Gardening

I'm going to bore you with another story that relates to my brother. You see...there are only so many people and experiences I have under my belt. This, is what's on the menu.

Beth and I were eating at her home, talking about my brother and life in general. She was a close friend of his for the past ten years or so and an acquaintance of mine. She invited me over to give me something of a respite from the hurricane that had been the last few months of his life. It was needed.

The conversation shifted around as they always do and I spoke of the fields I have worked in. I told her that of the two careers I've had, both dealt with damaged people in one form or another.

She had asked why I chose that and I surmised that I didn't consciously choose it; but I naturally gravitated towards it. There was no epiphany in my last year in high school where I said, “That's IT! I”ll work in social services!” I inclined to it because I understood it.

“Those careers are not happy ones.” she tells me. “Working with broken people all day long? All you can hope for is to stem the tide. You remind me of the little Dutch boy with his finger in the dike, trying to stem leaks.”

“You're right, in a lot of cases that's all you can hope for. Either the wreckage is too great, been ignored too long or the fixes can only solve some part of it. But, you try to salvage something of it.”

“Salvage...that's what you do then.”

“Yeah, I agree.” I end that without adding anything more to it.

So, I start with a new story, another theory of life I have, using my brother as an example, a perfect example.

I tell her, that people, are no different than any other living thing on Earth. We abide pretty much by the similar laws that control a lot of who we are, genetics and the experiences we pile on. I used my brother as an example and added corn seed to explain why I think life is the way it is.

My brother lacked one particular component healthy people have and that's the gene that makes mucous thin. You and I can cough up this goo as it is viscous enough to carry away all those cute bacteria down in our lung that would like to colonize and kill us. Those with cystic fibrosis cough up wood glue. Or try to at least, with little success. You do that for years and see what improvement you have with that.

“It wasn't his fault, being born with that. He had NO say and at the time in 1959 there was no cure and to this day, there is none.” “Impediments like this are a ball and chain and he had one hell of a weight to carry about. It also prevented him from being the best he could be. And what makes it worse, he was aware of that.”

I go on. You broadcast corn seed across a wide field. Some of the corn falls on plowed soil, some on sand and some by the roadside. It has no choice in where it falls at all. Which seeds will do well?

Take the seed by the roadside. It'll germinate and try to make a living there. But it has to compete with the weeds, hope for rain and not get any of the irrigation the fields get. Living like this will stunt your growth. Now the corn in the field, gets all the tender care in the world. Irrigation, fertilizer, weed killer, bug killers and it grows eight feet tall. It has reached and lived to it's potential.

And I didn’t take into account yet the seed that has lousy genetics. I say again, it's no fault of the seed either. The seed, wherever it falls, will try to do the best it can with what it has. And growing just a foot tall, all bent and scraggly and never producing ears of corn, may be the best effort it's allowed because it's genetics dictate this.

“That” I say, “was my brother's lot in life, and it was my mother's too, though her medical problems were different."

“It's also, the lot of tens of thousands of people now. Be it medical, mental...or what have you.”

“So Ron” she asks...”Who are you? Farmer Brown? You go around transplanting these miserable corn plants to decent fields?”

“By the time I got to them, it was too late really. The damage is done. All I could do was assuage some of that misery.”

She adds, “You do know, at your age, that all those experiences you've had, determine how you see the world. Most people can't stand to look at ugliness in the face without running away, yet you had to, you grew up with it.”

“Oh, I know, I know. It put me in a place many people can't relate to at all, not well at least. But I cannot ignore it, I can't avoid it. I know it full well. When someone you know, or even don't know, is crippled by life's shitty happenstance, they can stare at you...it's a condemnation of your good luck...or the stare is plea...either way, you are bound, must be bound, to help.”

I think for a bit...”Perhaps that's why I've always orbited the occupations I have had...I was schooled from an early age to do so. For me it's a kneejerk reaction, to lend a hand.”

“Then you will never stop.” she says. “You, are the corn seed who had the better genetics out of your whole family, although you grew up between the sand and road, you made it. You always have and always will be looking to replant others in better fields. You did it then and you do it now.”

“Beth..sometimes I wonder why don't I replant myself in a better field, say the Farmer MicroSoft's field, or Farmer Conoco Phillip's field. Give up playing EMT.”

“Because that's not who you are honey. That's not the way the world is. You have your experiences that tell you how you see the world. We all project our inner selves to the world at large. “Nothing is true outside of Ron's experiences, nothing is true outside of me, Beth's experiences, nothing is true outside my neighbor Alan's experiences...and that's how it is. If it falls outside of our own experience, it feels foreign and IS foreign and it is not 'true' to our view.”

“I can't see you in London, trading oil futures.” she says. “You could learn to do it, but it's not who you are.”

**

The moral of this story? There is only one and it applies only to one person, me. The moral is I am me, with all the glories and all of the scabs. I know what, not who, I am. You all have your particular pasts and they are what they are. You walk in your own shoes, live in your own skin and any answers adopted from someone else, probably won't work. You'll have your own.