Every Color But Blue: Why You Need to Plant You Some Zinnias

Every Color But Blue:  Why You Need to Plant You Some Zinnias

By Robin Ford Wallace

            “Plant zinnias.”

            That’s what I told the unhappy woman.  Then I got into my car and drove off into the twilight, lips blue with shock.  How had it happened?

I had just given advice.

            I don’t give advice!  Certainly not the horticultural variety, on the principle that nobody would take it.  Why should they?  Virtually nothing you find in newspaper gardening sections these days is useful, entertaining or, not to put too fine a point on it, true. 

You get the idea the editor says, “So write 700 words on petunias,” and the writer says, “So what’s a petunia?”  And the editor says, “So I look like I know what’s a petunia?  But if it’s something you eat run a recipe.”

In such an environment if I choose to squander my allotted column-inches on beer, Shakespeare and the human condition, I figure I am anyway doing no harm.  But back to those zinnias.

I had recommended them not horticulturally but medicinally.  The woman seemed depressed, and I had given her a suggestion on how to be happier.

Me?

Though I claim no expertise in either field, it could be argued I know more about horticulture than happiness.  You might go so far as to say I know more about Mesolithic marsupials (if any existed).  Not to beat it to death, but I am not just a  “The glass is half empty” type, I am a “The glass has been sucked into the yawning abyss of my despair” type.

But as detailed in one of the “Boblets” I have begun posting on the Bob’s Little Acre blog, during a recent period of intense misery I read a self-help manual on happiness, drank the Kool-Aid,  and have since been earnestly trying to mend my Black Hole ways. 
Resolutions and mantras sift from my desk and dangle off my bulletin board. (“Enthusiasm is a form of social courage.”) (“Be nice to people.  Mostly.”)  I march through life with a determined smile, militantly searching for the good in others.  I’ll shake it out of them if I have to.

For my cell phone ring tone I selected “Nature,” which sounds like the cinematic effect you’d hear when the fairy godmother descends in a soap bubble to wave her wand.  Birds chirp.  Chimes tinkle.  My husband says all that’s missing is a high, piping voice announcing, “Somebody’s callin’ to say they love you!”

            And the odd thing is, I really have been happy.  Like last Sunday I worked like a field hand from the minute I woke up until past midnight, weeding flowerbeds, mowing my continent-like lawn, canning 12 quarts of tomatoes. 

At the end of the day I was covered with sweat, dirt and grass.  I’d scalded all 10 fingers and gotten poison ivy between the left ones.  But as I crawled into bed, too exhausted to read, I thought: “It don’t get no better than this, Earl.” 

What’s my secret?  Well, all right.  Beer may have played some tiny role.  I have never made any secret that to mow the lawn you need more yellow fluids than gasoline.  But that’s not really it.  I’m at a level of bubbly that can’t be accounted for by malt fermentation. 

You might postulate it’s because summer is my season by birthright; I was born in August and, FYI, I’ll be blowing out some candles this week.

But way too many!  Past, say, 40, birthdays seriously suck.  Why celebrate a process that makes our butt sag, our belly billow and hair grow out of our rapidly multiplying chins?  You might as well dedicate a holiday to methamphetamine, or leprosy.

            So probably I should be depressed by this reminder that my brief hour of youth and beauty, such as it was, has dwindled further into the murky past.  Instead, I’ve been so perky lately I’ve wondered:  Is there still time to try out for cheerleading? 

Is my sunny mood owing to the self-help book? the mantras?  the ring tone?  Maybe a little.  But I think what really does the trick is:

            Flowers.

            Ten years ago I bought a rose of Sharon with big double purple blooms.   Shortly afterwards, I discovered how to root out new plants from cuttings and thus began my Mad Scientist phase.   Alternately speaking in a Royal-Society accent (“May I take a cutting, sir, for purposes of vegetative propagation?”) or a Dr. Frankenstein one (“Ve make der big vuns into der little vuns, but vurst ve have to cut zem op.  Bwah-ha-ha-ha!”) I proceeded to cover every bare spot with rose of Sharon clones. 

So now, every August I’m surrounded by oceans of big double flowers, to the point that struggle as I might I float helplessly off in a tide of horticultural bliss.  For persons of a botanical bent, no case of the blues can withstand that amount of purple.

But even if you were not sensible enough to go postal years ago with scissors and rooting hormone, it’s not too late to perk yourself up with flowers.  I have planted zinnias on my birthday several years and seen them bloom before frost.

Zinnias are round, double and easy to grow.  Their colloquial name is Old Maids but they always remind me of those tall, cheerful country girls who wear a lot of makeup and marry early and often.  A seed packet will run you maybe a quarter and keep you the rest of your life, as they self-seed relentlessly.

Zinnias come tall or as dwarves and, significantly, in every color but blue.  

So if August finds you, like me, with your personal life in tatters, your professional life a shambles and your fingers swollen with poison ivy, flowers help!  So I feel impelled to tell you:

“Plant zinnias.”

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

Which One Are You? An Earnest Treatise on the Pursuit of Happiness

            This is one of the fabled “Boblets,” which I’m beginning to realize are not necessarily going to be shorter than bona fide Bobs.  You think it’s easy rolling the universe into a ball?  Maybe later I’ll condense this a bit and make it into a newspaper piece, but for right now I had something to say about happiness and wanted to say it.

Which One Are You?  An Earnest Treatise on the Pursuit of Happiness

By Robin Ford Wallace

            “Most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.”

            I looked that up and it was attributed to Abraham Lincoln.  That’s a shame, because I’ve always had a soft spot for Abe.  I’d thought it was by Henry Ford and that was fine with me because from the history he already sounded like a jerk.

The quote presumes if you’re unhappy it must be your own fault, and that’s what makes my butt hurt.  Who wouldn’t rather be happy?  You think I like sitting down here in the garden eating worms and sucking entire galaxies into the abyss of my despair?

That’s an exaggeration.  I’m not always a black hole.  Just mostly.  Sometimes I find myself singing on a Saturday morning and realize I’m happy for no reason other than it’s Saturday morning.  But my default mood is a kind of Ain’t-Complainin’ neutral, shifting down toward glum or up toward cheerful depending on circumstances, health and relative humidity. 

Anyway I don’t suppose I’ve ever thought that hard about happiness before, but this has been an awful, awful year and I needed help.  Thus it was that I recently found myself reading a bestseller called The Happiness Project, by Gretchen Rubin, a sort of how-to manual on joy.

            I started reading the book with my accustomed negativity.  The first chapter seemed to be mostly about closets.  Hello?  I acknowledge that a reasonable level of tidiness, varying according to individual taste, is necessary for comfort, but how much ecstasy can a woman hope to achieve from a really organized closet?

            That’s the thing about these self-help books, they always mix the homely with the profound.  I remember reading one by the great and fluffy Helen Gurley Brown that admonished you to cherish your friends, because the people who love you are your most precious resource; and to keep rinsing until all of the shampoo is out of your hair.

            Ms. Rubin, though layers less fluffy, deals out similar mixtures:  “Do good, feel good” is side by side with “Bring a sweater.”

            But as I read on I began to understand the practicality of this sort of advice.  Her point about the sweater is that it’s impossible to be happy when you’re freezing.  Physical misery is one of the more basic deterrents to happiness. 

I have noticed this about shoes and certain items of underwear.  I bought a pair of black high heels with adorable little bows during one of my girlier moments.  They’re beautiful but they hurt, and not one day I’ve worn them has been anything less than tragic.  Similarly, some of my unhappiest business days have ended with me thrashing around at traffic lights trying to liberate myself from bras, which are instruments of torture left over from a barbaric past that also brought us the hair shirt and Spanish Inquisition. 

Anyway, physical comfort does contribute to happiness, and the book is full of useful pointers like that.  Take variety:  We think we like it more than we actually do.  If you were to stock up on two weeks’ worth of snacks you might buy everything from burritos to stuffed mushrooms, but if you go to the store each afternoon for something to eat you will almost always come out unwrapping the same Moon Pie. 

The point is, it may well improve your happiness to allow yourself to return from your next shopping trip with eight identical black tank tops if that’s what you wear every day.  Anyone who has ever had a psychotic episode in the light fixture aisle of Home Depot can tell you about the anxiety of too much choice.

Ms. Rubin also urges you to reexamine your basic beliefs – which she calls heuristics or True Rules – not so much to discard the ones that aren’t true as to modify the ones that don’t contribute to happiness.  For example, one of her husband’s – “The first one is not the right one” – is a keeper, she says, because though it’s probably not true it’s a comforting thing to say to a friend who has just been turned down for a job.

            I thought about my own heuristics and was sourly amused to find that most of them had to do with food:  “You can’t unsalt,” and “The only way to win at Captain D’s is not to go in.”  (I stand by that one.)

            I did reframe one of my nongastronomic heuristics to contribute to happiness.  Old:  Everyone hates me because of my vile personality.  New:  Everyone hates me because they envy my fascinating life.  What does it matter which is true?  Now every time another friend dumps me I just clamp my eyes shut and chant:  “Livin’ the dream!”

            Anyway, the most important point of the book was not these little tricks but the idea that happiness is, too, at least partly a matter of will.  One of the tenets of the book is:  “Act like you want to feel.”

            Of course you can’t be happy just by deciding to, but Ms. Rubin says it’s not a bad start; even faking a laugh or forcing a smile for some reason raises the spirits – and then of course you can always try her little tricks.

            Furthermore, she points out, happiness is the socially conscious choice:  Happy people make others happy, whereas unhappy people drag others down.    

I thought about that and it’s true.  I know slightly a young man who’s always happy whatever his circumstances and, rather better, another who’s always miserable.  The train wreck is smarter and funnier and really I like him more, but at worst he says something mean I have to forgive him for (because he’s unhappy) and at best he’s so gloomy I do somersaults to cheer him up.  So it’s actually less work talking to the dumb guy.

So Ms. Rubin’s stance is that pursuing happiness is not just our constitutional right, it’s a virtue.  She cites the case of a young French nun, St. Therese of Lisieux, who was canonized in 1925 for little more than what sounded like Extreme Perkiness.  She didn’t lead any armies or get crucified upside down.  She was just real, real cheerful.

One happiness trick Ms. Rubin recommends is reading disaster accounts – you know, the kind of memoir that begins, “I’ll never forget the day I was diagnosed.”  The idea is, they make you feel grateful it isn’t happening to you, and grateful people are happier.

I can attest to that because of the tornados that tore through here in April.  People whose houses were left standing almost universally used the word “blessed” to describe their feelings.  That included me.  In fact, I felt so blessed I didn’t start to whine until precisely the sixth day without electricity or flush toilets.  (That was the day it rained on me while I was burying rotting chicken from the freezer in the front flowerbed.)

But the point was brought home to me more vividly a couple of weeks ago when my husband told me about a fender-bender he’d had on the way to work.  He’d been following too close, he admitted, and when his cell phone rang he rear-ended the car in front of him while he fumbled to answer it.

My husband didn’t think he’d done that much damage but of course he stopped and so did the car in front of him.  The other driver got out and my husband, who had seen from behind that he was very short, now realized he was a dwarf.  The guy walked around his car and all he said was, “I’m not happy.”

“So,” my husband concluded, “I asked him, ‘Which one are you, then?’ ”

Get it?  The Seven Dwarves?  My husband hadn’t had an accident at all, it was just some crap joke he’d read on Facebook.   We were dressed up to go out to dinner and I laughed so hard I cried off all my eye makeup. 

It was only later I realized it wasn’t that damn funny.  I had just been easy to please because the last time my husband admitted he’d followed too close it had cost us $700.

            So.  I’ll conclude by recommending the book, and admitting I’m a convert to this happiness thing myself.  Maybe I’m not genetically predisposed to perkiness, and maybe some rotten things have happened to me in the past year.  But I can anyway try.  

Since the job is open, maybe I’ll be Happy.

            Robin Ford Wallace lives in Deerhead Cove, where she plays happily in the dirt.  More or less. 

The Gardener and the Market: How Radishes Started Civilization, Or Something

            For out-of-town readers (if I’ve got any):  The Trenton Ingle’s Market was damaged in the April 27 tornados that ravaged our area.  Rumors abound about why it has still not reopened – it rents the space from Soloff, a big shopping-center realty concern, and Soloff ain’t sayin’ either.  But its absence is driving everybody in town nuts.  Or at least your narrator.  One of the only two competitors costs too much, and I’m still mad at them about a chocolate chip cookie in 2009; and the other prominently features preformed yam patties in the meat section.  I ask you.

The Gardener and the Market:  How Radishes Started Civilization, or Something

By Robin Ford Wallace

            You hear a lot of nonsense about how it all began.

Religious people will tell you that everything was made fresh and clean in a matter of days, and scientific ones will bend your ear about fish slowly growing legs and monkeys developing thumbs, leading to an increased ability to manipulate tools and, ultimately, beer cans. 

I’ll tell you what it really was:  It was radishes.

I know this because my neighbors grew radishes one year and gave me a bushel.  I thought it was nice of them at the time but radish by radish I realized it had been an act of desperation. 

See, tomatoes you can can and green beans you can freeze, but the only thing you can do with radishes is eat them until your insides commence to combust spontaneously.  That pleasant peppery little zip they have turns on you after the first dozen or so, blows you up like swamp gas and makes it feel like you are practicing for Hell.

            And then there’s lettuce. 

Lettuce is even more perishable in the garden than it is in the crisper, so during the growing season it’s hard to walk down the road without some hollow-eyed gardener body-slamming you and begging you to take some before it goes to seed.  They call that process  “bolting,” which I find apt because most of your trouble growing lettuce is chasing down people to eat it.

            And what of zucchini?

Zucchini is a vegetable that takes over whole neighborhoods, proliferating furtively beneath its spreading foliage and militantly resisting any effort to control its throbbing Italian fecundity.  Gardeners pushing zucchini tend to be needier even than your radish crowd.

What, then, could be more natural than that these overburdened growers should come together for the mutual good?  That they should develop a system of exchange to ease surfeits and supply deficits?  That someone should take advantage of the crowd and sell hot dogs? 

Thus it was, at the dewy dawn of time, that gardeners unwittingly created the concept of the Market, and thence civilization.

I have mixed feelings about that. 

See, the thing got out of control.  We started turning everything from food to finer feelings into a market commodity.  Hungry?  Buy a burger.  Feel bad?  Buy some pills.  In love?  Buy a ring.  When I was young (she said coyly), that was not the effect that followed that cause. 

            I have a friend who instead of antiperspirant uses a salt stick she gets at a health food store.  The light film of minerals allows you to sweat but mitigates the odor.  My friend uses it because she worries that antiperspirants contribute to breast cancer.

            I wasn’t sure I believed that – what’s the FDA for if not to protect us from products that kill us? – but I decided to err on the side of caution and bought a salt stick myself. 

Then recently I realized I’d had the same one over a year and not much of it was used up yet.  The part that’s gone is mostly through attrition, which is to say dropping it on the bathroom floor.  So it may be around to pass on to my heirs.

            And thinking that, I found myself suddenly believing my friend’s theory.  The Market works best with commodities you use once and throw away, like toilet paper.  What would happen to America if people bought deodorant only once in a lifetime? 

So tumors schmumors, antiperspirant, and the Market, must roll on!   And if you don’t believe FDA allows products that kill people, just look at the diseases that processed food has visited on America’s children.

This past year has been my annus horribilis – that means “horrible year,” by the way, and is not a lead-in to anything else I have to say about toilet paper – but if no other good has come of it, it has showed how little gardens need have with the Market.   

As I dogpaddled morosely around my sea of troubles this spring, basil volunteered from  self-seeding, parsley and sage from roots.  Potato plants sprang from spuds I’d missed harvesting last year.  Eating-size asparagus grew up beside the porch steps and down by the mailbox, ostensibly through spontaneous generation. 

And flowers?  Cleome appeared magically in a spot where I’d grown it several years ago, and in the front border petunias were blooming before I’d quite realized they were even capable of self-seeding.  These are simpler blossoms than the big flashy doubles I had there last year but the colors are beautiful and I love them.    

So when my horticultural fervor finally kicked back in, it was simply a matter of rolling around in the dirt liberating the plants from weeds, neatly illustrating the one overriding message of Bob’s Little Acre:  Gardening is something you do, not something you buy.  

Yes, when I moved here from the big city many years ago, I did so with the idea of escaping the Market.  I wanted to twine flowers in my hair and grow all my own food. 

But when you live at the anal end of nowhere, and work at home, it’s not long before you figure out that the Ingle’s is 75 percent of your social life, and anyway you can’t grow toilet paper.

Which brings us, at last, to the point of this column:  WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO DO WITHOUT INGLE’S?  EVERYTHING I NEED, ONE OF THE OTHER GROCERY STORES CHARGES DOUBLE FOR AND THE OTHER DOESN’T CARRY!  SHRIEK!  SHRIEK!  SHRIEK!

Ahem.  What I meant to say was, as a nation we must wean ourselves from our pernicious dependency on the Market, in favor of the steely self-reliance of our frontier forefathers.

And above all, we must not plant radishes.

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

The Boblet is Born!

Bob goes Blogger:  The Birth of the Boblet, or Essu

By Robin Ford Wallace

            Today in the newspaper I read about Ginger Lee, the stripper who got that politico Weiner in so much trouble.  The crux of the article seemed to be that she was attributed as saying things on her blog about Mr. W. that she in fact hadn’t, but I got confused partway through because I didn’t understand the term “reblog” or, really, even the concept – if it wasn’t something she wrote, what was it doing on her blog?

            The truth is, I know squat about blogging.  It’s too new for me!  I’m a dinosaur that cooks!  In fact, as I typed them just now, the spellchecker highlighted “blog” and “blogging.”  I’m still using a version of Word that doesn’t recognize them as words.

            Yet I am a “blogger.”

            Damn.  Spellchecker didn’t like that one, either.

            My point is this has never been much of a blog.  I started it because I needed someplace to put Bob’s Little Acre that people might actually read it.  I’d been fighting with the newspaper I wrote for to put Bob on their website, and for a while I won:  A desultory collection of my columns may still be viewed in the Sentinel archives.

            But it was never that satisfying.  At the rag, nobody really cared about the Bobs but me, so they would always go up with misspellings in the titles or something else a little wrong that would spoil my pleasure in them.  If I insisted I felt like a prima donna, and in the end I just gave up.  (Since then I gave up all my fights with the newspaper and am much happier as a result – but that’s another story.)

            In any case, the technology, or my tolerance to it, had improved enough by last fall that I was able to post the Bobs online all by my pink self, and that has given me a great deal of pleasure.  Mark Twain said he could live off a compliment for two weeks, but your modern writer lives off “hits.” 

            Though they were pretty dismal at first.  I still remember my joy when I saw I’d gotten up to 15 – and my disgust when I figured out they were all me!  There was an option you had to select so the program wouldn’t count it as a hit when you went in to correct your grammar. 

Bob’s Little Acre has never “gone viral,” but these days I do notice when I’ve written a new one my hits soar for a few days.  That makes me so happy I practically pee myself.

            But the thing is, I can’t write a Bob’s Little Acre every day, or really even every week.  There’s this business of making a living, for one thing, and for another, writing Bob’s Little Acre is hard!

Yeah, yeah, you say, Bob’s Little Acre is frivolous and breezy and mostly about beer, how hard can that be?  Well, go back and read one (she said with icy dignity) and you’ll note they’re tightly organized, that they try pathetically hard to make some pithy point about Reality,  and that in some cases they actually strive to make the world a better place.  Hell, you try it.

When I first got the idea of doing Bob, that idea was to write a gardening column that was funny.  I don’t know what happened!  Sometimes when I get worried about money, or ambitious or something, I try to go back and become a real gardening writer, impart a little useful horticultural information here and there, you know the type of thing, talk about soil acidity, to see if I can’t get other newspapers to take me seriously.

  Fat chance!  Either I see an opportunity to cop a cheap laugh, and go for it every time, or I start imagining the disappointment of the regular reader, searching in vain for some sly double-entendre as I drone on and on about alfalfa or something, or I get clear aim at Big Food, or my brother Frank, and can’t resist taking my shot.

So Bob is what it is, I can’t change its spots.  And I can’t write more Bobs – but here’s my point, I want to write more SOMETHING.  I’ve got topics and topics on lists and lists all over my computer and throughout my notebooks.  The reason you go into writing is you’ve got so much to say, and are flat-chested, so that nobody pays you any mind in person.

            That, and the fact that I’ve given July over for self-improvement, gave me the idea of writing, and posting on this site, much shorter or at least much more general pieces, on a variety of themes, simply because I want to write them and I hope somebody will read them, whether or not they’re suitable for publication in the newspaper or anywhere else.  The caveat is that they shouldn’t rob me of much time in which I’m supposed to be working.  Thus I conceived what I originally called the “essu,” a cross between an essay and a haiku.

A haiku is a poem of a set number of syllables along a central theme.  Haikus compare favorably with other modern poetry in that they are, anyway, short.  Here I cannot help quoting to you my favorite one, a spoof written by Richard Brautigan:

A piece of green pepper

fell off the wooden salad bowl:

so what?
            But since I’ve already learned – I’m now on page 4 of the double-spaced version of this entry – that writing quickly doesn’t always mean writing tersely, perhaps we’d better abandon the “essu” idea and just call these pieces “Boblets.” 

Boblets will not be as studied and organized as Bobs, and they will not work so hard to get a laugh, but there will in any case be more of them – so that maybe this will start looking more like a blog, and I’ll start feeling more like a blogger. 

To that end, I have anyway added the words to my spellchecker.

More soon!

END

We Have Nothing to Fear But -- Well, Got A Minute?

     2011’s spring has been the most horrible of my life.  For me, things started with that damn tornado and got worse from there.   So with that in mind, I thought I’d unearth this fossil from a couple of years ago, when it was spring and I was whining about my misfortunes because it was – get this – raining.  Them was the days!

WE HAVE NOTHING TO FEAR BUT – WELL, GOT A MINUTE?

By Robin Ford Wallace

            It’s not just media hype.

And it’s not just a clever ploy by the government to pull the wool over our eyes about what’s really going on in Washington, either.  This sickness is real, folks, and it’s serious.  If it gets much worse, we’re going to have to start using that ugly word:

Pandemic.

How did it all begin?  Weather conditions brought it on, and human nature did the rest.  At first there was just Patient Zero, standing on her porch and staring bitterly out into the rain on a soggy Saturday.  Then the whole thing snowballed and next there was –

Well, actually, there was just Patient Zero again, standing on the same porch and staring bitterly out into the same rain, only this time it was a soggy Sunday. 

Then there was another wet Saturday.  Then another wet Sunday.  Then another rainy weekend and another and another, until Patient Zero saw the spring slipping through her fingers, so she picked a flowerpot up off the porch railing, determined to plant it anyway, but on the bottom of the pot was something cold and slimy, and suddenly it wasn’t just the spring slipping through her fingers. 

It was slugs. 

And as she shrieked and gibbered and sprinted toward hot water and soap, she realized she had come down with all the symptoms.  What she had was a slobbering, full-fledged, possibly terminal case of:

Whine Flu.

Mark Twain said that everybody complains about the weather but nobody does anything about it.  That’s not strictly true.  The ancient historian Herodotus wrote of a North African people who declared war on the desert wind and marched out with all their weapons to kill it. 

The wind blew up a sandstorm and the armies were subsumed and never seen again, but that’s beside the point.  The point is, they did, too, do something about it.

Most of us, however, follow the Twain model and stick to whining.  Thus the pandemic. 

Of course I’m Patient Zero in the case study cited above, but I refuse to believe I’m the only one whining.  Spring is what the gardener lives for and this has been the Spring that was Not.  At first every weekend was too cold to play outside, then it got so wet, you kept expecting an old man to float by in a boat with two of every kind of animal.

But it wasn’t just the rain that gave me Whine Flu.  It was the slugs.

Earlier this year, I planned to write a column on garden pests.  I didn’t get any further than the title (“Insects and the Single Girl”).  The world of invertebrates unnerves me so deeply, I just couldn’t bring myself to do it.

There is nothing dainty about me.  I cuss and drink beer.  But there is something about a caterpillar that brings out my Inner Girlie Girl.  I’m talking about those tent worms that come down from the trees by the millions, the ones with white rings around their heads.  They don’t seem to have eyes but sometimes they rear up and wave their faces at you blindly, as if they know by your smell you’re the one they want, and there’s nowhere you can go that they can’t track you down. 

“Eek,” says my Inner Girl.

Next to slugs, though, caterpillars are cuddly.  There is something about a slug that brings out my Inner Fay Wray. 

Slugs are why I haven’t gone barefoot for 19 years, why I wear gloves at the recycling center, and why I never eat eggplant, mushrooms or anchovies.  (Wedged eggplant, and sliced mushrooms, look similar to slugs.  Anchovies are identical.)

Here are the rules:  I don’t touch slugs.  I don’t touch anything a slug has touched.  I don’t touch anything that a slug might have touched. 

Which, in this weather, means: anything on my porch.  The constant rain has brought armies of fresh, juicy slugs sliding up the posts.  By night, they feast obscenely on the tender seedlings waiting on the porch railings to be planted.  By day, they nestle snotlike beneath the pots, waiting to ambush my unsuspecting fingertips with their vomit-inducing touch. 

“WAAHHH!” says my Inner Fay Wray.  I head for the hills.

Which brings us naturally to the subject of bears.

Doesn’t it seem there have been a whole lot of newspaper reports about bears eating people in the past couple of years?  Or is it just me?   That’s possible.  I walk the rim of Cloudland Canyon two or three afternoons a week with my dogs, and as such I find myself looking over my shoulder sometimes, feeling, you know, edible.  But I’ve never seen a bear there. 

Now, however, the Sentinel reported that a bear was found dead on I-59.  The woods are so thick with bears, it appears, they’re interfering with traffic.  So on my hikes these days I’ve started feeling, you know, tasty.

            And my fears in life are not limited to being eaten by a bear or touched by a slug.  We haven’t even touched on airplanes, basements or dental hygienists. 

Some fears I can do something about.  I can buy poison for the slugs (though right now everybody’s sold out), and laugh if you will but I own a can of bear spray (though so far the childproof cap has proved impregnable).  But what about the big ones, age, sickness, death? 

No, I think maybe life is all about being afraid of things you can’t do anything about and wanting things you can’t have, any more than you can order up a sunny day when it’s raining.  As we’re no longer stupid enough to declare war on the weather, our only logical course of action is to complain impotently.

So whining, we must conclude, is not just a pandemic. 

It is the human condition.

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

Wealth. Poverty. Asparagus.

     I haven't posted here for ages!  Why?  Well, death, depression, and did I tell you about the tornado?  But last week I cheered up long enough to finish this piece I'd started about asparagus way long ago.  

Wealth, Poverty, the Human Condition – Oh, And Did I Mention Asparagus?

By Robin Ford Wallace

            Oh, hello there, darling.  My secretary said you’d rung.  I’m down here in the garden, cutting asparagus.   Do join me!

But I’d leave that jacket with the butler.  Of course it’s only April but in the sunshine it’s already hot.   In fact, I’ll ring for the maid to bring us something cold, shall I?

            T.S. Eliot said April was the cruelest month but personally I cannot imagine anything nicer.  A month that contains not only wildflowers but asparagus?  Well, Eliot  was a common little man and I expect he drank.   

Cutting asparagus in the spring gives a girl the same cozy feeling she gets from opening dividend checks.  Make that one little investment, darling, and every year it pays and pays.

Ah, here’s Matilda to take our order.  Champagne for me, I think; one’s feeling distinctly bubbly today.  But I expect you’re more at home with beer, aren’t you? 

SPLAT!

            That, Gentle Reader, was the sound of an oak tree snapping in the April 27 tornado, crashing down like 100 feet of the clumsiest metaphor your narrator ever wrote, and burying her vegetable garden under tons of hardwood, brush and poison ivy vines. 

Not to mention knocking crap out of the latest Bob’s Little Acre.

            As you may have gathered, it was to have been a column about asparagus.  My friend Mary wanted to start an asparagus bed and had asked my advice.  Where I was going with all the maid-and-butler stuff was to show that though asparagus since ancient times has been rich-people food, the poorest home gardener may easily ascend the socioeconomic ladder, at least gastronomically, by putting in an asparagus row.

            But the column was already in trouble!  Your narrator seems congenitally incapable of imparting useful horticultural information without tossing in some profundity or another about the human condition, to the point that a simple statement such as, “Tomatoes benefit greatly by a side-dressing of manure,” might keep the regular reader awake for a week, muttering, “What?  What?” to a cold and answerless ceiling.

            In this case, I was trying to churn out some wisdom about poverty versus wealth in America.  Mary is a starving artist and struggles to pay the bills each month, but she has 5000 years of culture at her fingertips and can order lunch in Italian without breaking a serious sweat.  So what does poverty mean, really?

            But after I’d started the column I happened to drop by the house of a better-heeled friend as she harvested her own asparagus.  My friend doesn’t have maids and butlers but that day she did have two paid workers helping her in the garden, and she also had asparagus so plump and bursting with vitality, it made mine look like one of those tubercular Poe heroines standing next to the Campbell Kids.  She gave the credit for it to mushroom compost and her clever yardman.

            And that wasn’t the only problem with the column.  I was also trying to work in a way to tell you about the day that Mary cooked the lobsters.  

It was late last summer, and Mary had been feeling poor so she’d splurged on live lobsters from the Bi-Lo.  Lobsters reminded her of her idyllic childhood in the Northeast, when summers were spent in Maine.  Meanwhile I’d been lonely and had called, and when she told me her plan I invited myself over to her farm, buying my own lobster on the way.

Because it was so hot, Mary was wearing only an elastic-waisted skirt pulled up under her arms, which for some reason looked very elegant, and she boiled the lobsters alive, saying over her shoulder with merry sophistication, “I hate to murder them but they’re so delicious.” 

We ate them at a table out on the lawn, washed down with red wine, and the memory sustained me through the long and terrible winter that followed.

Not the memory of the lobsters.  The lobsters were a nightmare!  They escaped from their boxes and before Mary murdered them chased me around the kitchen while I jumped on chairs and shouted, “Eek.”   Then eating them was like joining the Manson Family.  You had to keep cracking open their pitiful little bones, and sometimes green slime slid out.   I’d have been much happier with a hot dog!

No, what sustained me was the memory of the whole golden afternoon, the intrinsic coolness of having a place to go where people make art and eat rich-people food when they’re feeling especially poor and generally live their lives in a Hemingway novel, and where if I knock they let me in.  Mary’s rich because she’s got the 5000 years of culture, and I’m rich because I’ve got Mary, and of course things like Shakespeare and my garden and –

SPLAT! 

OK, so I don’t have my garden.  Maybe the whole moral of the story, if there is one, is that it’s a joke to get all smug and complacent and ring-for-the-butler-darling when the universe routinely smacks us down as swiftly and inexorably as in the pivotal scene of  “Bambi Meets Godzilla.” 

            Epilogue:  I never finished the asparagus column.  Mary went ahead and planted her asparagus patch without benefit of my wisdom, and I think she made it too small.  If anyone is still interested in my advice here it is:  You can’t be too rich or too thin or have too much asparagus.

            But who cares what I think about asparagus, much less wealth, poverty or for God’s sake the human condition?  I’m a garden writer without a garden, just a blob of human jetsam crouched down here muttering amid the one row of vegetables spared to me after the storm, some straggling yellow straightnecks that, any minute now, the squash borers may very well –

SPLAT!

END

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

Radio-Free Robin: Don't Help the Bear!

     This is a column for this week's Sentinel I wrote not as a Bob's Little Acre but as a Radio-Free Robin, which means it's what passes at the Acre for political.  It's not necessarily artful but I had to be rid of it!  It's spring and time for people of my proclivities to roll happily in the dirt.  This afternoon I was trying to do just that but I had this piece to finish before deadline and this point I wanted to make about the Current Situation on my beady little mind, so instead of rejoicing in dirt I kept furrowing the brow and moving the lips as I formulated arguments.
     And really, after I ruined my Sunday for the piece, what boots it?  Do I change anybody's mind?  Do I strike any real blows for Truth, Justice and the American Way? 
     Well, who knows?  But I promise, I'm through with these Radio-Frees for the rest of the spring anyway.  The next Bob, which I've already started, will be about asparagus.
     Well, sort of about asparagus.  Mostly about asparagus.  Though there were some points I wanted to make about materialism and poverty and Truth, Justice, the American ...
     Later.

Kiss the Girl!  Have Some Kids!  But Above All, Don’t Help The Bear!

By Robin Ford Wallace

            “There once was a farmer who took a young miss, in back of the barn where he gave her a –

Lecture, on horses and cattle and chickens and eggs, and told her she had the most beautiful –

Manners, which suited a girl of her charms, a girl that he wanted to take in his –

Washing, and ironing, and then when she did, they could get married and raise lots of –

Sweet Violets!”  

            In case you’re wondering, the above is a song called “Sweet Violets” that my mom used to sing me when I was a child, and one reason I never reproduced.  Think of the awful power of mothers to warp their children for life. 

Oh, you wouldn’t mean any harm.  You’d just be trying to get your kid to sleep.  But there you’d be at 3 a.m., slumped against a wall jiggling away, when suddenly you’d realize what you’d done:  Infected your innocent baby with all the words to “Honey,” which would haunt him for the next 90 years.

But weren’t we talking about the stark and terrifying socioeconomic realities of the early 21^st century?

Yes, I fear so, Gentle Reader:  Radio-Free Robin rides again! 

Don’t look at me like that.  You think I want to editorialize?  It is spring, when a girl like me is already torn between the siren call of dirt and the more winsome melody of wildflowers.  You think I got time to watchdog our cherished American freedoms? 

However, keeping the world safe for democracy gets to be a habit, and it was not for “Sweet Violets” that I was delving through the spidery attics of my memory.  “Sweet Violets” just seduced me from my grim duty momentarily, being about flowers.  What I was really looking for up there was a song my mother used to sing about a preacher chased up a tree by a bear.  He prays:  

              "Oh, Lawd!  You delivered Daniel from the lion's den.  

              You delivered Jonah from the belly of the whale and then,

              The Hebrew children from the fiery furnace, so the good book do declare,  

              Now Lawd, dear Lawd, if you can't help me,

              Please!  Don’t help that bear!”

              What got me singing that was a speech by newly elected Labor Commissioner Mark Butler.  Mr. Butler expressed regret for the Labor Department’s reputation of hostility toward the business sector, and vowed to make it more business-friendly from now on.  “I don’t think the Department of Labor should be about handing out checks,” he said.

              You realize, of course, he was talking about unemployment checks?  

              So the new labor commissioner is against taking care of axed workers, on the grounds it might irritate business, and it’s not the first time I’ve heard this.  Here’s the thinking:  

              With millions of Americans out of work, job creation has become our national holy grail.  And who creates jobs?  Why, business!  And business could create a whole bunch more if it weren’t for all these pesky government regulations!  “We need to get government out of the way,” I heard (also newly elected) U.S. Congressman Tom Graves say in a speech on job creation.

              Ahem.  Does anybody besides me remember who it was who shipped American jobs overseas because overseas workers work cheaper?  Who eliminated jobs in favor of outsourced consultants so it wouldn’t have to pay for health insurance?  (And don’t even get me started on health insurance!)

              Business did those things, of course.  It is ridiculous to hope that business will save the American worker.  Business doesn’t care about the American worker.  Business used to send coal miners into dank pits where they died like flies.  Business still does that as far as it can get away with it.  

              In fact, business has always treated workers as badly as it was allowed.  Remember, please, the company store, where business clipped workers of what little wages it was obliged to pay them.  For that matter, business used to capture people in poor countries and sell them to other businesses so they wouldn’t have to pay wages at all.  Business still adores slave labor and that’s why it recruits illegal aliens.  

              And business never even pretended it was a good guy.  Calvin Coolidge famously said, “The business of America is business,” but who ever said the business of business was America?  Business never made any bones it was doing anything but trying to make a buck.

              Now, Point Two:  It is a legitimate – a vital! – function of government to protect American workers from the greed and rapacity of business.  If it weren’t for government regulation, business would still be cheerfully boiling workers down in lard vats and beating little children to make them operate machines faster.  

              But now, when the greed of business has not only outsourced the jobs but collapsed the banking system and more or less obliterated the American middle class, when working Americans are fixin’ to become nothing but a pool of disenfranchised organ donors for the very rich, what does the great toothless voice of tea party populism shriek?

              “Keep the government out of business’s hair!  Abolish the minimum wage!  Dismantle collective bargaining!”   

              It is like my mother’s violet song, when the rhyme scheme suggests the farmer is going to kiss the girl and instead he commences to carry on about chickens.  If the world made sense, we wouldn’t elect candidates who said things like that, we’d swarm over them like Zulus and cut them up for meat.     

              What I’m trying to say here is that I am perfectly happy for the government to intercede in my behalf to keep rampageous capitalism from harvesting my bone marrow.  And if it won’t, all I can hope is:

              It won’t help the bear.

END