A Tree By Its Fruit

We moved into our home in 2015. I planted an Shinseiki Asian Pear tree in our quarter-acre backyard the following Spring. I pruned the limbs and suckers diligently each winter, and fertilized it with my own compost produced from our kitchen scraps, leaves and grass clippings. It took a few years to mature, but eventually it began producing fruit.

Every year for the past eight years, it has produced a bounty--fifty to seventy-five--of golf ball sized Asian pears, my favorite fruit.

And for the past eight years I have not tasted a single one. The squirrel gets every last one. Year after year. He waits until late July, when I think to myself "maybe this is my year. This is my year!" I go to bed with fifty fat pears on the tree, and wake up the next morning and there are none. Stripped clean. And I just can't take it anymore.

I have done everything I could think of to preserve the harvest--I netted the entire tree one year. Another year I put plastic cupcake holders on each and every pear. This year I put plastic sleeves and a chloroplast skirt on the trunk to try to keep the squirrel from being able to climb up. 

Everything I did failed. Nature has defeated me so thoroughly it is enough to drive a man to nihilism.

During those early years, I removed a 20'x20' plot of grass, covered with cardboard and compost (20 years of grass clippings and leaves dumped behind the shed by the previous owner; a rich, black, airy humus-like compost) and horse manure and topped with wood chips from a recently taken down maple tree. I set 8 foot stakes in the ground, wound chicken wire around the lower perimeter and fishing wire around the top. Planted eggplant, tomatoes, cucumbers, zucchini, peppers, turnips and beets, lettuce and spinach and bok choi. Living out the little suburban homestead fantasy. Cute. So full of hope and promise.

First year I got a few things; most of the "crops" grew well. At least in the first year. But the compost ran out and the soil over the years became harder to nourish without amenities like animal manure and a steady supply of compost. Increasingly I was fighting a war on multiple fronts--woodchuck, deer, fox, squirrels, voles--anything and everything that could work against me did. Even the five chickens I picked up one year got picked off one by one.

I got worn down. Those pilfering animals didn't deserve the fruit of my labor, for the "laborer is worth his wages" (Lk 10:7). It was heartbreak after heartbreak. The futility of fighting nature. The garden has returned to grass now. I'm considering cutting down the tree as well. "Why should it deplete the ground?" (Lk 13:7). It's flaming white blossoms each Spring mock me with hopeful beauty, though. A spiteful testament. "Maybe this year will be different." But it never is.

Homesteads are a nice Pinterest fantasy. Or maybe yours produces enough so you're not running a deficit of time, money, and labor. I give farmers so much credit--what they have to deal with, the risks, the unpredictability, the stress. For $9.62/hour (average wage for a farmer here in PA). God bless them. No farms no food. 

Homesteaders are not farmers. They are playing in the sandbox. It's great. It's an honest minimum wage hobby work to produce that $64 tomato. Just a different league is all. So many things to manage as well. So many things to go wrong. Homesteading does not save you money (not that that's everyone's motivation). I guess it's a "labor of love." Your self-sufficiency is a fantasy.

Is there a Christian lesson here? I imagine working for the Church, perhaps, could be akin to the homesteader. You would think working for the Church as a Music Director or Campus Minister would enable a living wage, to be able to support a large family for those living by the Church's teaching. But instead it is high expectations with low compensation. Long hours. Burn out. Squeezing employees for all they're worth "for the sake of the Kingdom." I don't know. I think I dodged a bullet having applied for so many diocesan and Church jobs and never getting hired for one. I'm not surprised Catholic schools are closing or are sub-par with regards to their academic standards unless they are elite prep-schools. Parents are getting squeezed by tuition, infrastructure bills still need to paid, and you're trying to retain good teachers at forty grand a year. Fighting nature. Entropy. Having the fruit stripped from the tree. Year after year.

God bless our farmers. No farms, no food. God bless our priests. No priests, no Church. God bless our religious and those on mission and those who have given up all to follow Christ and proclaim the Gospel. God bless those who volunteer their time, talent and treasure (even when the Church squanders it viz a viz lawsuits, settlements, etc all while simply "managing the decline"). God bless the FOCUS and NET college students on fire for the Faith, evangelizing good will. May they never burn out, but retain the fire of the Holy Spirit all their lives and fertilize the fields of their soul with caritas and charity. May they never give up and give in when they stop feeling like fools for Christ and instead feel more simply like just fools. May their faith be infectious, infectious like the powdery mildew that spreads over the zucchini vines, but let it give life and not choke it out. God bless the laborers in the vineyard who do not give up hope for a harvest. 

God forgive me.

Time Is Slipping Through My Fingers Like Sand

 

I did not expect to struggle so much as a father with my kids getting older. Lamentably, my memory is very poor and I only have little snippets of mental vignettes in my mind from when they were young. I do not, cannot remember. It is distressing. I feel like a lost man searching his mind for his kids, and I cannot find them. This is why I struggle to write as well, because the pool of details in memory to draw from is very shallow. There is no shortage of material to work with when you have memory. So I write from the present, but long to write the past as well, a past which is dispersing like vapor faster than I can preserve it.

My oldest two are teenagers now, while the youngest is 8. I know every parent goes through this at some point, but I was not prepared for it, the speed at which time accelerates. Next year the oldest will be driving. Maybe a job. Then college. Then...what? I am sad. I also am struggling to keep up with the changes. I want to hold on to them, control everything like we did when they were toddlers, but to do so would be to stunt them. 

Letting go is very hard. So, whether it is fair or not, I hold my youngest tight--I stroke his cheek and slip my hand in his. I have him fall asleep next to us in bed sometimes. I try to record his little voice to preserve it. He is the last, and when is grown there will be no more. 

I also am not sure I could have handled more than three kids. God knows. I know He gives the grace, but grace builds on nature. The Epistle at Mass on Sunday from 1 Corinthians: He will not let you be tested beyond your strength. We had seven miscarriages along the way. God knows.

I lost all my photos in a botched iPhone transfer last Fall. It was pretty traumatic, and in fact I am considering looking into EDMR therapy to deal with what has become a real problem in my life lately--being triggered by tech. I am standing still as the world is rushing by me. I am getting left behind. My wife has a good amount of photos on her phone, but I almost want to print the best ones out, keep them physical and in a album in our family room. I don't want to Zoom, I want to hug. I don't want to Facetime my grown kids, I want to hear them chew and laugh at the kitchen table. I don't want to be locked out of life, which is becoming increasingly digital. I am scared. I cannot keep up. 

It is very hard to live in the present, because the present is constantly shifting. We can take our time in the past, linger in memory; we can create futures for ourselves, make ourselves anxious or sick with longing. But the present is flitting, requiring constant attention, focus, and awareness. By the time you seek to hold on to it, it is gone. You cannot hold on to the present. And so each day I get distracted and my kids get one day older, one becomes two, to weeks and months, and then they are almost slipping out of my grasp. I am not a controlling dad, but I do have fear--fear for what my kids are being launched into--and fear is not of God, is antithetical to trust, which God requires of us to live in faith. 

I was watching Terrance Malick's Tree of Life last night, a beautifully shot meditation on memory, past, nature, and grace. The opening monologue contrasts "the way of Nature" with "the way of Grace" and that one must choose which one they will follow. Jack (Sean Penn) is a middle-aged corporate executive trying to make sense of his present by reflecting on his past growing up with his mother, father, and brothers (one of whom died at the age of 19) in Texas in the 1950's. The way of Nature is reflected in Jack's father (Brad Pitt)--loving yet authoritarian, teaching the boys discipline and that the world is a hard place where you need to be on your game to survive. Jack's mother is the way of Grace--gentle, caring, empathetic. There's no real "point" or plot to the film, but the meditative aspects reminded me that memory is composed of those subtle moments that take place in the present--the trace of a mother's finger across her sleeping son's chest, the evening sun piercing through the pine trees, the sound of the screen door closing. The day their brother died. 

Without memory, or with it being so compromised, I feel as if I am disappearing. I want to remember because I want to preserve, be a good custodian of the my past. Everything is moving by so fast, and I can't stop it, can't stop my kids from getting older, nor would I want to. I just want to hold them in the present, and keep the memory from that now-past for my future self. 

Team We

 

Team Me We

For our sixteenth wedding anniversary, my wife got me a card from the Dollar Store. That sounds callous and pathetic; however, we have a mutual agreement to only do Dollar Store cards because all the cards are overpriced, the Hallmark cards at least, and they are all cheesy anyway so it just simplifies things. I got her card from the Dollar Store too, and picked flowers from around the yard to make her a bouquet which I arranged and put in a vase on the kitchen table. We didn't go out to eat or to a movie or even have a date because I was feeling low, a kind of suicidal low, and everything would have been tainted by that no matter what we did to celebrate. 

So we postponed until we were at the beach visiting my parents and brother the following week. Even then, too, I was feeling awful--anxious, weepy, irrational and still suicidal. We did go out in town, walked along the beach and then to the wharf to sit on a bench. We wanted coffee but it was late, so we settled at a bar and had a Coke and a Twisted Tea. It was fine, it was good, but I felt bad not being able to show her how much she meant to me, to be happy about it and actually celebrate those sixteen years. Because she is great, she understood and squeezed my hand to let me know it was okay, as if I were an invalid in a hospital bed, which was how I felt at least.

Anyway, back to that card. Most of the cards we have to choose from are either gag worthy flowery, probably AI generated sonnets, or the "funny" cards that are lighthearted and stupid. But this one she got me this time was just right. All it said on the front was:

I'm on team YOU!

And inside she said there was no other team she'd rather be on than Team Me.

She has the card sitting on the bay window sill in the kitchen where I can see it, next to an orchid some friends got us that has died and come back to life each year for four years now, maybe to remind me that there is in fact a Resurrection, that it is not a myth or a dream, that things will not always be awful and I will not always want to die, that things can come back from the brink and bloom and flower and be just as gorgeous and intricate and beautiful as that orchid is each spring when it blooms, leaving the previous year's pale colored stalk like a tentacle of death on the plant, like the rings of a tree you can ascertain its age by. I know it is in its fourth year of blooming because there are three of those spindly tentacles protruding from the main stem. 

And we do nothing to this plant except a tablespoon of water every few days; no fertilizer or care. I would have thought it would have used up or exhausted the soil in the small white pot, but it has not. As if something so beautiful demands an intensive input, managed care, to come back year after year as radiant as the year before. As if it does not deserve to live or be beautiful because of that lack of care.

And yet, it lives. 

And so I'm reading the cover of this card from my wife--mind you, not even the handwritten contents on the inside, and fighting back tears because inside I'm thinking "You piece of trash. Look at you, using up the food and the oxygen in the air. You don't deserve it. You are a loser." And other such self-recriminating thoughts. 

And yet here is this woman, this gift to my life, who would care to disagree with those statements. I am on your team, she says. I choose you. You and I are in this together. I am on team You. 

And of course, I want to say, you've made a mistake, I'm a lousy bet, a bad horse, and yet she won't be deterred. She pours into me, believes in me and the family we have created together. And there is no force stronger on earth for a man than a wife who believes in her husband. I cleave to her too, because she is flesh of my flesh and bone of my bone. And it does not occur to me in the throws of all these self-accusations of worthlessness and being a loser that I am accusing her of those things as well because we are one flesh, what's hers is mine and what's mine is hers. 

She doesn't deserve those self-defacing titles. And neither do I. They come from the Accuser under the guise of my own voice, like some kind of AI hack, a counterfeit trying to steal my identity. Because I am a child of God. I belong to Christ, I am not my own. I rebuke the demon but the echoes of the voices remain.

That exclamation mark at the end of the "You" on the cover of the card, I think that's what pushed my tears over the edge to spill out the corner of my eye. So juvenile, but it underscored that my wife was not begrudgingly choosing me as if I were the last kid left on the court and resigned to being on Team Rob, but she was in fact enthusiastic about it, believes in me, in us. Not that I will carry her her whole life, but that she will shoulder me when I am hurt and wounded, throw me over her five-foot-four frame and not give up on me or leave me for dead just because I cannot walk on my own in this war. It's a given that I would do the same for her, but to know that she would do it for me--a nurse, a soldier, doing whatever needs to be done for the team. Team Us.

There is a mural I painted that hangs in our bedroom. I painted it when we were engaged, stretching the canvas myself on scrap 1x2s and using cheap little tubes of acrylic paint. It is based on a poem that the boxer Muhammad Ali composed and recited spontaneously, the shortest in history:

Me. We.

The "me" is small, in black print, while the "We" sweeps up, the tentacle of the "W" diving the "m" and the "e" in "me." The "me" is tenuous on its own and easily split apart, but the "We" is indivisible, even while one would think a "we" would be more easily divided in two because it is made up of two parts, while the "me," or self, is a single entity.

While the card from my wife moved me--that she would entrust her future to someone as fragile and ill-equipped for life as myself (Team Me)--in her I see the potential for something elementally stronger, like a water molecule, a fusion of hydrogen and oxygen. Team We. The chemical fissure, the atomic glue, the spiritual epoxy is the sacramental grace of our marriage that not even the pope can dissolve, for no man should tear asunder what God has joined together. I would rather be a single drop of water in an ocean with her than an entire atmosphere of either hydrogen or oxygen alone by itself. 

For God can keep an orchid alive with a drop of water a day, and not only keep it alive but resurrect it year after year, bringing it back from death again and again and into new, radiant life. There are sixteen stalks, sixteen tentacles on our stem, giving testament to our life together, and I pray for the grace of sixty more.