Some days the bear will eat you, some days you'll eat the bear

And some days you are the bear.

Today I was trying to make a left turn at a light without a left turn arrow. I had been sitting there through a couple of light cycles and on the third round, the cars on the other side of the intersection all decided to let me turn first. I was watching them so intently that I didn't notice pedestrians approaching the crosswalk. As I (slowly) turned in to the crosswalk. the pedestrians had reached my car. One young man started screaming at me, his face red, neck veins bulging. "We're in the crosswalk!!!!" He yelled over and over. I had already stopped. Through my open window I kept saying, "I'm sorry, I'm sorry" while he kept yelling and getting redder. Then, an even younger man - a teenager - with long red hair and Viking horns rolled on his skateboard past the red-faced man, smiled sweetly, gave me a thumbs up, and said "Have a nice day." I gave him a smile and thumbs up and drove on, thinking.

A perfect example of two people responding with different emotions to the same situation. At the moment, it seemed to illustrate, on a micro level, the world of strife. Each of them had a choice. One responded in anger and one with compassion. If only more people could be like the kid in the Viking horns on the skateboard. You know, like me.

I drove a few blocks. As I sat yards from the next crosswalk to let a pedestrian cross, I began to remember times my face turned red and my neck veins bulged as a car started through a crosswalk I was in. When thought I might be run over and fear turned to anger. Or, I was just feeling self-righteous about the inconsiderate jerk who didn't respect MY RIGHT OF WAY, even if I never really was in any danger.

So, my little epiphany isn't that the world is made up of either smiling, Viking-hatted skateboarders or bulging-veined screamers - but that people have the capacity to be either on any given day.

There are two kind of people in the world. Those that think there are two kinds of people in the world and those that don't.

In the garden today

The crosswalk epiphany - along with a weekend in the garden - inspired me to pick up writing this blog today. It was a surprise that my last post of a year and a half ago was about the song Georgy Girl and today I read the news that Lynn Redgrave, who starred in the movie, died yesterday. Rest in peace Georgy Girl.

I didn't do anything in the garden today. I did spend most of the weekend pulling weeds and turning soil while listening to past episodes of Wait Wait Don't Tell Me via the NPR app on my i-Phone. All the while, planning my plots. Crop rotation time. Corn will go where the tomatoes and peppers were. Peppers where the peas were. Already in are lettuce, snow peas, and sugar snaps.

There is a healthy volunteer sweet pea climbing the wall, spreading as many out tendrils and vines as three or four plans would normally do. All shooting up and expanding from one fragile little stem. It's in a spot notorious for the most spectacular volunteers.

Every year the garden prep gets a little easier. And every year there are surprises.

Time for jumping down from the shelf

For no good reason the song "Georgy Girl" started playing in my head. When I was around eight, the local AM station WRAW played it over and over. Plus, I would call several times a day to request it. The DJs finally told me to stop calling.

I vaguely remember the movie Georgy Girl, but I think it had an ugly duckling makeover type theme. I put it in my Netflix Q.

Whenever I hear songs from that time - the mid to late sixties - whether in my head or on the radio at the gym - I get a feeling like the feeling I had back then. Especially songs that played on the radio over the loud speaker at the pool. I call them pool songs and they evoke the summer smells, tastes, sounds, and feelings whenever I hear them today. Chlorine and Coppertone. Frozen Milky Ways and giant pretzel sticks that cost only two cents. The screams, laughter, and splashes that combined into one big pool sound. The fear of my fuzzy hair drying naturally in the sun and then the humiliation when it did.

You had to be member of the pool to get in. Or a guest. It was white only. I remember someone trying to bring a black kid in as a guest and the guy at the desk said, "We don't allow [n-word]s." The pool didn't seem as cool after that, even with songs like "Young Girl" and "Crimson and Clover."

In the garden today

Lots of dead stuff and long green grass. A bed of onions that surprised me. (I was sure the little Texas grano plants were too old and dry but I gave them a chance.) A few habaneros soldiering on through the cold. A beautiful bouquet of parsley. Little gifts among the decay.

Re-reading my post from one year ago, I realize that every year I think my garden is in the worst shape ever in December. But it really is in the exact same shape this time of year, every year. And every year I get it back into shape and it ends up better the than the year before.

I wish I had a river

I don't remember when I started not liking the "Holiday Season." As a kid I loved Christmas - the anticipation, the excitement, the decorations, the carols, the snow, the Christmas vacation, the Christmas tree, and the presents. Playing with the manger scene, mixing trolls and Barbies with Mary, Joseph and the Wise Men, all wanting to hold the baby Jesus. Tinsel. Ice skating. Secrets. Shopping. I think it most of all, was the magic. This was the time of year when everyday boredom and fear was suspended - it was a reprieve. At least that was my expectation. Perhaps, over the years, as this reprieve gradually eroded, as the suspended gunk oozed back down to earth, so did my Christmas spirit. When bad stuff could happen even on Christmas, that was that.

Now, I just want to skate away. I catch the edge of the joy, sometimes more, which then makes me feel worse. As the season comes to a close and the new year beckons, I'm oppressed by disappointment about not getting something I wasn't even aware I was hoping for.

I look at the garden. Oxalis gone wild. Crinkly tomato plants with withered fruit that didn't get a chance to ripen. Dead vines clinging to the garage wall. It looks how I feel. Weedy. A little out of control. Daunted. Yet a few plants are valiantly thriving in spite of the cold, dark, and drear. Some pea vines look incredibly healthy. And the cover crops in the corn patch are steadily inching up in neat rows. Logically, I know that a good mow and removal of dead stuff will work wonders. Yet how it seems at first glance resonates so well with my mood, it's hard to muster the hope that gardening is all about.

I know there is no summer without winter, no light without dark. I could learn from the plants who go through their dormant times with grace and acceptance.

Love the one you're with

At the meat counter at my local natural foods store I asked where the prawns and scallops came from. My sweetheart's 50th birthday is today and I wanted to bring home something special for dinner. The scallops flew in from the east coast - a little far for an everyday choice but I made an exception to my goal of eating locally just this once. But the prawns came from Vietnam! They did not come home with me.

The woman standing next to me said she was glad she wasn't the only pain in the butt when it comes to asking where the food came from. We chatted about how hard it is to be pure in living one's convictions. But that striving for purity is a good thing.

Last evening we went to a "Slow Food" dinner at an organic farm that was a benefit for the Open Space Alliance. This farm, High Ground Organics, is on one of the first organic agricultural easements in the country. It can only be used for organic agriculture - forever. The land abuts a conservation easement where, in cooperation with High Ground, habitat restoration is taking place. The land is being reclaimed for the endangered tar plant, other native plants, owls, egrets, hawks, and more.

All of the food served was locally produced, most of the vegetables from right there on the farm. The salmon was line caught in the Monterey Bay, the sacrificial lamb from a nearby farm.

In the garden today

A bee rolling in pollen deep inside a California poppy. Green tomato babies clustering on the vine. Brown pea vines crackling as I pick the last of the viable pods. Peppers taking their good old time to redden. Midsummer in the garden.

By the time I get the all the tomato supports built I will at least be ready for next year. It's slow going. I hope they last a few seasons. I saw the first appearance of blossom end rot yesterday. Gotta get that watering more consistent, think I'll get one of those stick in the ground gauges to tell me how much moisture is in the soil and how deep it goes.

I know what this country needs

I made my own tomato cage today out of 6 ft wooden stakes. Seems sturdy, the Brandywine it now supports seems happy. One down, 11 to go. I hope the rest go faster now that I have the basic design. I had never used an electric saw before. Now I have visions of all the garden structures I can make out of sawed and nailed wood.

Tomatoes, like many garden plants, need support. Sure, they'll grow and bear fruit without support, but they'll sprawl all over the ground, making them difficult to water and more likely to rot. They need the support early in life - doing it while they're more than a couple of feet tall leads to damage.

If I took the same approach to my young tomatoes as George Bush's approach to children's health insurance, I would have fewer and less healthy mature fruit. The president argues that making publicly funded health insurance to available to more low-income children (there are more than 8-9 million of them) and their families will make people drop their private insurance to get on the dole. Here's what he said a few days ago in Cleveland:

The immediate goal is to make sure there are more people on private insurance plans. I mean, people have access to health care in America. After all, you just go to an emergency room. ... [T]he reason I emphasize private insurance, the best health care plan -- the best health care policy is one that emphasizes private health. In other words, the opposite of that would be government control of health care.

And there's a debate in Washington, D.C. over this. It's going to be manifested here shortly by whether or not we ought to expand what's called S-CHIP. S-CHIP is a program designed to help poor children get insurance. I'm for it. But now there are plans to expand S-CHIP to include families ... In other words, the program is going beyond the initial intent of helping poor children. It's now aiming at encouraging more people to get on government health care. That's what that is. It's a way to encourage people to transfer from the private sector to government health care plans.

It's debatable to what extent this will happen since the idea behind expanding eligibility is to reach families without private health insurance. It could result in some folks leaving private insurers, but those will mainly be people who are having a hard time affording health insurance.

In the garden today

I started setting up drip irrigation for the tomatoes - they're getting all the love right now. It was too hot to do much else. The plants were droopy and so was I. It isn't usually this hot here in July - the sun feels particularly broiling. Or maybe it's just me and my changing body (i.e, hormones).

Rocky you met your match

If only it were true. There's one spot in my Fatali pepper patch that is a dead zone. I plant a Fatali, it dies. I replace it, it dies. Couldn't figure it out until one morning I found a warm, steaming pile of raccoon offering. Guess he was peeing there and pooing in the oak half barrel. I took away his number one number two spot when I emptied and turned over the rotting half barrel. In retaliation, he began making larger deposits in the Fatali patch.

For the last two years, raccoons have been eating my Mammoth sunflower heads. I tried raccoon repellant which only turned the sunflower leaves black and made them more irrestible than ever to the bandits. This year I planted Teddy Bears which don't seem to appeal to ol' Rocky and friends.

Twas a gopher who chewed my morning glory's roots, causing it to all but die. There are a few living tendrils I have coaxed up the trellis. I will tend them in hopes the morning glory will get better as soon as it is able. The gophers have never eaten the morning glory roots before this year when I planted all the peppers and tomatoes in gopher baskets. Again, I suspect retaliation.

In the garden today

More like, in the garden center today. I only bought stakes to make tomato supports and a gopher basket to replant the morning glory into. But I admired many plants, especially Annie's Annuals. While it's great to browse the aisles of four-inch pots of unusual sunflowers, lupines, and poppies, perusing the web site is also rewarding. You can browse by plant type or color and search by sixteen types of plants, color, water and sun requirements, and annual or perennial. So, if I want more purple perennial flowers, I can get a pageful. Lots of pictures to moon over.

Now I better get started making those tomato supports. And setting up the drip irrigation.

Plant your love and let it grow

When a plant is ailing, it usually involves the roots. Blossom end rot on tomatoes and peppers comes from insufficient uptake of calcium. Even if there's plenty of calcium in the soil, the roots can still have trouble getting it to the rest of the plant if you've over watered or watering has been too sporadic. Foliar applications of calcium just don't work. The different kinds of wilt come from a soil-born disease that is transmitted by the roots. All you can do is not compost the plants and not plant the same thing in that place again - and plant wilt resistant varieties next time. I'm now trying to determine why my 5-year old morning glory suddenly died after gloriously returning each spring. It did so this year and then passed on. I suspect a gopher. There's so much going on beneath the surface that affects the garden's health. Most problems require you address the root cause.

My good friend Bill is big on working for fundamental change - the only kind that will prevent annihilation and, in his words, "create a civilization in which all people have the opportunity to live happy, fulfilled, empowered, and actualized lives." Count me in. We need to change where we're heading or we're likely to end up there. His blog is Mutual Empowerment for Fundamental Change. Making this kind of change is a tall order, but it's within our reach, Bill says, if we use what we now know about behavior change.

Bill also told me about a network of researchers, thinkers, and doers who want to eliminate humiliating practices in the world. I've often thought humiliation to be a form of violence. If you experience humiliation in your formative years, it's hard to grow into a healthy and whole human being. Not impossible, but harder than if you experienced an abundance of love, nurturing, kindness, and encouragement. This group says, "Our work is inspired by universal values such as humility, mutual respect, caring and compassion, and a sense of shared planetary rights and responsibilities." Their site is called "Human Dignity and Humiliation Studies."

In the garden today

There's an organization in my town, the Grey Bears, that delivers bags of fresh produce each week to seniors. My neighbor -- the one who know the history of my inherited plants - gets more green onions than she can use from the Bears. She tried planting them to grow mature onions and it seems to be working. When she got more than she could plant, she gave me a few bunches. I planted them today - I'll let you know how it goes.

I also planted even more peppers and then put some out front as give aways. Two out of seven went to new homes. There are still Fresno and Jalapeno seedlings in pots that I have to squeeze in somewhere. Harvested more snow peas and a magnificent head of lettuce. I am aching to plant carrots, but I need to gopher proof first.