the miserable gardener

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here today to talk about some things rather different from the usual stuff. You may remember me from such posts as “Good Things And Bad”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.I was thinking of taken a nap on the soft Pottery Barn sheets, on this quiet afternoon, but I heard a hawk crying, and so I went downstairs to check it out, but couldn’t see anything.

It is, in fact, a quiet afternoon, with those little moments of almost complete calm like the guy I live with thought he would have when he retired…but it didn’t turn out that way. The moments of calm are still very pleasant, especially after the frightening weather of last week. For a few days last week we were under a tornado watch, though the guy I live with didn’t say anything about that; he just kept it to himself. Never mind that those things rarely happen so close to the mountains. They can still happen here. There were tornadoes all over the place northeast and east of us. Even though they were well over a hundred miles away, and not huge ones, the guy I live with still thought they were scary.

Since it’s the last day of July, the guy I live with went shopping and brought these home. He said he used to give them to Slipper when he was sick, but that I didn’t need any. (Because once the box was opened all the crackers had to be consumed. It’s like a rule or something.)He also brought this home because he said “you never know”.He talked to a “skunk guy” (really, a guy who used to relocate wild animals) who said this worked the best.

So now I have this story to tell. It’s kind of long.

It’s a story about Necco wafers (which were brought up in a comment), two sisters, their children, the guy I live with’s childhood in Los Angeles, and the things he didn’t hear about as a kid. For some background, you might like to look at this:   https://paridevita.com/2012/05/03/yesterday-today-and-tomorrow/

I didn’t write that post, but it’s still okay. The story I have to tell is a totally true story, and kind of astonishing. I’ll try to tell it in the most dramatic and interesting way possible.

A few weeks ago there was a knock on the door, and it was a young deputy sheriff. The deputy said the guy I live with wasn’t in trouble, and handed him a thick sheaf of papers. He looked at them, knew what the papers were, because he had gotten some earlier and responding had slipped his mind (he’s ancient). He told the deputy that he had to hear this story before the got to the sidewalk.

It was a request from the U.S. Army for a sample of mitochondrial DNA so that the remains of his mom’s cousin, Hudson Upham, who was piloting a B-17 which crashed near the summit of Mont Blanc in November 1946, could be identified so that all the crew members could be buried in separate graves in Arlington National Cemetery. There’s stuff on the internet about this. The guy I live with told the deputy that his mom, who is the only surviving person who remembers Hudson (he taught her to do a dance called “the jitterbug”), would give the DNA sample since that only seemed right.

That was a story the guy I live with had heard since he was very little. The retreating glaciers on Mont Blanc exposed the plane and the remains.

Now back to the Neccos. The guy I live with loved to go to his grandparents’ house in Los Angeles, as a kid, to the house on Oakwood Avenue. He would work and play in the garden, spend time in the house, with all its little secret places, smelling of books and old Army things, and full of artifacts from Asia, because his grandfather was stationed in the Pacific before the war, and during the war. The neighborhood was old; houses built before the First World War, up and down tree-lined streets. That’s all changed now.

Sometimes he would walk down the street with his grandfather to the liquor store, to get a newspaper, on Western Avenue. The liquor store smelled of candy, at the cash register, and that’s where the Neccos were purchased. The guy I live with would walk back home with his grandfather, eating Neccos, which he really liked and always associated with his grandfather–even now–while his grandfather smoked a cigar, sometimes. The smell of cigars makes the guy I live with think of summer evenings in Los Angeles. Just like the powdery surface of a Necco, and particularly the taste of the licorice ones (the best ones) makes him think of his grandparents and the Uphams.

The house was owned by two sisters; one his grandmother, and one, his great-aunt. Hudson was his great aunt’s youngest son. There was another brother, Frank, whom the guy I live with knew pretty well. He was in the Navy, on the USS Essex, in the Second World War. He was commander of the air group. The planes. He retired commanding the naval station at Corpus Christi, Texas. When he was little, guy I live with once got to go on the aircraft carrier USS Princeton when it was in Long Beach, one time; his “Uncle Frank” was Captain of the aircraft carrier.

The guy I live with constantly heard about the Uphams when he was at his grandparents’ house. His grandparents used to talk about them all the time, because his grandfather greatly admired them, so the guy I live with would see images of driving around Los Angeles looking at Christmas lights and think of the Uphams. Of course for everyone involved the previous decade had been anything but Christmas, and now, in the 1950s, the guy I live with’s father was in rehabilitation from being wounded in Korea and no one knew what his future would be.

There was a baby grand piano in the house. The guy I live with used to hear stories of the oldest Upham brother, John, who was wounded at Omaha Beach on D-Day, playing the piano there to help regain use of his left arm.

One time the guy I live with watched the movie Saving Private Ryan. He’d never seen it before and said I shouldn’t watch. I could hear it, though. They mentioned something about the tanks not getting ashore. The guy I live with called his sister to see if she’d seen the movie and she said she had, and so he told her that the 741st Tank Battalion didn’t get its tanks ashore, but that the 743rd did, and that it was commanded by John S. Upham, Jr., who was seriously wounded that day.

The guy I live with’s great-aunt and her husband, John Sr. (also in the military) lived in the house earlier, and one time the guy I live with went to his grandparents’ house and his grandfather was busy with a trowel, uncovering some bricks in the grass. They were part of a line of brick stepping-stones which had been laid down maybe in the 1930s.

The garden was old by the time the guy I live with first experienced it. The shed had been a garage for a Model A Ford, and had been moved into a corner of the yard, by the “way back” there. The guy I live with loved playing in the shed, though going into the back of it, where stuff had been piled for years, was a bit too scary. But the sight of a line of newly uncovered brick stepping-stones, laid down long before he was born, by people he had only heard of, was one of the most magical experiences of his childhood.

Maybe that’s why he took up gardening.

Until next time, then.

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here today to bring you a couple of movies. You may remember me from such posts as “The Night Rain”, among so many, many other rain-related posts.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.Notice how calm, and, yes, dare I say noble, I look, just lying here on the patio rug, in the sun. This was taken when what was said was going to happen didn’t.

I ought to explain, I guess. It’s been raining here a lot, and I have movies to show you in just a bit. I hear that everyone who gardens likes a good rain movie from time to time.

We got over two inches of rain earlier in the week. The first one was a real downpour with lots of thunder, and the street flooded. We got almost an inch of rain. That was on Monday. He bought me some Rescue Remedy, like Slipper and Chess got, and I think it makes me feel better. On Tuesday we got more rain, and then Thursday night we were both awakened by the “highly unusual” (meaning, it happens all the time now) thunderstorm at three in the morning, with more rain.

The forecast for Friday was for severe weather. The guy I live with became very agitated. But nothing happened. It was a nice day.

Then the forecasts for Saturday and Sunday were changed to severe weather, after about one in the afternoon on each day. The guy I live with looked at the radar page constantly. Saturday’s forecast improved, so he left me for a while (not very long) to go visit a garden with his friend. There were quite a few really bad storms out east that day, and up north in Wyoming. Both places are far away from here. I was reassured to learn that.

The guy I live with often wonders why people wonder why he likes dry weather. Lots of wondering. The alternative here, since regular rain is pretty rare (which is why we show movies of it) is terrible storms. Today they said we might get tennis-ball-sized hail. You might be able to imagine what was said about that. Then later the forecast said baseball-sized. He said that if you think this sounds totally insane you would be right.

It often makes him quite sad that we live in a place which features such terrors. But, he said,  being extremely philosophical, “Here we are”.

So around about noon, “anticipating the end of everything”, he went downstairs with a couple of flashlights, a gallon jug of water, my traveling water bowl, and he got out this little faux lacquered bowl, “just in case”. The bowl has a little plastic bag with some jewelry in it which is very important to him. He said that when he and Chess had to go downstairs that one time he took all those things down there.

This is what it looked like this morning. Not very threatening, as I think you’ll agree. The humidity was one hundred percent. Then they changed the forecast and the guy I live with was hugely relieved. As in super hugely relieved.

So now I can show the rain movies, made last Tuesday, without worrying that we might have much worse movies to show (of me and the guy I live with hiding downstairs).

The guy I live with said something about “popcorn” and movies and he had to explain that to me. I’ve never had popcorn. He said that he and his wife had a disagreement about how much butter went on the popcorn. I guess he preferred a lot. Like almost soggy, with a lot of salt. He said that Slipper was really afraid of all the appliances in the kitchen except for the popcorn popper; Slipper, who was really big, would lean his elbows on the kitchen counter watching the popcorn pop. He liked it so much that the guy I live with couldn’t say “popcorn” without Slipper getting all excited.When Slipper got sick and didn’t want to eat much, the guy I live with would buy something called “white cheddar popcorn” which Slipper would eat, or “suck up like a vacuum cleaner”, and Chess would get some too. I think I should get some, once in a while. Or constantly.

I got carried away. The movies are really too short for popcorn, though the guy I live with said you could think about popcorn while watching the movies. The guy I live with said when he went to movies he liked Milk Duds and Dots and that movies cost thirty-five cents to get in.

This next one is similar to the one posted on Facebook but it’s different. Kind of jiggly if you ask me. This was taken from the upstairs bedroom window, through the screen.

Okay, well, I really rambled a lot this evening. The guy I live with says I’m easily distracted. The other night I got really interested in a Striped Kitty in the garden late at night–again–and the guy I live with said not to, and to come in, which I did eventually, after he reminded me that I’m trained to come when he calls me, and that he had nothing but my best interests in mind when he yelled at me to come inside.

Then there was the really big snake under the birch tree just this afternoon, a snake which I tried to get, and the guy I live with said not to, like he always does it seems, and said that there was a bunny in the garden and that my priorities were all wrong for the day. I did finally chase the bunny out of the garden.

All in all, it was an interesting day. 

Until next time, then.