The Good Fortune Harvest
I finished up my lunch with Andy, evading for the most part any reference to visiting the grave in the future and to what my plans are here.
Since the day has turned out to be so beautiful, I decide to take a stroll down the main street and see what changes have occurred in my long absence. Many of the old stores have been replaced by franchises you see anywhere. I walk into Mel’s, one of the few stores that has been around forever. It’s a five and dime and the merchandise looks unchanged even after years of not coming in here. Everything has a fine layer of white dust coating it.
I walk out and a little ways down spy a welcoming sight, two buildings down from Mel’s is Meditation Park. This little oasis was the inspiration of Jim Tolay Jones who used to have his shoe shine parlor right here at this very spot. After it burned down, he didn’t have insurance on it and didn’t have money to rebuild it right away. He would bring a bench out here and when passerby’s would ask him when he was going to rebuild the shoe shine parlor, he’d simply say, “I’m a meditating on that very thought right now.”
He must have come to the conclusion that it was better to think about it than to actually do it, because he sat there for the next seven years of his life meditating on it until he died. His children didn’t have the heart to sell the property, so they donated it to the town under the condition that it become a park. His bench remains in the same spot, and people have planted flowers all around the perimeter.
I sit down on the bench and breathe in the honey citrus smell of a tea olive bush that someone has planted in the corner. If I close my eyes and drift, I can almost see Jim Tolay Jones with his polish-stained hands and dark-folded smile.
Down at the other end of the street I catch sight of Turget’s Feed and Seed. I wander over. Map Turget is still behind the counter. His family has been running this feed store for generations. He looks unchanged. Within minutes he recognizes me and hollers across the room, “Constance Behar, I’ll be damned. What in the hell brings you back here to Nowheresville, USA? What are you doing? Came for some rat poison? Ha!”
I smile at him trying to conceal my horror at this last question, but he knows.
“I’m fine Map. How’s your folks?”
“Dead,” he says with a curious look on his face as if I should have known this beforehand.
“I’m sorry Map,” I say to him. “I haven’t kept up too well.”
A man walks by carrying a big sack. Map stops him and says, “Lookee here. This is Lenny Behar’s youngest. Can you believe it?” The man keeps walking to the counter, disconcerted that he has been stopped and seemingly oblivious as to who Lenny Behar is and why he should be bothered.
“Ah shit. This town has changed yeah, Constance,” he says with disgust. “But you’re back for good I hear tell. That’s good. That’s good.”
He runs up to check out the disgruntled man at the counter, and I slip away to go look at the vegetable bedding plants out the side door. I survey the wilting leaves of the small plants – eggplant, cucumber, peppers, tomatoes. The usual sad fare. I turn to go in and look at the seed packets, when I run smack into Map again.
“Hey, hey,” he says smiling, “can’t get away from me that quick. What’s this I hear that you won’t go see your daddy’s grave?”
I am completely stunned.
“That’s your old man, Constance. You should go pay your respects,” he says in earnest. He has a look of real disappointment on his face.
“Map Turget, I can’t believe I traveled 2500 miles, have walked down a major street, come in here after not seeing you for countless years, and that is all you and it seems everyone else is concerned about knowing from me. When am I going to go to the grave? For goodness sakes, what the hell does it matter if I never go to that grave, ever?” I push my way out the door and slam it so hard, I barely hear Map apologizing.
I walk straight over to Jim Tolay Jones’ meditating bench and sit down. My heart is unsteady, fueled by the adrenaline racing around inside me. What was I thinking? Coming back here after all, fool that I am. Where is my liberty now? I am a fool. I came back here seeking to reconnect. But the lines are drawn taut here. Being told what to do, how to feel, what to think. You have to force the slack. People get up in your face here, pushing you and pulling you, wanting you to fall in line.
My heartbeat is slowly stabilizing. I close my eyes gently and hum a lullaby my mother used to sing to my sister and me – dream of the sandman my sweet child, the bright sun’s a rising up…. I walk toward the bookstore across the street. Napoleon’s Bookstore is new. I go in and browse the Literature section, then thumb through the cookbooks, and after a while I make my way over to the gardening section which occupies a full two bookshelves in the back of the store. I search the titles and finally find what I am looking for, Organic Gardening. I sit in the armchair nearby and look through it. I read the sentences on the pages, but my minds reads from some other script, “I am not going to let Map Turget defeat my spirit. I am back. The west was a vacuum for me – I had no ties, no connections, I was out of context. Here, I shape a history that began many years before me, which runs steadily through me.”
I look down at the chapter entitled “The Primary Garden.” The steps are bulleted, easy for anyone to understand; an ounce of prevention here, coupling, mulching, sweat and hard work, and perhaps a little more forethought. Yet the rewards of not using pesticides are immeasurable. Why do people continue to abuse themselves? The proselyte who lives inside of me wants to go stand on a soap box on main street and shout at the folks who live around here. We are killing each other with fertilizers, insecticides, and poisons. There is another way. Go organic! But I have learned that people just don’t listen to what you think, no matter how great your ideas may seem or how eloquently you may state them. And if you shout too loudly at them, most turn away from you no matter what you have to say.