Violence


Dear Eugene,

I was playing in my garden last night, giving all the hedges around my house bad haircut.  If they are teenagers they'd swear to never talk to me again.

I don't mind, cos people talk to me when I am out in my garden.

Old folks.  Older folks.  Some I have seen before working on their own garden, others in their eyes I saw them looking at me seeing themselves once working on their own garden.  Sometimes they'd stop to talk, if our eyes met, if the beast in my hands wasn't roaring.  More often though they would just give me a big, approving grin, telling me, among many other things, to not take things for granted.

Even my toil.

I've finally got a chance to talk to the wife of my neighbor, the auto mechanic who suffered a big stroke.  She was walking her pit bull.  I've learned more about him in this 15-minutes conversation with his wife than with all the conversations I had with him over the years added together then times by two.

He loved life in ways loud.  He loved life in ways quiet.  He just loved his life.  Now no more.  Only loss.  Depression.

He used to vacuum his vacuum; now I know why his garage looks like a Martha Stewart kitchen.  He can't even remember how to use a telephone now.  Most ironically he lived and ate healthier than most people I know.

And I've been knocking
But no one answers
And I've been knocking
Most all the day

Oh, and I've been calling
Oh, hey hey Johnny
Can't you come out to play

People truly connect in their weaknesses, much more than in their strengths, unite in our lostness to search backward for the who and what and why in the givenness of things.  A hackneyed observation, for sure, but one that never grows trite, for we keep denying its salient veracity to keep it fresh and strange, alien to our everyday life.

Mini heart attacks noted but gone unnoticed.  Precursory strokes felt but not fully taken up, taken in, taken to be the eleventh-hour chime.  I learned all these last night.  Catching up with stuffs on my way down.

Who lived here
He must have been a gardener that cared a lot
Who weeded out the tears and grew a good crop
And now it all looks strange
It's funny how one insect can damage so much grain

I woke up this morning with pain on my shoulders, expected, and expected worse.  I thought the tendinitis on my left palm would come back.

There's so much violence even in a garden.  Using a hedge trimmer is a very violent way to set things right, Wendell Berry whispered in my left ear last night.

Maybe that's why the tendinitis didn't come back.

Not today anyway.

Yours, Alex

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