Resolution For 2011: The Purse Theory of the Universe

Resolution For 2011:  How I Hope to Heal Galactic Disharmony and Locate My Car Keys

By Robin Ford Wallace

My sister Laura has a theory that if you find the perfect purse, the rest of  your life will fall into order behind it.  Of course, it’s purely hypothetical because no one has ever done it.

If you have a small purse, you find yourself in denial about it, trying to cram in things like books and pizzas.  If you have a big one, you can fit all those necessities in there but with the caveat you’ll never see them again.  And if you get one with six zillion separate compartments cleverly cordoned off with flaps and zippers and outside pouches, you will almost certainly end up slobbering mad on a rooftop with an Uzi, firing into an innocent crowd while you shriek, “Where – are – my – Breathsavers?”

But why are we talking about purses in this, a feature that usually maintains a least a thin veneer of horticulture?

One word:  January.   January is not a month that offers much by way of horticulture, but it is one that traditionally affords humanity an opportunity for self-improvement as it slouches into the new year appalled by what a loser it’s been in the old one.  For my resolution this year, I thought I’d try the purse theory.    

Some people don’t believe in these self-improvement resolutions.  That’s fine for them, but as for those of us whose personality is best described not as Type A or Type B but Type TW (“Train Wreck”), we have to believe.  It is our only hope! 

It’s not just that we have a million faults.  It’s also that we’re so aware of them, our insecurity is fault no. 1,000,001.  Here, for example, is an actual conversation one of us, to name no names, had with her husband after hosting a dinner:

HER:  Honey?  Do you think I’m an OK cook?

HIM (drowsily):  You’re an excellent cook.  Everything was delicious.

HER:  Well.  Thanks.  But my writing –

HIM:  There’s nothing wrong with your writing.  Go to sleep.

(Pause.)

HER:  What about my hair?

Disgusted, he left her for a Waffle House waitress. 

Not really, but you see the problem:  For those of us with low-to-no self-esteem, if we don’t have at least the hope of improvement we don’t know how much longer we can stand us.

Besides, though I admit each year’s diet and budget may leave me just as fat and poor by Christmas as I was the year before, there really are some resolutions I have kept.  In 2009, I kept one to stop smoking, and in 2010 (squeaking by in month 12 by the hair of my chinny-chin-chin) I kept another, overcoming my Internet ignorance enough to plunge boldly into cyberspace.  Bob’s Little Acre is now a blog you may read at www.bobslittleacre.blogspot.com.

Now, for 2011, it seems logical to give the purse theory a try because my handbag has always seemed such an apt metaphor for my life.  Which is to say:  a train wreck.

I’m the large purse type, myself.  I’m always saying in this space that things don’t matter, things are nothing, and I really believe that.  Nonetheless, insofar as I own things, I don’t leave home without them.

My purse must house the accoutrements of my trade – notebook, voice recorder, camera – as well as books and crosswords to keep me company at lunch, in case my car breaks down, or in the event I’m thrown in jail. 

Then there are cosmetics.  A girl has to have lipstick, not so much from vanity as from the fact a girl’s lips start drying out once a girl hits menopause or so.  And the mirror compact is not for primping but to check whether, as indicated from the looks I get from interviewees sometimes, I really have a booger hanging from my nose, or have recently turned into a cockroach.

As for the rest of it – well, heck, you never know when you’re going to need a corkscrew, or want to toss a salad.  It may seem like a lot to carry around, but when someone needs something out of the ordinary like a jump rope or a shoehorn, we big-purse types can look smug, pick up our bag and –

Claw helplessly through it until we are reduced to tears.  We can never find anything in those murky depths!  Objects in a big purse do not obey ordinary laws of physics.  They move through time rather than space – there, not there, then there again with no intervening human agency. 

Purse contents not only move mysteriously through the fabric of reality, sometimes they even multiply.  This happened once with my favorite pen.  I liked it so much I always kept mining in there until I found it.  Then one day my hand came out of the dark miasma clasping two of them.  It was a shocker, like learning you are married to twins.        

            Of course, the duplicate pen soon returned to its alternate universe, and so did the original eventually, never to return.  It’s when that happens, says Laura, that action is required.  “When your space-time continuum goes south,” she says, “it’s time for a new purse.”

            It’s time for a new purse.  Maybe this time it really will be the perfect one, and then, who knows?  Maybe Laura’s theory will work.  Maybe I’ll stop fumbling frenziedly for my cell phone until a ringing from my butt alerts me it’s in my back pocket.  And maybe from there I’ll become calm and organized and quietly self-confident. 

And maybe from there reality will continue to reshape itself until the clashing universes achieve harmony.  Maybe all the people of the world will live together in peace and love each other like brothers.

Now.  What about my hair?      

END

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

A Garden is Like a River

 

                         

All right.  I decided to post this one not because of its shining brilliance but because my husband dug me up a picture of the River O’ Petunias and I’ve been gloating over it during this interminable blizzard like a lifer over a Hustler mag.

The photo shows the River O’ in perhaps its second year, not its most spectacular, which was certainly the first, when I wrote this Bob’s Little Acre about it.  Like the man says, you can’t step in the same River O’ twice.

A GARDEN IS LIKE A RIVER.  SORT OF.

By Robin Ford Wallace

            Old joke:  A wise man says to his disciple, “Life is like a river.”

            “Life is like a river,” the disciple, deeply impressed, tells a second disciple, and the second disciple passes the wisdom on to a third, who passes it to a fourth, and so on until perhaps the twentieth disciple asks the nineteenth.  “Wait a minute.  How is life like a river?”

            “I don’t know,” admits the nineteenth, and asks the eighteenth, who asks the seventeenth, and so on until the question makes its way back to the wise man.

            Who shrugs.  “So,” he says.  “Maybe life isn’t like a river.”

            Still, people are always comparing life to one thing or another, and bodies of water and horticulture figure prominently.  I can’t count the times I’ve read, “The river of life,” or “Life is like a garden.” 

Nowhere, however, have I read, “A garden is like a river,” so I’m not altogether sure where I got the idea for the mighty Petunia River that now dominates my front yard and life.  All I know is:  This thing is bigger than I am. 

I don’t say that merely because it takes two garden hoses to water it.  What I mean is, I think it’s Art.

The Petunia River is to the ordinary flowerbed what the Pyramids are to the Quonset hut.  It is Everest.  It is the Sistine Chapel.  It is an epic, cast-of-thousands Cecil B. De Mille flood in living color that meanders, cascades and undulates down the length of this little acre, finally to empty into a plunge basin of impatiens around a willow tree at the bottom of the hill. 

It is my chef d’oeuvre, my opus.  It is the crowning achievement of a life spent rolling in the dirt. 

It is also the reason for the weeds in the pea patch and the fact that the squash swells to the size of your average Wal-Mart shopper before I get around to picking it.  What is food next to Art? 

The idea of the River might have sprung from the variety of petunia I planted, Wave, a name that suggests aquatic motion.  Or it may have its genesis in the geography of this place, which is so vertical that things are always losing their moorings and rolling merrily down toward the road, including topsoil, mulch, beer cans, and, more than once, your narrator.

Or I may just be barking mad.

People tell me I am and I used to worry about it, but it has long since ceased to bother me.  In my experience, when people tell you you’re crazy it usually just means you’re driving them that way, which is regrettable but hardly the same thing.

            Besides, if you read the news you’ll notice that people who really are nuts never suspect a thing.  They just go on their way rejoicing, believing that it is perfectly normal to communicate by letter bomb or keep UPS deliverymen cut up and parceled out in freezer bags.  So worrying about your sanity is a pretty good sign that you’re sane, or so I tell myself as I twitch and slobber.

            But I will admit the River represents a possibly psychotic departure from my usual gardening style.  I’m not big on design.  Like everyone else, I admire the glossy pictures in gardening mags, but always with a certain contemptuous realism  -- nice, but it ain’t gonna happen here, I work. 

I’m more the slash-and-burn type.  I don’t plant flowers in the place they’d look best, I plant them in a bare spot left where the dog’s wading pool has killed the grass.

I do, though, have a thing about rivers.

Throughout time (which Thomas Wolfe compared to a river), poems, novels and silly testosterone-laden movies about fishing have attested to the magic and mystery of rivers.  From the Styx to the Jordan, they figure in the world’s religions, and from the Nile to the Rubicon they figure in the world’s history.  Songs have been sung about them by everyone from Homer to Otis Redding.  Rivers are important to our culture.

Some of the best times of my life have been at rivers, though I don’t mind admitting they involved less of culture than of beer and inner tubes.  Still, isn’t there a kind of poetry in happy memories, whether or not you were drunk at the time?

In any case, I feel a certain mystic reverence for rivers and am always stunned by their beauty.  So perhaps that’s why the one Grand Design of my gardening life has been the Petunia River. 

I don’t think so, though.  I think I just looked at the hill and saw a mighty confluence of pink and purply blue petunias rolling organically down its slope, precisely as Michelangelo looked at a slab of marble and saw his David prance nakedly forth. I can’t explain it any better than that.  To understand the process, you’d have to be a great artist like Michelangelo and me.

Just joking.  This has been my only brush with Art and it is seriously starting to get on my nerves.  My lettuce bolted before I even noticed it was ready to pick, and as my husband points out we can’t eat petunias.

Still, I’m not unhappy I did it.  Yard work has so commandeered my life that if somebody asked me what I’d been doing for the last 30 years I’d have to admit, “Mostly mowing grass.”  Now I can anyway say, “What?  You never heard of the Petunia River?”

Well, I will stop trying to explain Art.  You either get it or you don’t.  I will merely shrug, look wise, and say:

“So.  Why shouldn’t a garden be like a river?”

END

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