EVERYTHING WANTS TO LIVE
(Photo credit: Sue Robin)
It took my father a very long time to die. He started shortly before my eighteenth birthday and didn’t finish until I was nearly thirty-five. He did it slowly, incrementally, almost invisibly at times, punctuated by occasional rushes downhill. My life moved along its parallel track, through school and work and romance, but he kept me anchored to New York and I kept thinking it must be over soon. When it finally was, I changed coasts. I left my mother in New York, with her third husband, to fend for herself for a while and took a long sublet on a house that came with two big dogs.
It was another old man I saw all that first summer in California. I would have avoided him if I could, would have gone around the block, taken Amsterdam instead of Broadway, or walked up 72nd instead of 73rd. But there were no blocks in the canyon in the Santa Monica Mountains above Los Angeles, just dirt roads that led further up into the hills. No choice about which route to take. In an odd way, I found this comforting. At least there was no pretense about having options.
So every afternoon the dogs and I passed his house, and in spite of the stifling heat, he was almost always working outside.
The heat is different here than in New York, I wrote Mother. Now I see what you mean about it’s not the heat, it’s the humidity. My lips are getting dry, and my skin, but at least it’s not dirty and humid like at home.
Moisturizer, Mother wrote back. Have you got a good moisturizer?
Sometimes, though, the air grew East Coast hot and heavy, and on those days the old man moved more slowly.
He wore the kind of skinny-strapped T-shirt that made me think of Marlon Brando bellowing Stellllaaahh at the top of his lungs. And it made me think of my father, and countless other old men, all looking like they were left over from old movies or photographs.
The old man could have been seventy; he might have been eighty. He had probably looked very much the same at sixty, and I could even imagine him in the same t-shirt as a young man of twenty: dark hair slicked back, skinny arms young and brave and black with the grease from under the hood of an old Buick on which he leaned.
Now his thin arms and shoulders looked fragile in the sun as he stooped over the slope that would have been a lawn had he lived somewhere where grass grew. Somewhere, to my way of thinking, normal.
Things grew out here that I’d never seen before. The first time I spoke to the old man, it was to ask him the name of the viny plants with small green leaves that covered the bank in front of his house.
“Ice plants they call ‘em. This stuff’ll help protect the house if there’s a fire. Trouble is”—he waved a fistful of long stalks that looked kind of like wheat, only more aggressive— “these here foxtails get in an’ start to take up all the room. The wife’s afraid they’ll take over the whole yard.”
“So you have to pull them out every year?”
He stood up straight for a moment and looked around him. “Well,” he said slowly, “to tell ya the truth, this is the first year there seem to be so many. Don’t rightly know why. But they’re really drivin’ the wife crazy. Gets all riled up if’n I don’ pull ‘em out as soon as they come in.” He turned and pointed up the hill to where thick-stalked plants grew beside the low stone fence that encircled his house. “See them succulents up there?” I nodded. “Now she can’t stop talkin’ about how them succulents are gonna take over an’ kill the trees.”
Sometimes, when it wasn’t too hot, the old man’s wife hauled her heavy frame out of the small white house and rested it on the stone bench tucked at the top of the slope. When she was there on her perch, I felt uncomfortable and out of place, as if I, too, was a weed messing up the old lady’s view.
But on the days we were alone, the old man seemed pleased to stop and greet me or, more accurately, the dogs. Rubbing their heads, he would speak as if to them.
“The wife really hates them succulents,” he would mutter as a way of greeting. Never being sure of the appropriate response to this, I would smile and nod sympathetically, while the dogs wagged their tails.
“Got some I pulled out yesterday.” He paused to wipe his brow, then slid his eyes in my direction before turning back to the dogs. “Don’ know what to do with ‘em. Hate jes’ throwin’ ‘em away.”
That afternoon, I hauled home a grocery bag full of the old man’s uprooted plants. And the next day, another. The day after, I didn’t see the old man, but there was a bag filled with jade hanging on the branch of the tree opposite his house.
I put the bags in the basement. I had always liked to think of myself as someone who would have grown flowers and vegetables if only I lived somewhere which made such things possible (this notwithstanding the countless kitchen and window gardens I saw proliferating in Manhattan apartments). I had bought a rake and a trowel shortly after my move but done nothing with them. I had also gotten some books about planting and mulching, books I occasionally opened, then quickly closed in despair. They made the whole process seem hopelessly complicated and a major life commitment. I had enough of those.
But native succulents? Surely even I could grow these plants that seemed to spring to life everywhere in Southern California—everywhere, that is, except in the barren clay which passed for earth next to my house.
I chose a patch of ground right out front, an area whose neglect was particularly visible from the dirt road in front of the house. All that grew there were stalky little weeds and long stringy ones. I pulled them out by their roots. I raked the ground. Then I dug some holes with the trowel and brought the succulents from their hiding place in the basement. One by one, I took the fleshy plants from the grocery bags and laid them on the ground. They looked like miniature trees with their thick sturdy trunks and green and brown crowns. Some had roots; many were dried up at the end where they had been broken off. I planted them all.
I put the largest ones in the center, then a widening circle of smaller and smaller ones around them. I created a little forest from these plants which I had never seen till I moved West, an idiosyncratic garden that bore no resemblance to the soft grassy Edens of my hopes and dreams.
The next day, I cleared a new space and planted the jade. Then the aloes, which had come with the house and long ago outgrown their pots. I shook them out of the confines of their clay enclosures and placed them in rows alongside the front steps.
I couldn’t wait to tell the old man, my ally in this secret rescue mission. I wanted him to know that the survivors were doing fine. They had made it through the refugee camps and Ellis Island, and were settled in their new homes.
But nearly a week passed before I saw him again, and when I told him of what I thought of as our garden he barely heard me.
“The wife’s poorly,” he said. “Been takin’ her to all these tests. Doctor don’ know what’s goin’ on.” He looked up at the house. “But she still wants me to work on these weeds. Nothin’ else seems to innerest her ‘cept gettin’ the yard cleared out.”
The plant demolition and rescue work went on into September and October, the months that would be fall in another climate. He wouldn’t do anything to upset his wife but it clearly saddened him to have to pull all these lives up by their roots and it seemed to ease his sorrow to have me carry them off. I wanted to tell him how sorry I was, but felt awkward and clumsy whenever I tried to say anything. He appeared satisfied with my silence. He didn’t need me to fix him, or sympathize with him, or talk to him. He needed me to take away his plants.
As the old lady got sicker, the scope of her passion for land clearing grew. Soon she was afraid that the flowering bulbs would attack her trees and demanded that they, too, be pulled from the ground.
I felt overwhelmed by the added responsibility. These were flowers, not some ubiquitous native plant. I looked up “bulbs” in my gardening books and discovered that planting in the fall, in soil four to six inches deep, was perfect for irises and daffodils but would be lethal for calla lilies. And that, while crocuses should be planted two to four inches apart, hyacinths needed at least six.
I had no idea what these bulbs were, so they remained in their bags while I continued to carry away all that the old man left for me. I often thought of them guiltily, tucked into their plastic grocery bags, hidden in a dark corner of my basement.
I saw less and less of my accomplice. Once, in the late afternoon, he passed me and the dogs in his old truck and stopped for a moment.
“She’s in the hospital. Gotta get over there for visitin’ hours. She won’t eat nothin’ if I’m not around.” Then, a few days later: “Brought her home yesterday. Gotta get my toaster oven fixed. Don’ know nothin’ about cookin’, but she won’ eat much anyway.”
I wished I were the kind of Old West neighbor woman who cooked up big batches of food and brought over casseroles and soups to cheer the aged couple’s barren evenings. Nourishing warm meals, food to let them know they were not alone.
But all I could do was take the plants I’d find by the tree. And, after awhile, even that stopped. He seemed to hardly leave the house. Sometimes I would look up to see him wandering aimlessly around his garden. Then I didn’t see him at all. Weeks went by. I would walk past the house searching for a sign of life and occasionally felt reassured by the single light that burned in the entryway. I took to surreptitiously checking their mailbox, grateful each time that their mail wasn’t piling up, which I was sure would be a sign that they were both lying dead inside.
I finally saw him again. Winter was barely over, and the air was chilly, but he was back in his place, bent over the sloping green, still wearing his t-shirt. It was as though he continued the action long after the stimulus for it had ceased. He just hadn’t found anything else to take its place.
“She’s gone,” he said. “Been nearly three weeks now.” He rubbed his eyes and looked at the dogs. “Not feelin’ so good myself, if you know what I mean.”
That day I went home and planted the bulbs.
§
Taking the bags from their dark corner, I brought them out into the thin afternoon sunlight. I had expected to find them shriveled and dry, and was amazed to discover that almost all were alive, were even sprouting shoots in the dark earthless confines of the plastic bags. I quickly read the instructions in Easy Tips for Gardeners and Gardening Made Easy, and tossed the books aside.
I knelt carefully in the circle of succulents and dug a dozen large shallow holes in their midst. Into each of these holes, I threw six or eight bulbs, turned them so that the sprouting end faced up, and covered them with a combination of native clay and the rich store-bought earth that I had lugged home in thirty-pound bags. I soaked the ground with water from the new hose I had gotten at the same time as the dirt.
When I finished, I sat on what in the East would be called the stoop and looked at my garden. A memory came back to me, returning me to Manhattan’s streets. I saw myself and my father, side by side, on a different spring afternoon. He was leaning on a walker, his strength stolen from him by age and strokes. Every day, weather permitting, either I or my stepmother took him for a walk around the block. This man, my bold and dashing father, was ending his life circling one small city block.
And that walk around that one block seemed interminable to me. Would he fall? How often would he stop to rest? Would he be able to hear me over the sounds of traffic? Would some teenager on his bike come tearing along and knock him over? Would I run into someone I knew? Would this never end? And why, oh why, did he continue to persist with this daily outing?
As we shuffled slowly around the last corner (Thank you God, I prayed silently. It’s almost over), he stopped.
“Look at that.” He could still command attention. Pointing at a skinny tree which emerged from beneath a sidewalk grating, he leaned heavily on his walker.
The tree had barely room to grow. It was molding itself to fit the grating, its trunk growing around the bars, oddly twisted from its efforts to find clear space to expand into. Next to it, a couple of scrawny plants had pushed open some cracks in the sidewalk to make room for themselves. One of the plants was blossoming with tiny blue flowers.
“Look,” he repeated, his old face alight with wonder and joy. “Everything wants to live.”
§
I continued to worry about my friend. He seemed so lost and sad. Would he eat enough? Who would he talk to? His social skills seemed so meager, how would he ever manage without that bossy wife of his? Was there anyone else he ever spoke to?
For a few weeks, I saw him often. Some days, he appeared relieved that the long struggle was over. Others, he just looked lost. Then I saw him less and less. Where was he? I envisioned him alone inside that small dark house, eating TV dinners from his electric oven, too depressed to even work in his garden.
Then, one afternoon as the dogs and I approached his house, a strange car drove up. An old white Mercedes, seats a bit worn but the car clean and polished. My friend, dazzling in a bright yellow and black checked jacket, climbed out with a sheepish grin.
“Did you get a new car?” I asked. “It’s beautiful.”
“Nah,” he said, as if it was no big deal, though he did seem to be pleased by my reaction. “Jes’ haven’t used it fer awhile.” He greeted the dogs and gave them his news. “Thinkin’ about gettin’ married again.”
I wasn’t sure I heard him right. What exactly was he saying?
“You mean—you’d like to find someone to marry? Or—you’re marrying someone?”
“Marryin’ someone. July 1st. Gettin’ married on July 1st.”
I maintained my composure enough to ask a few polite questions.
“Nope,” he replied in response to one of them. “We’ll be movin’. She says this house is too small. Makes her feel claustrophobic. And she’d like a garden with flowers.”
The bulbs never did come up that year. But the next spring, many months after the old man had moved away with his new bride, I discovered, on his now weed-covered slope, a lone miniature tree with a thick sturdy trunk and a blossoming green and brown crown, just like the ones in my front yard that nestled between the purple and white blooms of irises and lilies.
