Tuesday, October 7, 2008

Vegetables and Ironies. Kinda.

This isn’t the entry I had intended to write. What I was going to write is a reflection on a particular irony that I enjoyed: while I should have wanted to work in my garden, there was too much dirt around, and this made me not want to. The dirt came from the city ripping up the streets and sidewalks where I live, and along with them, considerable chunks of my yard. It was sad, and looked like hell. Then, after months of inactivity, the workers came back to finish the job, and the concrete sidewalks they poured made me want to garden. Concrete makes me want to garden; dirt makes me want not to. So much for creating a natural environment.

But that isn’t this blog. After immediate and impressive progress upon the return of the workers, the project once again ground to a halt. They replaced the sidewalk but ripped out the street, piled the chunks up around my property, and stopped. More dirt had been piled up, more gravel. More gnashing of teeth. More people stood around whenever I ventured out to do something. Then came the night of the rain, followed by the dark morning of the long trek to the car through the sinking in mud. In my nice school clothes. In the rain.

This is how that post was to have started:

A few weeks ago, I was excited by the return of the workers.

Saturday morning, I was cleaning the filter on the aeration pump in the fountain, a foam affair that fits over the submerged pump’s intake and gunks up every few days. I had recently talked to the city engineer, the galoot, and had been expecting the concrete guys. They wasted no time getting started.

This is how that post was to have ended:

Concrete and vegetables. I hadn’t expected how the arrival of one would lead to an appreciation of the other. But I like the irony.

Looking back, I see that the irony is illusory. It’s not the concrete or the dirt. It’s the dirt where there is supposed to be concrete, and the concrete where there is supposed to be dirt. This isn’t a ‘time to every purpose under heaven’ moment. It’s the fact that whatever illusion of nature I make in the yard, the concrete is never that distant and illusions are short on substance. It’s noise and dust and mud where I want sounds and sunlight and loam. It’s holding a garden trowel and kneeling on a root watching a man sitting in an air conditioned cabin running a backhoe, the helplessness of planting a flower while acres of pavement are hauled off.

And the fact that it’s still not done doesn’t help, either.

Monday, October 6, 2008

Companion Planting, Part One

I’m not always in my garden, or even thinking about it. My university has been witnessing how a mishandled sexual assault allegation plays out in its internal bureaucracy. After wending its way through the school athletic departments, the case came to rest in the office of the president of the university, an office which has seen its share of turmoil in the last couple years. At the heart of that earlier turmoil was a prolonged and contentious search for a new president that left us with only interim leadership for six months as we went through multiple rounds of searching, leaving faculty disgruntled and morale low. Now, it is not so much the mishandling of the alleged rape of a drunken female student athlete by at least two members of the football team that is at the heart of the current turmoil; the president’s incompetence in that regard is by now old news.

The current turmoil, still less than a year into the new president’s tenure, resides in the mishandling of the aftermath of the mishandling of the sexual assault case. This mishandling comes in the wake of the suicide of a university professor accused by his students of offering to trade better grades for fondling them. Sweeping new sexual harassment prevention and reporting directives have been implemented without input from the university community, and as a face-saving measure in the rape case a widely respected and long-term employee of the university has been made the scapegoat and fired on the basis of dodgy evidence and without explanation, due process, or a chance to defend himself. To be clear, he isn’t accused of anything malicious, but rather of inexpertly navigating a labyrinthine conflict of interest between the family of the victim, the board of regents, and various university offices both athletic and administrative. We were talking about the case as my arts research class was getting started a few days ago.

As a high school teacher, a sometimes gruff and usually groggy one, I at times forget that I am some sort of role model. I think that part of my professional life is modeling the human behaviors that I want to see in the world. Almost. I should say my job is to model the behaviors I want to see in the world in a way that makes sense to high school students. One beautiful day a few years ago, before I had a pond of my own, I sat on the bench near the pond in front of our school looking at the water plants, and my friend Kara came out and sat with me for a while. “Does this mean you’re going out with Mr. Schott?!?” her students were asking her later that day. This is how the world makes sense to tenth graders.

School itself is a strange environment. Students cling physically to each other in all manners of ways from cute to obscene, while we adults in the school seldom touch anyone. We rarely shake hands. The bustle of children that the adults try to avoid can feel like an extension of being lonely in a crowd. We never, never, touch the students. I was myself uncomfortable earlier in the term when a student of mine walked over to where I sat reading his homework and sort of leaned on me, pawed me over, generally got in my space as he eagerly pointed out things I should pay attention to in his paper. He’s a squirmy kid like that, still learning boundaries. But still.

As we discussed the university’s troubles in my art class, in a pleasant gesture another professor walked across the cavernous basement room to say hello to us where we sat at tables talking. “I just wanted to say ‘hi’ to you all,” she announced generally, “I never get to see most of you.” We smiled and murmured pleasantries.

Then, unexpectedly, “I’ve got some questions for you,” my proff said to the other professor as she made to leave. His tone was more serious than his eyes. She paused, wryly skeptical.

“Tell me about the haircut,” he demanded. Her hair was short, with bangs swept dramatically over one eye, coming to a nearly geometrical point. As she looked for meaning in this question, I stared, confounded. “How do you make it into a triangle?” he continued, his close-shaven head tilted up to look at her, the smile creeping into his voice.

“Gel,” she said to him, stepping close, leaning into him, her hand on his shoulder. “Lots and lots of gel.” She looked up to the rest of us and explained, “He likes it when my hair is longer.” How, I wondered, could she know he thinks that?

“Gel,” he said. “Maybe I should try that.”

She ran her hand across his head, more so than through his close cut hair. “Maybe we can get you a die job, too,” she smiled. She didn’t rub his shoulders or poke him in the tummy or kiss his forehead, but at this point, if she had I wouldn’t have been surprised.

When I recounted this scene to a friend, I had to ask myself what they were modeling so unselfconsciously in front of their students, not only at a time when sexual harassment policies at the university are on everyone’s mind, but oblivious of them while in the middle of a discussion about them. They weren’t modeling respect; any faculty member would have that for these two. It was something more than that, a calm assurance in their playful humor and gentle affection for each other of the sort that I had never seen in a professional environment before. It makes my spirit smile to even remember it. Maybe being out of the garden isn’t such a bad thing.

Community Development

I maintain a narrow view and inhale the dust. This just isn’t working.

A few days before, I was complaining to my neighbor, Kevin: Where is all this pond sludge coming from?

“I thought you were digging a pond over there by your bird feeder?”

“This, what you’re doing here,” Kevin had said, pointing to me where I stood with fish swimming about my knees, “looks a lot like maintenance. I don’t want to do maintenance.”

“What do you want, Kevin?” I can’t remember what he wanted.

The origin of the sludge, however, I recall him suggesting was the dust. A car drove by, followed by a white and brown cloud that wasn’t exhaust. “Every time that happens, it ends up in your pond.” Dirt and rock settled in a layer on the patio furniture.

A truck, laden with fifteen cubic yards of gravel, labors forward and back behind me. I smell the diesel as a skid loader bounces over toward the truck; I hear the clang of steel and voices. It takes the same amount of maintenance to have a pond and read beside it as it does to have a pond and sit reading in the coffee shop. I’m debating.

Last summer, people stopped by. I got to know my neighbors. “Digging a pond?” they would say as I leaned on my shovel, “Planting flowers?” as I took them out of their flats. They said these things as they walked by, when there was somewhere to walk. I think it showed that I was one of them; everybody planted something, except the ones that were already leaving when they signed the lease. Chatting in the front yard was neighborly, and working there made it a neighborhood.

As the gravel pours into the street behind me I put down my book and go for a beer. It’s too early, really, but it’s kind of my ‘fuck you’ to the workers whose fault it really isn’t that they are still mucking around in the devastation that is my neighborhood’s roads, lawns, and sidewalks. I take a long, slow drink and squint into the haze. One of them looks back and wonders just briefly what I’m up to before going back to work on a backhoe like a child who didn’t want to grow up so grew his Tonka toys to keep pace with him.

As I drink, I look at the flower bed between my two trees in the front yard. It’s scraggly at best. I want to want to do something about it, plant something, weed something, give a damn. This is only the bed’s second year, too early to get tired of it and quit, and lots of the perennials and some of the new bulbs are thriving. Annuals are non-existent. The view just beyond the bed explains why: mud and the ruins of the edges of my yard. It’s a story long in the unfolding.

One day, I asked a galoot with a camera if I could help him. “Just taking before and after pictures,” he told me. “Before and after what?” I asked, somewhat concerned as my yard was the subject of his work. It turned out that the next day the work would begin. The sidewalks were to be uprooted, the roots of the tree on the corner of my lot maliciously cut out on two sides, a cavernous trench dug by a machine that tore down overhead branches, the water main replaced, gas pipes run, smaller trenches across the yard, grass ground into the ground, bulldozers and backhoes and bobcats, oh my. Then they would replace the entire street. This was in May. “Six weeks start to finish,” the oaf had said. Done before my birthday party. The galoot is the city engineer. When first he and I spoke he had had his job one day.

The city owns a grotesque portion of my yard, past the inside edge of the sidewalks on both sides. When they want to replace the pipes underneath, it seems they can. Or, at least start to before getting tired and leaving. As the rear hatch of the dump truck slams shut, the coffee shop is sounding better and better.

Mud. Dirt. You’d think that this would be the stuff of organic inspiration. It’s not. It’s four months of a disheartening mess. It’s a summer of looking the other way and pretending something growing is all that’s going on behind me. It’s tracking in on the floors. It’s nowhere to study and nobody to invite over to share the outdoor living space. It's no visible neighbors. It ain’t too god damned much like a garden.

Sunday, October 5, 2008

School Days

“How’s your garden doing?” Asabi asked me.

“I don’t know. I haven’t seen it in three days.”

Asabi works with me at the computer lab in the college of education helping students scan images and convert files and upload assignments so professors can check them. She and I became friends over the summer when we co-taught the class that teaches students how to do these things. Asabi had heard I had a garden, and kept a watchful eye towards any surplus produce.

“Collard greens!” she had exclaimed, “You all have collard greens?”

Yes. I had. And plenty to share, altho she and I never managed to get the sharing done.

Picture of Schizachyrium scoparium (Michx.) Nash little bluestemI’m not a very energetic gardener. I prefer to let things take their own course for the most part. This inhibits certain kinds of garden success. In the summer I spent a lot of time in the garden, standing in the heat and imitating the plants, soaking up the sun. Sometimes I would make a mental list: should ought put that fence back up, might could weed the carrots, need some sort of trellis for the peas. The list was mental only, without any physical manifestation. Like I said, my gardening isn’t very energetic.

Now that school is in session, from Sunday night until Thursday night, I’m not home in the daylight.

Weeds have been a problem this year. We’ve had a lot of rain and the weeds keep… shooting up like weeds. The Saturday before Asabi had asked me this, I had plunged into the weedy mess with resolve. The day before I had simply stood and stared, wondering where my vegetables were. It was a mess, enough of a mess to put off dealing for as long as I could.

And then, that was it. Cut down a bunch of weeds and run off to study. Leave the garden to its own devices. It feels somehow that without me standing there to watch it, it must be going to have problems growing. Or something. It needs me.

I soak up fluorescent light from the school and the flat screen monitor glow from the lab and grow pasty and pale. And the plants. The plants and the weeds soak up the rain and remains of the southening sun and dispute my claims of relevance to the whole operation.