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

   

When Loved Ones Overrun Manchuria: Bob’s Little Human Relations Column

     This ain’t precisely about gardening.  It is, fah cryin’ out loud, January!  Anyway this is what’s been on my mind as we stride bravely into 2012.

When Loved Ones Overrun Manchuria:  Bob’s Little Human Relations Column

By Robin Ford Wallace

            Winter leaves the garden column in a hole.

At least, it leaves in a hole the kind of garden column that carries on much about gardening.  How fortunate that Bob’s Little Acre is less wedded to the genre than most.

BLA seems to have meandered off the horticultural high road somewhere around October (perhaps following a BOILED PEANUTS sign) and has yet to find its way back to the on ramp. 

Come spring, the column will consult its road map, or possibly a state trooper – tossing beer cans at them as they whiz past is, by the way, amazingly effective in attracting their attention – correct its route, and return to its peaceful agrarian existence.

But January is more suitable to hoarfrost than to horticulture, and BLA will thus postpone its rededication to dirt until the thaw.  Instead it will pull up to a cozy roadhouse, the kind where one sits before a gas log eating fats and carbohydrates delivered by waitresses with plump, comfortable names like Mabel, and spend the rest of the winter indoors as a human relations column.

Or at least that’s how it will spend this week.  What happened is, I read a piece by one of those inspirational columnists on the subject of leaving the bitterness of the past behind us as we stride determinedly into the future.  And I thought:  We might as well!  Since if we’re waiting for those who embittered us to apologize, we’d better ask Mabel to bring us more fries because we’re going to be here a while.    

With 2012 opening before me like a shining new city, there’s nothing I’d like more than to leave the baggage of strife at the train station of reconciliation and go tap-dancing into the streets of happily every after.  I’m feeling loving!  Hopeful!  In a mood to forgive everybody everything! 

But nobody’s asked me.

People by and large do not apologize.  Lately I’ve put a lot of thought into why, and I’ve concluded the chief reason is:  They’re not sorry.

Here is an obscure comedy snippet my husband is always quoting (and I’m probably misquoting):  “We was just sitting around one night drinking beer when we took a notion to form us a littley old Third Reich.  We didn’t mean nobody no harm.”

That beautifully illustrates Point A:  People never think they’ve done anything wrong, even the ones on trial for crimes against humanity.  Much less your sister!

Say your sister has done something awful, made off with your boyfriend or spread vicious gossip about you or rampaged across Europe breaking out shop windows, shooting university professors and rolling artillery into peace-loving democracies.

If it was me I’d say, “I’m sorry.  I was wrong.  I love you and honor you and in the future will be more careful about crushing Western civilization.”

But most people would rather die!  Confront them with wrongdoing and they’ll explain why it was right:

“I wasn’t stealing your boyfriend!  I just thought he looked cold over there.  Anyway I planned to bring him back in time for the wedding.”

Or they’ll tell you it wasn’t wrong, it’s just your sick mind:  

“Nobody else would mind their picture on Facebook naked on the toilet picking their nose!  You just enjoy feeling persecuted, don’t you?” 

Or they’ll say it’s so insignificant only a psycho like you would think it mattered.  “So, stupid, you think anybody else is going to miss Czechoslovakia, a tiny country with no really good restaurants?”

There are exceptions to every rule and to the apology rule the exception is:  Me.  Come to my house for dinner and I’ll apologize for the house, I’ll apologize for the dinner, then I’ll apologize for apologizing.  I have to stop myself from flagging down cops and apologizing for the Kennedy assassination.    

            Moving on though, another reason apologies are so hard to come by is (Point B):  People lie.

As a garden columnist, I’ve often pointed out that much of what we’re told about the universe is lies or male answer syndrome.  But I never realized until recently that this includes practically everything we hear on the interpersonal level – even from quite nice people such as, say, your sister – when it’s a matter of defending Point A.

“France?” your sister will say.  “Why would I want to go and invade France?  Never been there!  Nasty unpleasant place, no public restrooms.”

This, while you’re looking at a photograph of her goosestepping into Paris, the jackbooted B-word. 

Parenthetically, I never lie myself, not even when people ask, “Does this make me look fat?” or “How did you like the sweet potato casserole?”  Oddly, this honesty has done little to improve human relations in my neck of the woods.    

Yet another factor in the apology drought is (Point C):  People forget.

Say you’re finally back on speaking terms with your sister and she says, “I only invaded Poland because you borrowed my blue sweater.”

To which your astonished reply is, “What blue sweater?” 

And then: “Poland?” 

See, you’d caught her red-handed in France but Poland is fresh and new.  Point being, give people enough time and they forget not only what they did to ruin your life but what lies they told you about it later. 

Except me.  I never forget anything.  In arguments, I assert, “But that directly contradicts what you said on May 2, 1986.”  (Imagine what a human relations plus that is.)  (But it is also why people should give up and apologize.  I am right.)

            Well, people are imperfect and I suppose one solution is to forgive them whether they ask forgiveness or not. 

Another is to bomb them into the Stone Age.  While I make up my mind, how’s about another plate of them nachos, Mabel?

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

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.