|
|
The Homeless Gardener
by Memphis Saltos You see them everywhere in Berkeley. You step around them peeing on the stoops or as they sleep on sidewalks snoring like busted chainsaws. You deftly avoid eye contact with the ones talking to themselves, or screaming obscenities while jerking their arms around in meaningless gestures. Theycan smell like a mix of stale coffee, dirty socks, cheap food and urine. We see them as the people unable to cope with the vicissitudes of ordinary life. Sometimes you throw money at when you are feeling generous as they sit along the grimiest streets doing nothing much all day as we go off to our jobs as productive citizens exhausting ourselves and others with our self-proclaimed brilliance. You never expect to find a little solace from a homeless person. You never expect to have your heart changed just a little. I knew George the homeless guy because his "spot" was next to one of my favorite cafes. George was missing a few front teeth but that did not stop him from always smiling at me, so in turn I always looked forward to seeing him and hearing his lighthearted and playful hellos. He was a lean dark man, probably a lot younger than he looked, and he had useful ropey muscles from hard work on him. I could see more hard work in him in the future. One day he invited me to see his "watermelon". He asked with such an utterly sincere face, and it was so obvious his intentions were honorable, that I followed him into a sunny vacant alley. And as he promised, there was a large striped watermelon growing green and ripe on a vine. Yet the fruit itself wasn't the amazing sight, but rather that there were many smaller melons surrounded it. And behind the melons were rows of tall corn stalks, bushes of flushed fat tomatoes and 6" beans vines unfurling on sticks tied into tee pees. Tucked away in a hidden "dead" urban lot, he had created this flourishing vegetable garden from seeds stolen from the local Ace Hardware and with the water and soil he had at his disposal. His Eden was a secret despite the busy Xanaxed concrete urban jungle buzzing around it. It was like looking at diorama inside a gray museum. With earnest eagerness George described his successes--showing me a row a corn that already had been harvested, describing the size of that last melon he ate, etc. He displayed such indescribable excitement that he found someone to show this to, that he found someone to appreciate his work. I promised to return. I visited the hidden garden few days later but George was not there. I sat and waited for a short time while my daughter played "jump over the melon". The small deserted rectangle was made brilliant by the sun of early afternoon, and now and then I heard gulps and gurgles from hidden drain pipes. Then without having planned it, I kneeled to pull up weeds by the roots. It was a small task, but a satisfying one. I could reach a comforting metaphor with it, the tending, weeding, watering working along with all the other useful natural motions happening, the seed carrying breezes and cycles that make our planet work, and improve the lives of the watermelons and one lost man. I was able to savor the enjoyment of making something brighter, better, more realistic. After I finished weeding I took the seed packets I had bought for him that were marking places in my books and lined them up against that big watermelon for George to work his magic. A few weeks later I brought a friend to show this oasis too. It had suddenly became vitally important that someone else knew this secret and that it just shouldn't be known to just George and me. Like the tree falling in the forest, unobserved the garden might not exist if someone else didn't know. But in place of those melon vines working through cracks in the soil there was now freshly laid sod, and where there should have been tall stalks of corn bloomed a perfectly hemmed Hawthorne hedge. The City had replaced it all, and I'm sure strip mined George's in the process. I didn't see George again for months. Then one day I was sitting in the usual cafe, looked up and there he was drawing apples and smiley faces with his index finger on the opposite side of the glass. He smiled at me half-toothless and all. I had thought he was dead; he hadn't been around and the newly sanitized City garden was starting to look shabby and smelling like pee. I mouthed "Where have you BEEN?" to him and he didn't understand me. Finally I just said it loudly "WHERE'VE YOU BEEN?" (disturbing all the students conversations of Foucault and the like). He kind of sadly said "Oh around, around". Then he started pretending he was a monster like only crazy homeless people do. I pretended it was funny and laughed a little then circled my thumb and index finger and winked at him, like only crazy people with homeless friends do. |
|