and topiary.  They weren’t very pretty and anyway they were only in the grand estates of the rich. 

Fast-forward to now, when sweet old ladies cheerfully slaughter each other for the best blooms at the London Flower Show and when, as the preface to an English plant dictionary put it:  “The English are all, more or less, gardeners.”

What happened in between?  Ms. Wulf thinks it had a lot to do with the quirky long-distance friendship of Peter Collinson, an English cloth merchant, and John Bartram, an American farmer just outside colonial Philadelphia.  It is the archaically spelled, weirdly capitalized correspondence between these two that is the backbone of  Ms. Wulf’s charming book.

Collinson, though he was what the English of the time would have considered “in trade” as opposed to upper class, had educated himself well enough to become a fellow of the Royal Society.  This was a group of “Scientifick Gentlemen” who would get together for dinner and refer to the fish they were eating as Pleuronectes platessa. 

Bartram, by contrast, was what Collinson called “a plain Country Man.”  Though he read voraciously, there was only so much science one could find in English in those days and, as he admitted, “Ye lattin pusels Mee.”   

But though Collinson and Bartram were by background as well as geography thousands of miles apart, they were “Brothers of the Spade” and the rest is history.

Collinson was always interested in acquiring “curious Plants,” reminding his friends when they traveled, “Forget not Mee & my Garden.”  He did business in the Colonies, but it was through his unpaid work as London agent for Benjamin Franklin’s subscription library that he heard of Bartram and his expertise in New World flora.

So Bartram began collecting for Collinson in America, and in January 1734, after a long sea journey, the first of what was to be many boxes of seeds and plants arrived in London.

Collinson was thrilled.  What in England was as beautiful as a magnolia?  Or a rhododendron?  Or his lifelong favorite, the ladyslipper?  Tenderly, he set out propagating these treasures in his garden, and through the centuries the reader can still hear his joy when they grew.  “I am Charm’d, nay, in Extasie,” he wrote to Bartram when several flower species bloomed at once.

Bartram rode cross-country, canoed down rivers and climbed trees collecting samples all over settled America and into the wild, Collinson urging him on by letter.  Bartram had described a Venus flytrap in one letter, and Collinson replied he was ready to “Burst with Desire.”  If Bartram couldn’t find one soon, he wrote, “never write Mee more for it is Cruel to tantalise Mee.”

At one point Collinson wrote to Bartram, “Pray go very Clean, neat & handsomely Dressed to Virginia.”  Collinson wanted samples from the governor and feared Bartram would disgrace him.

He could be a little patronizing even when he was nice, assuring Bartram his writing style was better than “what one might expect from a Man of thy Education.”  He paid Bartram partly in English seeds, partly in cash and partly in goods – one letter referred to a “Suite of Cloths.”  Once he sent Bartram his old hat which he said had years of mileage left but which Bartram said had holes in it:  “I thought some Sory Fellow had thrown it in,” Bartram wrote.

Bartram eventually complained he received only “one Sixth part” of what he gave.  Collinson replied stiffly he had “affairs of greater Consequence to Mind.”  But then he not only sent more money but also fixed Collinson up with other English enthusiasts, enabling him to make a better living from his collecting – and in the process American flora was spread all over England.

The two friends’ correspondence simply bursts with charm.  In a broader sense, though, it struck me as an eerily perfect metaphor for Anglo-American history of the time, down to the exchange of raw materials for manufactured goods, not to mention the eventual rebellion.  What was the American Revolution but a larger version of:  “You call this a hat?”

The Brother Gardeners, by Andrea Wulf, is published by Alfred A. Knopf.

END

 

    

Warts, Worms and Naked Emperors: The Jumping Frog of Bob's Little Acre

For out-of-towners, this one probably has a little too much back-story.  Suffice it to say there's a developer out there who is seriously mad at your humble narrator as a result of some articles she wrote.  He sent this awful, awful letter to the newspaper, copying everybody in the county government, accusing me of everything up to shooting his dog and stealing his Bible.  It hurt my pink feelings I suppose; but not enough that I won't point out the NEXT time I see somebody destroying the American banking system, bilking the county government, or obliterating civilization as we know it.  (Don't thank me.  It's just my job!)  The Sentinel hasn't printed the letter yet, perhaps because it is so LONG, but I felt impelled to respond anyway since the whole town seems to have read it.

Anyway I guess maybe I shouldn't have dragged front-page local issues into Bob's Little Acre; but I had this image of myself as a big damn frog hopping around my vegetable rows menacingly and zapping intruders with my tongue; and where do metaphors work like that but the Acre?

Warts, Worms and Naked Emperors:  The Jumping Frog of Bob’s Little Acre

By Robin Ford Wallace

            Thwppt.  Gotcha!

            Yeah, hey, it’s me, down here in the garden, catching insects with my long, sticky tongue.  Can I interest you in a fly?

I expect you’re wondering how I came to be insectivorous.  You know the real twist?  I actually came down here to eat worms.

Self-pity, don’t you know!  Somebody objected to my investigative journalism.  Well, somebody wrote a minor novel objecting to my investigative journalism, to be exact, and then they copied everybody in town on it, to the point that by now 9000 county officials plus lawyers, busboys, calico housecats and my Uncle Milroy in the spirit world have all heard the word:

ROBIN IS MEAN AND UGLY AND HAS WARTS!

Honestly, I haven’t felt so unpopular since my big sister Laura gave a piñata party for all our little friends with me as the piñata.   So, consumed with self-pity, down I slunk to the garden to eat worms. 

That’s the metaphor, I mean, but in fact once I’d settled into the mud I couldn’t see the point.  Do you know how hard I worked to build up my worm population?  I kept the garden under a foot of hay all that first winter, and spent good money at the bait store.

            But even if, from a horticultural as well as a gustatory standpoint, I decided against a literal ingestion of invertebrates, I was fully engaged in consuming them figuratively.  How had this happened? 

Making people mad is not what I ever set out to do!  I wanted to write about organic gardening.  Tomatoes!  Turnips!  Pretty flowers!  I am a gentle soul, and it was my ambition to play quietly in the dirt, disturbing no one. 

But as I brooded darkly, a fly buzzed by, and without looking up from my somber musings –

Thwppt! 

 – I shot out my tongue and nabbed it. 

            What had come over me? I wondered as I chewed thoughtfully.  It had been rather a while since lunch, certainly, and, as vermin goes, the fly had looked unusually toothsome; but as a rule I am less impulsive.

Then the explanation dawned on me:  I had been singing Kermit’s song, “It Isn’t Easy Bein’ Green.”  It’s my favorite poor-me song (though I also favor the Avenue Q spoof, “It Sucks To Be Me”).  Thus it was only fitting that the Metaphor Fairy had turned me into a frog.

Shocking?  Well, sure, at first.  I’ve known people who became frogs before but most of them were tadpoles. 

Shortly, though, things normalized.  A girl gets used to anything!  Even eating flies isn’t that funky after the crap they used to serve at my high school.  Every Thursday, lunch was this orange-colored chili that made vomiting redundant.  And is there really anything weirder than a Fig Newton?

Plus, it wasn’t long before it struck me that froghood is not that bad a metaphor for small-town journalism.  In the normal course of things, you paddle around your little pond ribbiting benevolently on about the new Methodist Women’s recipe book, or croaking out accounts of the local government’s latest budgetary crisis, deeply fulfilled when you score a dramatic quote like: 

“I am sick and TARD of having to BAIG for every LIGHT BUB.”

But then some hairy horsefly of an issue flits by – say some noisy citizen who rails against government more or less full time, but now wants it to build him an aqueduct; or a business that brags it is boosting your community’s tax base, but hasn’t itself paid taxes since they were more than metaphorically a matter of rendering unto Caesar  – and before you know you’re doing it:

Thwppt! 

It’s a job hazard!  You know perfectly well you’re not the New York Times, you’re just a hinterlands hack leaning on Old Betsy and spitting contemplatively from time to time as you report on this year’s hay crop. 

But a backwoods journalist is a journalist just the same, paid – though not much, not much – to keep eyes, ears and notebook open.  So should Napoleon Bonaparte prance across your line of vision in an advanced state of nature, what can you do but push your coonskin cap back on your forehead, point at His Imperial Majesty and shout:

LOOKY!  YONDER GOES A NEKKID EMPEROR!

Or, as we say in Frog:

Thwppt!   

Really, even in a garden column you kill a few flies if you’re halfway paying attention.  It’s all very well to talk about playing quietly in the dirt, but then you notice the Freep’s “Five Tips” gardening hints referring to petunias as something you deadhead, or dirt as something they sell at Holcomb’s, and  –

Thwppt!

 – there you go again.  Those who read the Bob blog know that BLA prides itself on being to the extension agent:

“WHAT WOODWARD WAS TO NIXON!”

So.  Anyway.  I try hard to report truthfully and fairly, and I hate it if in so doing I’ve made anybody mad.  I’d add, though, that if you come into a little pond like this and do it any kind of injury you cannot realistically expect big wet kisses from the local frog.

But enough of that!  Since I’m down here anyway, I thought I’d hop through the rows, maybe get a little actual garden writing done for a change.  It’s hard to grow anything with metaphors this thick on the ground but an extension service article last week said February is the perfect time to plant asparagus.

February is not, of course, the perfect time to do anything, and what the writer probably meant was that he’d be out of a job if he couldn’t find anything that could remotely go into the ground, but –

Oh, my God, I’ve done it again.

Thwppt!  

END