She’s embarrassed to ask, but my friend whose birthday is nine days before mine is coming in near midnight on a train from Fresno,
and, late night writer that I am, how can I not offer to pick her up? Especially when she’ll be chugging into the Art Deco train station in our city,
and, if I manage to snag a photo or two, there could be a poem in it—something about friendship being like a train with some hackneyed metaphor
that has stalled far down the track. But give me a minute or five. Let me stand on this windy platform waiting for her suitcase to arrive, my heart
smiling at my fine writing friend, my walking buddy, whose presence lifts me in ways I can’t describe— she herself a fine present and the first to wish
me many happy returns—as the clock ticks into the wee hours of the day that commemorates the completion of my 66th trip around the sun,
sending me into yet another wondrous year.
Deborah Meltvedt arriving at Sacramento Valley Station / Photos: Jan Haag
When you walk among them, they seems like they’ll be here waving and bobbing their happy heads forever, growing by the long dirt road leading to the farm.
Like an LP you can play again and again, the leggy zinnias and butterfly-winged cosmos flutter on a blessedly cool summer morning that you didn’t expect after weeks of a bumper crop of heat.
Nor did you expect all this loveliness on U-Pick day amid the furrows of the farmer’s crop—the tomatoes and zucchini running so amuck that they are pressed upon you along with the stems you have snipped as you walk the rows, clippers and bag in hand.
Clouds skip like a flock of sky sheep high in the wide-open blue, and you pause at each of the farmer’s philosophical signs planted carefully along the long row of growth:
Cultivating your daily life: Plant three rows of peas Peace of mind Peace of heart Peace of soul
Plant four rows of squash: Squash gossip Squash indifference Squash grumbling Squash selfishness
Plant four rows of lettuce: Lettuce be faithful Lettuce be kind Lettuce be patient Lettuce really love one another
Out here—where the idea is to clip flowers for others, put each stem into a waiting jar, then give it away—you embrace the lettuce really love one another
idea, whisper it like a mantra or a prayer as you tuck a merry zinnia blossom into your peace of heart, pledging to embody such generosity on this day and every day of your sweet, long-playing life.
•••
For Jill Batiansila and Cliff Wilcox, generous farmers extraordinaire in Elk Grove, California, and for the Together We Heal community.
•••
There will be another U-Pick day at Cliff Wilcox’s farm in Elk Grove, just south of Sacramento, on Saturday, Aug. 3, from 9:30–11:30 a.m. Tickets from $10–$25. Proceeds to benefit Together We Heal, a Sacramento regional nonprofit dedicated to those who are grieving. Information and tickets available in advance here.
Jill Batiansila, founder/CEO of Together We Heal, workin’ the flowers she cultivates at Cliff’s farm, Elk Grove, California
(for Sue Butler and Antsy McClain, with love and thanks)
The light that gets lost is blue at the edges, the kind that, if you could soar high enough,
you might see hugging the curvature of the Earth like a soft baby blanket, wrapping this blue marble in light that does not touch you, cannot touch you, but holds you, nonetheless,
not as gravity pins you, but much more gently, the blue embrace of something you can’t name, that feels like being found, like coming home, a twinkling blue under a star-filled sky.
I practiced it multiple times a day from March on, after Mr. Rolicheck, my eighth grade homeroom teacher, commanded that I sing a solo at graduation.
How did he know that I could sing? He knew that I loved to write, returned story after story with the directive at the top: Again!
Usually with suggestions— “Let’s hear them talk to each other.” “Let’s see them moving around.” “Locate them in a place with just a few details.”
And I’d dutifully scribble a new version, hoping to earn my first editor’s approval, the one who told me, when I summoned the nerve to ask why I had to do so many rewrites,
“Because you, Miss Haag, have potential.”
I inhaled the deep voice on that talltall man that pingponged inside my chest, eventually finding permanent lodging somewhere south of my heart, where belief took up residence.
But sing? My parents were singers who harmonized at the drop of a middle C, barbershoppers that they were, who taught my sister and me the lead and tenor parts to their baritone and bass should someone feel the need to sing a tag around the dinner table.
I wanted to sing folk songs or pop tunes, envied Karen Carpenter’s dulcet voice, and so chose one of the hardest songs in her repertoire to wobble out of my larynx.
Who was the accompanist who fingered the school’s upright piano as I rehearsed after school? As Mr. Rolicheck and my mom listened. “Getting better, Miss Haag,” he’d say. “A little flat there, Janis,” she’d say. “But you hit the high note.”
And when the fateful evening arrived, my classmates and their parents crammed into the tepid multi-purpose room, me in my polyester yellow mini dress minus the clumsy headgear that typically attached to my braces (thank you, Mom). Equal parts terrified and exhilarated, I stood before my first microphone and shakily sang,
Bless the beasts and the children, For in this world they have no voice, They have no choice.
I fixed my gaze over the seated heads, looking at the tall man with the shaved head standing at the back of the room, his eyes closed, fingers of one hand at his chin listening to his pupil with potential.
Light their way When the darkness surrounds them; Give them love, let it shine all around them.
And when I finished, he opened his eyes, smiled and brought his big hands together in a clap that caromed around my chest, in that heart spot where it resides still.
•••
(In memory of Robert Rolicheck, mentor extraordinaire)
He sees the path in the wall of green before I do, veers onto it, and at the other end of the leash, I say: She takes you here, doesn’t she?
Or perhaps it’s the other way around as I follow the shaggy wag of the aging blond boy whose paws have already picked up detritus of the woods, the leavings of seasons underfoot, foliage that has let go and drifted groundward as it does every day in the grand forest.
In a few hours little ghouls and superheroes will take over this island, making their rounds, knocking on doors, but here, now, the only costumed one is me, the visitor from a dry land masquerading as one of the rain people in a plum coat.
Mushrooms display their jaunty caps, frilly mosses wear their everyday frocks, brightening the wet wood they cling to. Though some trees still sport dulled yellows and crimsons, I inhale green with every step.
I wish she was walking with us, though her big dog does a fine job showing me the way. Today is a down day after yesterday’s up day. This is how it goes.
For every up there is a down. After preparing a place for me, fetching me home to her island, she sleeps in her bed plump with pillows under the soft duvet, the small gray cat at her feet, the window opened just enough to let in the green and the patter of rain— her favorite sound in all the world.
She continues to teach me patience, about resting when the body can’t continue, about bearing illness with grace, about love in the form of a big blond dog on the floor by her bed, his feet clean and dry, sound asleep, waiting for whatever comes next.
Walking in the Grand Forest, Bainbridge Island, Washington / 2014
It turns out that wildebeests are gnus, and gnus are wildebeests,
great, hairy African antelopes resembling muscular cows with curved horns, but wearing bushy beards and manes accenting their charcoal-striped outfits that collectively makes a wildebeest a gnu. And vice versa.
That improbable combination of body parts prompted a wordsmithing actor* to coin a new collective noun, making news of a group of gnus—
an implausibility of gnus.
Before that, they traveled simply as herds, but now the largest of all antelopes carries a clever appellation for these wandering vegetarians of the Serengeti.
More than a million of them join hundreds of thousands of other ungulates in the planet’s largest migration from plains to savannah.
Look at them go: the zebras, the gazelles, the wildebeests. And look at what stalks them: hyenas, lions, crocodiles.
Not all of them will make it.
So much wildlife on the move that the great columns of gnus can be seen from space, a stream of migrants compelled to make their way over the sea of desert on a well-traveled route from one territory to, with luck, a place where the convoy can land—
in a stomping ground that feels something like home.
•••
* The wordsmithing actor/television writer/author who coined the collective noun “an implausibility of gnus” was James Lipton in his delightful book, “An Exaltation of Larks.” It contains more than a thousand collective nouns, some of which Lipton invented. Lipton was perhaps best known as the dean emeritus of the Actors Studio Drama School at Pace University in New York, and the creator and host of the television series, “Inside the Actors Studio.” He died in 2020 at age 93.
Güd wrtr 