Güd wrtr

Really, I just wanted flowers, but as I
cruised the nursery—my antenna picking
up not-so-subtle messages from my
long-gone, veggie-growing husband—
I felt compelled to adopt one small tomato
plant and a leafy, wanna-be cucumber,
neither showing signs of food to come.

“What do I need to grow these well?”
I asked an aproned woman watering
a vast table of future veggies, she with
enough dirt under her nails to qualify
as an expert in my book.

She squinted at me. “Cage for tomato,”
she said, aiming the hose in their
direction. “Marigold for cucumber.”

“Marigolds?” For color contrast?
Bright orange to set off the greens?

“For bug,” she said, setting down
the hose and beckoning me to
the long table where flat after flat
of the ’golds little heads popped up,
goldening.

Bad bugs? I wondered. Good bugs?
Turns out it’s both, I later learned,
their scent deterring pests and
sending come-hither messages to
pollinators.

Weeks ago I plunked cukes and ’golds
near each other in the bed next
to the garage with, I hoped, enough
compost and kind words to encourage
the youngsters.

Ever since, the cuke leaves have grown
and grown, sporting cute little yellow
flowers that the bees seem to like,
but nothing resembling a vegetable.
Day after day, hose in hand, I tuned
into the buzzing transmissions:

Keep watering, Toots. You never know.

Today I peeked under the swath of green
umbrellas prettily arrayed on the ground,
where, I swear, practically overnight,
a trio of cukes has magically appeared,
fattening like well-fed calves,

the companion ’golds apparently having
done their job well, the silent bodyguards
beaming their bright selves like lighthouses
over the soil, encouraging the ones
in their care that all they need to do
is what they were born to do:

Grow, grow, grow.

After lunch with a friend,
walking home solo on what promises
to be a 100-degree day, you pause under
a Chinese pistache shading the sidewalk
and look up.

Under the sign restricting parking
towers a bit of all-caps encouragement:
BEGIN

It does not matter what needs to be started,
but clearly, something does.

As you move slowly back into the afternoon
of your life, stop here and there to watch
a bee, low to the ground, searching,
whether for pollen or water you can’t tell,

as the beacon resonates through
your buzzing brain:
You begin anew every moment,
with every footfall.

No matter how mobile,
no matter how limited,
one foot, then the other,
even if you hobble, even
if you cannot walk at all.

you begin again and again and again,
and so reminded,
you do.

Yeah, you two!
I don’t care if he’s your brother—
you can’t shove him into the pool.
No, you can’t shove anyone
into the pool.
No, you can’t dunk him and
hold him under either.
I don’t care that he ate your
cookie.

No, you can’t blow my whistle.
Because it’s a lifeguard whistle,
and you’re not the lifeguard.
Yeah, you can wear my hat.
For a minute. I need it back.
To keep me from getting
sunburned.
Yes, I see your sunburn.
It’s a doozy.
Yes, yours is a doozy, too.

What are your names?
And you’re how old?
I’m 18. Yes, I coach one
of the swim teams.
You want to be on the swim team?
Well, let me watch you swim.
Yes, your brother, too.

Can you put your face in the water?
Blow bubbles? Turn your head
to the side and breathe?
Yeah, like that. Good.

Nice handstands.
No, we don’t do handstands
on the swim team. But it’s
great that you can do them.

Let’s see how fast you can swim.
Sure, I’ll blow my whistle.
Ready? On your mark,
get set, go!

•••

Thanks to photographer/poet Genaro Molina of the Los Angeles Times
for the inspiration and his excellent photo.

Dick Schmidt
(guest poet)

It’s always the right temperature
when you want to take a nap.

(In honor of Brother David Steindel-Rast’s 100th birthday)

To swim, you must trust,
said a wise man who has
now achieved 100 years
on the planet.

“You can learn as much as
you want about swimming
from books,” he said. “You
can stand in the water

and move your arms.
But unless you really let
yourself down into it,
you’ll never swim.”

You don’t trust the water,
which will hold you, if
you allow it; you must
trust yourself, he says,

a bigger challenge.
Learning to swim then,
means learning to trust
the unknowable,
the unseeable,

what some call God,
as well as the physics
of bodies in water.
If we allow ourselves

to relax and float—
a lesson we practice again
and again—we build
trust in our fragile,

undependable, often
get-it-wrong selves,
coming to see that we,
quirky and oddly made,

truly are our own best
gifts.

•••

Brother David Steindel-Rast is an author, scholar
and Benedictine monk, known throughout the world
for his philosophy that gratefulness is the true source
of lasting happiness.

Widely considered the “grandfather of gratitude,”
Br. David has been a source of inspiration and spiritual
friendship to countless leaders and luminaries as well as
one of the most important figures in the modern interfaith
dialogue movement.

You can learn more about Br. David at the Grateful Living
website, where you can also see His TED talk,
“Want To Be Happy? Be Grateful,” which has been
viewed almost 10 million times.

Two summers ago she came to help
me sort through stuff in the garage,
taking careful inventory of decades-
old plastic bottles of bubbles,

testing them, one bottle at a time,
sitting on my deck, blowing bubbles.
On hot days, I still see her there.
Now a reporter in Texas, she moseys

back to her hometown to touch base,
see her people, reconnect with those
who mean much to her. I am one
of those, she kindly tells me each

time she sees me, this stellar former
student of mine, one of my last,
dealt some rough hands—among
them being a student journalist in

the early months of the pandemic,
the world locked down, learning
to report remotely. Good training,
she says now, covering business

and agriculture in San Antonio.
Though I watched so many students
fumble through their early days
as writers, poets, photographers,

journalists, designers, editors,
now they circulate through me
in a sweet blur, their faces
popping up now and then,

the particulars long gone
of what they did or didn’t do,
how well they succeeded or
didn’t. And then one shows up

full of gratitude and generosity,
along with mint-green tea,
and we sit in the back yard
on a sultry July afternoon

as I quiz her, fascinated, saying,
“Tell me what it’s like on your
newspaper these days. Tell me
what it is to be you.”

And she does.

(Ode to a Sacramento summer)

We knew it’d show up eventually,
after weeks of saying to each other,
“Perfect weather, isn’t it?” and
“Best summer I can remember.”

Because we live in a land of too hot,
a state of hot-hot, with the always-
hottest place in our southern desert
that’s got the word “death” in it.

But here—near the top of California’s
great central valley, where sizzling
spots like Red Bluff often win the prize
for hottest in these parts—this week

we enter the landscape of century
temps. We avoid the eastern and
southern humidity, but boy, can we
cook. And boy, are we about to.

Which is why God, in the guise of
Willis Carrier, created in 1902
a system to control temps and
humidity in a Brooklyn print shop,

though it wasn’t until 1906 that
engineer Stuart Cramer dubbed it
air conditioning. Think about that,
friends, when we step outside

into 100 degrees, then turn our
sweaty selves ’round and head back
in, offering our perspiry thanks
to Messrs. Carrier and Cramer

and the kabillions of their
descendant engineers and
technicians working to ensure
that we stay cool, baby—

real cool.

The garden goddess next door,
as part of her daily practice, stands
hose in hand, kindly watering

the corner bed by my driveway—
the creeping little daisies, the last
of the poppies, new cone flowers,

the to-be Black-eyed Susans
(still all leaves for the moment)—
chatting with me as our eyes

flutter upward, drawn to a large
monarch swooping, seemingly,
around us, gaily pirouetting,

alighting momentarily on the ginkgo,
perhaps looking for a drink.
The ticker tape in my brain

flashes—Mom!—along with
the sense of someone else hopping
up and down, hand raised

like a kid in class—me, too!
I say to the garden goddess,
“I wonder if that’s my mother.

She loved butterflies.”
I grin at my mystical neighbor.
“And maybe your mother, too.”

“You think so?” she says,
hope rising in her voice.
“Do you hear her? See her?”

“It’s more of a knowing,” I say
as the butterfly—who certainly
feels like a she—lingers within

our sight, even a bit later when
I walk across the street to my car.
She soars into the sycamores

of the house next door where
Becky lived, my favorite neighbor,
whose garden goddess daughter

has continued the family tradition
of daily hand watering in summer,
growing a lush forest of ferns

and greenery, which I can’t help
but think must delight both
of our mothers flittin’ in

for a quick hello from their
spot in the forever on this
sparkling summer afternoon.

Listen, an experienced gardener warned,
you want to watch the wisteria.

It gets away from you, its dime-sized seeds
burrowing into the ground, it’ll grow
and grow and grow into a constrictor,
a green strangler. I’m not kidding.

But, I said, I like the pretty clusters
that drape like lavender waterfalls
before the leaves burst out.

Yeah, he said. Just wait.

Same with the morning glories
that took over the fence with
their glorious purple blossoms,
open-throated to the sun.

And mint. Everyone warned me
about mint. Subterranean invader,
they said. It’ll pop up everywhere
like whack-a-mole. You won’t be able
to get rid of it.

You want to leave a legacy after you die?
Plant mint.

But spearmint, I said. For tea.
And the smell.

Yeah, they said. Just wait.

Today I stretch tall to clip
the constrictor’s searching arms
roaming the fence, get it away
from the neighbor’s house as it
reaches for me, snagging some
tenacious morning glory with it.

Crouching, I yank out a little mint
by the roots, plucking some of its
wrinkly leaves for tea later,
consider transplanting lemon thyme
where I have de-minted—

“my darling lemon thyme,” I hum—

growing so happily under the maple
in the front yard. Will it do well here
in so much unrelenting sun?

You never know till you try, I think,
the perennial motto of gardeners,
whose ranks I have now joined
as an apprentice, bringing my
minty-thyme hands to my nose,
closing my eyes, and—yes!—
inhaling deeply.

One short, measly hour,
not a special one, just any old
hour, look around and ask,

“What would my life be
without this thing? Without
that thing? Or that one?”

Without the tree shading
the window, without the window,
without the kitchen sink

you’re standing behind,
without the water running cool
and clear on your hands,

without the knife in your hands
that has just cut fresh corn
off the cob that you’ve put

into a bowl for a summer salad,
without the small oval tomatoes
growing on the searching vines

in the back yard, five of them,
lycopene red, on the granite counter
next to you, resting,

ready when you’re ready, in this
ordinary hour, this everyday minute,
this extraordinary moment.