By Jim Doyle
It dawned on me last night, floating in my hot tub, smelling the smoke from one of my neighbor’s wood fires, alternately warmed and chilled by the 50-degree variation between my water temperature and the air, that we are closing in on winter. Winter in Lake Charles, of course, means thoughts turn to idle consideration of when, or if, a freeze will kill my banana trees, and whether I should cook some fish (maybe even some pork) in those gorgeous leaves before that happens.
And if it’s getting colder, then the Megaholidays are on the way. Remember when the Macy’s Parade was the traditional start of the Christmas season, Santa Claus and big balloons with turkey roasting in the oven? Now we’re lucky to get past Halloween before the trees are for sale. I actually saw potted pines with ornaments in my grocery store last week. My staff has already placed a rather generous holiday schedule on my calendar. Soon, we’ll have one seamless celebration from Labor Day to Mardi Gras to Easter.
Harrumph!!!
This may be the year without a Christmas tree at my house. I’m down to one teenager and one returnee, and as for me, I’d be satisfied decorating my immortal tomato plant. Hey, at least it would be a “live tree.” This is, of course, a fantasy on my part. My son Harry would like to have the house decorated in National Lampoon mode (Clark Griswold and the many mini-lights). Probably should put something up.
Now, about my tomato plant.
I began gardening this year. In pots. It wasn’t so much that I didn’t want to commit actual labor by digging a garden; pots just seemed so much more, I don’t know, portable. Then there were the birds. An unguarded garden in my back yard would be vulnerable to all kinds of casual eaters, and since I planned to have a bounty of fresh, organic vegetables available, I wanted to keep them on my patio where my various domesticated animals, including five grandchildren, would likely shoo them away.
So, with optimism, I ordered tomato plants and other seeded mini-pots from some anonymous ad on the back of a Parade magazine. You know the type. They arrived a couple weeks later in a box, which someone helpfully deposited on my breakfast table, where they stayed for a couple of months until one of the members of the Former Mrs. Doyle Club opened the box and took a couple of the plants to her house. This was, I don’t know, maybe April.
By June, I figured I had to move the box. Looked at the seed pods. Didn’t seem too complicated. Bought some bags of dirt and planted them in the pots, and lo and behold, Magic! Green sprouts! I never knew I could do that!
Now I was hooked. I called over my yard guy and got him to transplant my then-dying banana trees, left there by another Club member, into my yard. As I watered them, an amazing thing happened. They grew! By this point I was out of control.
One day at the hardware store getting copies made of my house keys, I saw a pack of squash seeds. I love squash. Bought some more dirt and a couple more pots and planted the suckers in my patio garden. Damned if they didn’t sprout, too! My plants became my afternoon companions and part of my routine: work all day, go home, feed the dog, feed the teenager, water the plants. Even though I never spoke to my plants, I now sympathized with those who do, people I had previously considered eccentric. Hell, I’m not eccentric!
Spent most of my afternoons in the garden section of Wal-Mart. Bought two lemon trees on line and planted them in pots in my house. Bought two Bonsai trees, for God’s sake, in Florida. Added some low-light (as opposed to low-life) greenery in my kitchen. Made plans for harvest.
No harvest.
There must be something about this gardening thing I haven’t figured out. One of my tomato plants did produce five or six small fruit. The squash bloomed beautifully but yielded one miserable, hard, tasteless gourd. Finally I pulled up all the offending greenery and was about to plow the pots after Josie the Dog jumped onto a patio chair and broke my biggest remaining tomato stalk. But I never got around to it.
I decided instead to do some research. My ultimate resource is Google, which gave me a clue. Seems one of my tomato plants was engineered for cooler weather, like, say, Vermont, and that’s why it grew like Topsy but never “fruited” (and I never knew that was a verb until I became a gardener). I suppose that’s what happened to the squash, too.
Right about the time I was planning to yank my old friend the tomato from his roots, he started flowering. Last week – in November! – three fair-sized tomatoes appeared. And that’s when the idea struck me. I could move it into my house and decorate it with other ornaments, maybe a full-tomato theme. Maybe I’ll even flock the damned thing.
Since the tomato plant is either immortal or undead, it’s good for any number of stops on the seamless holiday trail. Hide eggs in the Easter Tomato, symbol of everlasting life. Scare little kids with the Halloween Tomato, a zombie with small fruit. Call him Scrooge for Christmas because he’s stingy with his produce.
Harrumph!
Hope you guys have better luck getting fruited.
See y’all on the flip.
Monday, November 24, 2008
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
Family Ties
By Jim Doyle
I am a history buff. Lately, I’ve been studying my personal history – actually, my family history – and it will be no surprise to you, Dear Readers, that there are some real characters locked away in that treasure trove.
Who knows if it’s accurate. But if it is, here are some of my relatives:
Lots of writers: John Milton, William Faulkner, Edgar Allen Poe, Henry David Thoreau, George Orwell, Truman Capote.
Several presidents: Eisenhower, Kennedy, Bush and LBJ.
One preacher burned at the stake for being a witch.
Some great actors: Spencer Tracy, Humphrey Bogart, Bette Davis, Cary Grant.
And several famous African-Americans: Booker T. Washington, Langston Hughes, and P.B.S. Pinchback, Governor of Louisiana.
I have to admit it left a peculiar taste in my mouth to confirm my ancestors (at least one of them) owned slaves, having thought (and been taught) all my life that our Methodist religion, dating back to the 1840’s, sided us with the abolitionists. But with a huge family tree rooted firmly in the South, I suppose it was inevitable.
My branches are laden with the Doyle, Webb, Duncan, Watson, McKinnie, and Nuckolls families, and those are among the most common of the Scot-Irish stock that drifted down through Virginia and the upper South like a wave about 150 years ago.
If you’re searching for good stories and interesting people, look no further than the Watson clan. My mother was one of 10 children, and the oldest girl, in a farm family that survived the Depression (maybe some of those skills will come in handy).
Her twin brother Leva was famous among my friends because he drove a Rolls Royce (actually it was a 1938 Plymouth he bought new, but nobody knew the difference) and worked at Fort Knox (he was an x-ray technician at the base hospital).
Uncle Julius owned a piece of history. The Battle of Middleburg was fought on his front yard. Leonard, father of my two closest cousins Carl and Roy, was a paratrooper who drove a general around Hiroshima right after World War II and died much too young of lung cancer. Five aunts raised exceptional children.
And that brings us to Lewis, who will soon celebrate his 50th wedding anniversary and is my only surviving uncle.
Like his oldest brother, Lewis was famous among my friends for his car and for his job. He drove an original Edsel, which he kept until about 15 years ago, and he worked as a welder at the nuclear plant at Oak Ridge. He is, in every sense, keeper of the family flame.
Every two years he hosts the Watson reunion at his home in Fairfield Glade, Tennessee, on the Cumberland Plateau. I’ve spent the July 4th holiday there in a jacket watching fireworks and keeping score as the kids captured fireflies. Some of my best memories are on his back deck, counting my cousins and soaking in the remarkable, enveloping feeling of a family whose numbers do not diminish the ties and love that bind us all together, today and back up the tree to those many, many limbs.
Geraldine, Lewis’ wife, is my “favorite aunt” in much the same way I am her “favorite nephew,” in other words, it’s our little secret. I still remember the first time I met her, probably when I was about 8. She and Lewis had two children and the oldest, Julia, is our family hero. She was the national poster child for juvenile arthritis before she was ten.
I remember her about that age, sitting quietly in the den at my house sobbing softly to herself in the pain she has carried all her life. And in marrying her husband Steve she added yet another interesting occupation to our mix: Steve is a nuclear engineer who works at the bomb plant in Oak Ridge. He’s in charge of “packaging.” I don’t even want to think about what that means.
Steve gave me one of my prized possessions one reunion, which hit at a particularly bad patch for me, about a week after my lifelong friend Gary Cole died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Other circumstances added to the frazzling effect of that blow. As I got ready to leave, Steve handed me a hat and said, “Here. You need this more than me.” The hat bore the logo: “S**t Creek Survivor.” I don’t even want to think about why a guy with his job had it. But there are days, less lately thank God, when I wear it proudly and defiantly.
This week’s ruminations may not be worthy of my cousin William Faulkner or even the Ravenmonger of Baltimore. But the point is worth considering. If home is the place where when you go there, they have to take you in (Robert Frost), I think it’s a metaphysical place rather than a physical location.
For me, it’s the bosom of my family, from slave owner to freed slave, uncles and aunts to cousins and grand cousins, once-in-a-while reunions to sporadic e-mails from some of my more loyal blood. In this hectic modern world spinning further from its comfortable and known center towards exciting and new possibilities, tempered by fear, may we all be Survivors.
I am a history buff. Lately, I’ve been studying my personal history – actually, my family history – and it will be no surprise to you, Dear Readers, that there are some real characters locked away in that treasure trove.
Who knows if it’s accurate. But if it is, here are some of my relatives:
Lots of writers: John Milton, William Faulkner, Edgar Allen Poe, Henry David Thoreau, George Orwell, Truman Capote.
Several presidents: Eisenhower, Kennedy, Bush and LBJ.
One preacher burned at the stake for being a witch.
Some great actors: Spencer Tracy, Humphrey Bogart, Bette Davis, Cary Grant.
And several famous African-Americans: Booker T. Washington, Langston Hughes, and P.B.S. Pinchback, Governor of Louisiana.
I have to admit it left a peculiar taste in my mouth to confirm my ancestors (at least one of them) owned slaves, having thought (and been taught) all my life that our Methodist religion, dating back to the 1840’s, sided us with the abolitionists. But with a huge family tree rooted firmly in the South, I suppose it was inevitable.
My branches are laden with the Doyle, Webb, Duncan, Watson, McKinnie, and Nuckolls families, and those are among the most common of the Scot-Irish stock that drifted down through Virginia and the upper South like a wave about 150 years ago.
If you’re searching for good stories and interesting people, look no further than the Watson clan. My mother was one of 10 children, and the oldest girl, in a farm family that survived the Depression (maybe some of those skills will come in handy).
Her twin brother Leva was famous among my friends because he drove a Rolls Royce (actually it was a 1938 Plymouth he bought new, but nobody knew the difference) and worked at Fort Knox (he was an x-ray technician at the base hospital).
Uncle Julius owned a piece of history. The Battle of Middleburg was fought on his front yard. Leonard, father of my two closest cousins Carl and Roy, was a paratrooper who drove a general around Hiroshima right after World War II and died much too young of lung cancer. Five aunts raised exceptional children.
And that brings us to Lewis, who will soon celebrate his 50th wedding anniversary and is my only surviving uncle.
Like his oldest brother, Lewis was famous among my friends for his car and for his job. He drove an original Edsel, which he kept until about 15 years ago, and he worked as a welder at the nuclear plant at Oak Ridge. He is, in every sense, keeper of the family flame.
Every two years he hosts the Watson reunion at his home in Fairfield Glade, Tennessee, on the Cumberland Plateau. I’ve spent the July 4th holiday there in a jacket watching fireworks and keeping score as the kids captured fireflies. Some of my best memories are on his back deck, counting my cousins and soaking in the remarkable, enveloping feeling of a family whose numbers do not diminish the ties and love that bind us all together, today and back up the tree to those many, many limbs.
Geraldine, Lewis’ wife, is my “favorite aunt” in much the same way I am her “favorite nephew,” in other words, it’s our little secret. I still remember the first time I met her, probably when I was about 8. She and Lewis had two children and the oldest, Julia, is our family hero. She was the national poster child for juvenile arthritis before she was ten.
I remember her about that age, sitting quietly in the den at my house sobbing softly to herself in the pain she has carried all her life. And in marrying her husband Steve she added yet another interesting occupation to our mix: Steve is a nuclear engineer who works at the bomb plant in Oak Ridge. He’s in charge of “packaging.” I don’t even want to think about what that means.
Steve gave me one of my prized possessions one reunion, which hit at a particularly bad patch for me, about a week after my lifelong friend Gary Cole died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Other circumstances added to the frazzling effect of that blow. As I got ready to leave, Steve handed me a hat and said, “Here. You need this more than me.” The hat bore the logo: “S**t Creek Survivor.” I don’t even want to think about why a guy with his job had it. But there are days, less lately thank God, when I wear it proudly and defiantly.
This week’s ruminations may not be worthy of my cousin William Faulkner or even the Ravenmonger of Baltimore. But the point is worth considering. If home is the place where when you go there, they have to take you in (Robert Frost), I think it’s a metaphysical place rather than a physical location.
For me, it’s the bosom of my family, from slave owner to freed slave, uncles and aunts to cousins and grand cousins, once-in-a-while reunions to sporadic e-mails from some of my more loyal blood. In this hectic modern world spinning further from its comfortable and known center towards exciting and new possibilities, tempered by fear, may we all be Survivors.
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