How Does Your Garden Grow?

We're trying our hands at gardening, we Aprons are.

I'll be the first to admit, we have no idea what we're doing.

Not only that, we have no business doing what we're doing.

We're murderers of all things chlorophyll'd. Why ought we be allowed to garden? It's rather like licensing a convicted pedophile to open up a nursery school or a Rita's Water Ice franchise.

Still, we're giving it our best shot. Our side-yard (we have no backyard, and our front yard is all pachysandra (except for the little strip of grass on the curb, which some anonymous do-gooder mowed for us while we were at work yesterday-- creepy, embarrassing, shameful, weird) is exceptionally small, but we have turned it into a micro-garden of sorts.

Peppers

Broccoli (for me, the veggie fetishist)

Tomatoes

and Pumpkins

Yes-- probably pumpkins aren't exactly the wisest things to grow in a garden no bigger in diameter than the average child's coffin, but then, no one ever said we were wise. Or gardeners.

We're just two stupid kids in love who are trying to share our love with as many things as possible. I mean, we have two dogs. We're trying to make a baby (which hole is it again?) and we're fumbling our way through attempts to make friends with people, even though I don't particularly like people, and now we're trying to lavish a little love on some growy-type things.

The broccoli is doing especially well. I'd describe what it looks like for you, but every single adjective I was thinking of using sounds pornographic. Except "green."

So, um, it's green. We good?

My maternal grandfather, Harry, had a garden. Actually, I think I'll refer to him as "Zayda" because that's what we called him. Not "my Zayda" but "Zayda." In fact, I thought "Zayda" was his name until I was about ten. Anyway, Zayda was the only person I ever knew growing up who grew things. Zayda's garden was serious, because Zayda was serious. He never joked about anything that I can recall. All the conversations I ever had with him were serious, including the last conversation I ever had with him-- about men's fashion and my belief that the three-piece suit would come back. He agreed. Three weeks later, he was dead. That was 1992, and he didn't live to see my Bar Mitzvah or the hipster fancy-dress revolution in which, in my opinion, skinny ties and three-piece-suits feature prominently. And I think that's unfortunate.

In the fortunate department, he also didn't live to see my sister marry a Christian mailman.

Zayda grew tomatoes and cucumbers. I loved wandering through his garden as a little boy and smelling the vegetation, just inhaling God, I guess. It was as close as I ever got to religion-- the Bar Mitzvah doesn't count, as I suspect it doesn't for most Jewish men. It's hard to justify and appreciate an inflated, expensive ceremony proclaiming you a man before you've got your first pube.

I loved going to Zayda's garden. He didn't show me anything about it, or teach me anything about it, and we never re-enacted the scene from "The Godfather" where Marlon Brando chases the fucking kid around the garden with an orange-peel slice in his mouth and has a heart attack. Zayda had his final heart attack while putting on his tie to get ready for work one morning.

It's funny-- I really wanted this to be about our garden and gardening, but all of a sudden it's about Zayda and heart attacks and pubes. Life is so funny, don't you think? I say that a lot, but I really believe it's true. And it's funny in every way something can be funny-- in the humorous and the depressive and the strange and the quixotic. It's unpredictable, sure, and you never know what's going to work and what's going to fail, and what's going to survive the harshest of times. In that respect, I guess life is like a garden. Or a blog post.