A Hill of Beans

Back in Confluence, it's time to start thinking about putting out vegetables.

It's embarrassing to admit it, but I do not come from a long line of gardeners, and as such, my knowledge of planting things is rather limited. Neither of my parents had much to do with growing things in our back yard; the three or four plants I can remember having in our house all fell victim to my mother, whose careful skill in nurturing children simply did not translate to horticulture. Our back porch became a graveyard for ceramic pots filled with departed Easter lilies, daisies, and ferns.

Most folks in town have a garden, or they subscribe to one of the community plots by the Episcopal church, so my life has until now easily avoided tilling my own ground. Every Sunday, three or four of the little old ladies in the church will pass me a plastic bag filled with squash and tomatoes, okra and corn, peppers and cabbage. My advice to the good people who troll farmer's markets every weekend: present yourself as a pitiful city-dweller who doesn't know a sprout from a hole in the ground at church. You will eat like a king.

One of my herbal suppliers--no seriously, she brings me rosemary--has fallen ill, though. Her name is Brenda May Elder, and she is suffering from cancer. I doubt I need to describe the trauma of chemotherapy on an octogenarian. Her husband, Eddie, died four years ago, but every spring she would plow the earth in her side yard, spinning the clumps until they became finer and finer, pulling the clay into something rich and hospitable, and then she would drop seeds and seedlings one by one, set things out as she called it.

From there, she mended the plot over the coming months, trudging through the rows in light colored slacks, a collared shirt, and a straw hat. She tugged at weeds and nicked off leaves that ought to be put aside. She knew just what to do. And every Sunday, her bounty would be so great that part of it would be set aside for me.

This spring, she's confined to her living room, tortured by the bay window that looks out onto her yard. The garden has grown over with weeds, but a few wild flowers poke up here and there. It might seem like a stupid thing to do, but I decided to grow a garden so I could give Brenda back all the vegetables she loaned me over the past decade or so.

Ambition being my only worthwhile quality in this endeavor, I knew enough to call on a certain oddball neighbor of mine, Johnny Rabbit. Johnny fought in Vietnam, married a girl there, renounced violence, became Buddhist, spent a decade in Cambodia "helping out," whatever that means, got stabbed in some kind of revolution rally in Asia, gave up religion altogether, and moved to Confluence by accident. Every year, the quiet man on the edge of town had three of the best looking rows of corn you'd ever seen.

I'd used this last compliment as a pickup line of sorts, enticement for the strange bird with the rose colored glasses to help me plant vegetables.

"Johnny," I said, "I'm pretty sure I can put the stuff in the ground. But your plants always look so great. I was just talking about your corn to somebody."

Seriously, this is how I feel like I have to talk to people like Johnny. He gave me an odd look.

"It's a pain in the ass."

"Gardening?"

"The corn. Deer gets to it." He paused. "They'll eat it all."

I nodded. What do you do to prevent that, I wondered out loud.

"Shoot them."

***

So there we were, Johnny Rabbit and yours truly, running a tiller through my back yard, next to the slat fence. I liberated the soil. I have turned the earth, and I am proud of it. Now, from my window in the kitchen, I can look out on four tiny tomato plants, a row of beans, and a half dozen corn stalks. Tomorrow I'll pick up a cucumber vine from the hardware store and maybe some potatoes and cantaloupe. Johnny showed me how to arrange it and set up the garden hose for irrigation, told me which plants do well in our valley, and which ones only seem to invite misery and blight.

I haven't a clue if I will produce a single edible thing. But I know that after the day's work I spent in my yard to simply plant my garden, I will never once take for granted a bag of tomatoes given to me by someone four decades older than me out of pity.

Marilyn, pt. 3

To folks from small towns like this one, New York City can feel like a different planet. I cannot say anything new or better about the city, and though I have been to cities I liked better than New York, there is nothing like walking its broad avenues and feeling the welling excitement that history is at your feet, that you are strolling through the modern capital of the world. Glass towers reaching above, cabs hustling by, trains thundering deep beneath--it can be overwhelming. Or captivating.

"Intoxicating," is how Marilyn Coolidge put it, to be exact. "I have four months to live in New York. It is too much and too little; a casual tourist might come to the city and make a day of it and see a myriad destinations and feel satisfied that he had seen New York. I, however, can't seem to pass a single corner without noticing a nook of some kind and inquiring about its story. I am afraid that four months will not be able to afford me the time to explore and learn about this city the way that would satisfy my curiosity."

She wrote these words in fine blue ink in her diary--one of several volumes she completed over the years of her younger life. Later, when she married, she packed them away, and decades later, when I came to Confluence and met Vic, I learned he had kept them in the back room of his shop downtown. Reading these journals is alternatively fascinating and voyeuristic. I am embarrassed at such an intimate disclosure of Marilyn's early adulthood--no one keeps a diary with the intentions of it falling into the hands of a rotten journalist fifty years later--but I am grateful that it allows a clearer account of the time she spent away from Confluence.

Marilyn lived in an apartment with two other girls from Bryn Mawr in Manhattan's Upper East Side. Lots of college students lived there, and she made friends quickly. "I love the girls in my building," she wrote, "but I have yet to meet a single one from New York. Everyone on my floor seems to have come here from somewhere else. We have such fun, though. Madam Harrison, who runs the building, is entirely more enlightened than any of the dormitory mothers back at school. We can often come and go as we please, and occasionally one of the girls even manages to sneak back a boy or some other contraband!"

She wrote that boys could often gain entry via the service entrance to the building, and while she never tried it, she was quite curious what it would mean to bring a boy home. She wasn't a prude as far as I could tell, but her small-town background weighed heavily on her: "If I were never going home, I cannot imagine the trouble I'd find in a city like this."

Late in the fall, Marilyn went with a group of girls to The Village Vanguard. (I have relished the chance to read her account of this legendary spot.) They listened to jazz and watched the intellectuals, and later there were Beat poets who read. Several of the girls paired up with boys.

"Alice had Jerry and Kitty had Dan. Well, Estelle and I had Vince and Tom, and neither of us could figure out which boy wanted which girl. Alice and Kitty decided to leave with their dates, and none of us could hear much over the band anyway, so during one of the breaks Estelle managed to convince the boys to take us down the street to a place called The Spot for drinks.

"The Spot was jammed, so we walked down a bit to the Washington Square Hotel and sat at the bar. I wasn't having a bad time, but I started to feel bored with Vince or Tom or whichever one was supposed to be courting me. Estelle seemed just fine with them both, and soon I began to feel that perhaps they were both interested in her!

I excused myself, walked to the lobby, and sat down on one of the great leather chairs they had near the fireplace. I imagined Estelle would come out sooner or later, and I would find my way home. I was tired."

Before she knew it, though, a man had taken the seat across from her.

"Are you waiting for someone?" he asked.

Marilyn was startled from her thoughts. "Excuse me?"

"I was just wondering if you were waiting to meet someone," he repeated.

"Well, not exactly," she replied, looking him over. He wore a dark wool suit, a blue tie, and expensive-looking shoes that reminded her of her father's.

"In that case," he said, standing up, "it would be my pleasure to buy you a drink. Have you ever been to the bar here?"

"I just came from there," she laughed. "My roommate is in the process of choosing a boy, I believe."

A glint of mischief came into his eyes. "If we go back in, then, we will have to take great care to avoid being spotted," he quipped. "Come on," he said, taking her hand. "I know the perfect hiding spot."

He led her to the back corner, where they sat in a plush velvet booth, side by side, looking out towards the bar. He ordered their drinks and lit a cigarette.

"I'll start. I'm Vic," he said.

"I'm Marilyn."

And so it was that, there in the corner of the Washington Square Hotel bar sat the cradle of their marriage. He was older, sophisticated, and a good drinker. She was pretty, new to town, and well aware that he had a mind to take her back to his apartment. Still, she was fascinated:

"Everything Vic told me seemed to tell me something else. He was the son of Italian-Americans who lived in Brooklyn. He went to Princeton on a football scholarship. He had three brothers and no sisters. His family owned a small chain of department stores. He liked modern music but said he loved hearing his mother sing more than anything. He was modest but he liked nice things, and he had a nice place across town he'd love to show me sometime.

"It was," Marilyn wrote the next day, "rather tempting."

Soon, though, Estelle figured out that Marilyn was there in the bar with her, and together they found their way back to Madam Harrison's building. Vic showed up the very next afternoon on the concrete steps leading to the door. "You deserve to have a real New Yorker show you the city," he said. His car was waiting down the block.

to be continued...

For Love and Spring and Dogs

It is a perfect spring day. My back yard is full of birds, and the pear trees have exploded into blossom. The dogwoods are soon to follow. The sugar maple in the corner is hung with what my nephew calls twirly-birds, or the helicopter like seed pods that will take flight later. What's better, none of the bugs have hatched out yet. Living in a valley with two rivers can mean dealing with mosquitoes. I am hopeful that the long, hard winter killed some of them off.

I took my dogs down to the Tinton River yesterday afternoon. I was finishing the laundry and dug out the old Frisbee that the youngest one likes to chase. She has a bit of retriever in her, and there's nothing finer than seeing her sprint full out down the river bank, ears tucked back, eyes set on catching the disc before it sets down. When she grows tired of the chase, she'll walk over to the water and plunge her snout down into the cool water, shake loose the surplus, and plop down into the mud. Later this afternoon, I'll have to bathe her in the back yard with the hose.

The older dog doesn't care much for the games her canine sister plays. Mostly, the eldest will wander around, stopping occasionally to sniff out a hole in the bank. There's a snaking grove of birch trees down where we walk, and she has a favorite that grows out over the river, its root ball jutting out like a shelf above the water. She'll perch there and watch the other dog chase Frisbees. Strange how one favors sport and one favors rest.

These are good days for dogs. I know I was rife with cabin fever this winter, but the dogs needed spring, too. The younger dog lives in the house with me, and this past week, she's whimpered every morning to be let out as soon as the sun rises.

So I let her out, and then I'll drive down to my office in town and do some work, and then I'll drive back home for a bite of lunch. The younger dog will come inside and eat with me, and then I'll put her in the car and bring her back to my office for the afternoon. I have a small balcony at the end of the hall, where a pair of French doors opens onto the street, and I'll leave them open in weather like this and the dog will curl up in the sun for a nap.

Then, when it's time to quit, we'll go for a walk. Sometimes I'll take her down to FDR Pub, and we'll sit outside on the deck while I have a drink and watch the river. A man, a dog, and a beer never fail to make conversation.

Watching the dogs play by the river, and watching all of the town dressed up today for Easter, their white dresses and seersucker suits radiant in the spring-glow, I am convinced that life might never be as good as it is today. This is a feeling I've been having more and more often, a slow reminder to pay close attention to everything around me. I am reminded of Hawthorne, in The Blithedale Romance:

"Priscilla had now grown to be a very pretty girl, and still
kept budding and blossoming, and daily putting on some new charm, which you no
sooner became sensible of than you thought it worth all that she had previously.
possessed. So unformed, vague, and without substance, as she had come to us, it
seemed as if we could see Nature shaping out a woman before our very eyes, and
yet had only a more reverential sense of the mystery of a woman's soul and
frame. Yesterday, her cheek was pale, to-day, it had a bloom. Priscilla's smile,
like a baby's first one, was a wondrous novelty. Her imperfections and
shortcomings affected me with a kind of playful pathos, which was as absolutely
bewitching a sensation as ever I experienced. After she had been a month or two
at Blithedale, her animal spirits waxed high, and kept her pretty constantly in a state of bubble and ferment, impelling her to far more bodily activity than she had yet strength to endure. She was very fond of playing with the other girls out of doors. There is hardly another sight in the world so pretty as that of a company of young
girls, almost women grown, at play, and so giving themselves up to their airy
impulse that their tiptoes barely touch the ground.

Girls are incomparably wilder and more effervescent than boys,
more untamable and regardless of rule and limit, with an ever-shifting variety, breaking continually into new modes of fun, yet with a harmonious propriety through all. Their steps, their voices, appear free as the wind, but keep consonance with a
strain of music inaudible to us. Young men and boys, on the other hand, play,
according to recognized law, old, traditionary games, permitting no caprioles of fancy, but with scope enough for the outbreak of savage instincts. For, young or old, in
play or in earnest, man is prone to be a brute.

Especially is it delightful to see a vigorous young girl run a race, with her head thrown back, her limbs moving more friskily than they need, and an air between that of a bird and a young colt. But Priscilla's peculiar charm, in a foot-race, was the weakness and irregularity with which she ran. Growing up without exercise, except to her poor little fingers, she had never yet acquired the perfect use of her legs. Setting buoyantly forth, therefore, as if no rival less swift than Atalanta could compete with her, she ran falteringly, and often tumbled on the grass. Such an incident--though it seems too slight to think of--was a thing to laugh at, but which brought the water
into one's eyes, and lingered in the memory after far greater joys and sorrows
were wept out of it, as antiquated trash. Priscilla's life, as I beheld it, was
full of trifles that affected me in just this way."

And so it is that my own life in this little town is full of trifles that affect me in this way. I have sat now and written this much, mostly to avoid some work I've left to do for an upcoming story in the Spectator, one that will be difficult to get right for the dear readers of Confluence. I've decided to publish an article on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the car accident that claimed the life of Marilyn Coolidge Salarino.