They've Got It Easy

They've Got It Easy

            Fiction writers have it so easy!

            They can grab readers, squeeze them, shake them, hold them upside-down over a lava pit, and the emotional content of their writing will make a connection that keeps the pages turning.

Some favorite fiction

            Non-fiction writers generally don't have such tools. Imagine you were writing a manual covering the operations on a spreadsheet. Heart-stopping, right? Or suggesting that a gardener consider a group of plants that might be small, but look good on a border. You could say, “And they really look good along the border!” Kinda grabs you right here, doesn't it?

            Fiction writers can put the buzz in our emotions. Love (of any type), fear (the monster's chasing me!), hunger (those pancakes …), devotion (my life is dedicated to ...), hope (things will get better), angst (oh, what will become of me?), pain (that really hurt!), loss (my life has no meaning now …), and a few others that they are happy to use to manipulate our attention span.

            As a non-fiction writer I'm frustrated (an emotion!) by the smaller number of arrows in my quiver.

            This futility has to stop. Starting now, my essays will display a full range of emotions and connect with the readers on a deeper level, or at least jack up their hormone levels. Wait, that last is too technical and unemotional. Note to editor: scratch that last line.

            To put the new me on display, I offer the following non-fiction essay about my garden, annotated for ease of study:

           

            Approaching the tall row of azaleas in full flower, the sun over my right shoulder catches them in a montage of blaze and shadow. It warms them from the cool morning into the sparkling day, as I am warmed by their beauty. (That's LOVE being demonstrated now, for those of you whose attention has wandered.)

            As I look up to follow the flight of a chickadee, I'm shocked to see a large, dead branch hovering over hosta, scheming to mash the mortals below. (That's FEAR. Are you taking notes?) Maybe it won't ever fall. (FALSE HOPE)

            I should go in and call a tree surgeon, but stomach-rumblings remind me that breakfast is waiting, so first things first. (And now, HUNGER.) Trapped between the strong chords that pull me toward the phone to save the hosta I've slaved over for so many of my days (DEVOTION) and the equally strong desire to have some pancakes with butter and syrup (Yeah, that's HUNGER again) I'm frozen between incisive action and indigestion. Oh, what will become of my poor plants? (ANGST)

            Clearly, both paths require turning back toward the house, but as I stride purposefully onward to do one of those two things, the ground rises to meet me and smacks me in the face! (PAIN) I've tripped over my hose! No, not my socks, the other kind. Who put that there? (QUERULOUS) Yeah, I did. (SHAME) I'm going to feel really embarrassed (EMBARRESSMENT) when people see how I'll have to go through life with all of those scars on my nose. (LOSS) Who knows? But I'll face up to it! (RESOLUTE). So I pick myself up, dust myself off, and start all over again! (REMINISCENCE from an old Sinatra song.)

            After such a taxing, but fractionally enjoyable, morning I'm euphoric (EUPHORIA) and head back inside, trying to remember what I was going to do there. (QUERULOUS again; or, maybe advancing age.) Ah, yes, breakfast. But …

            “I burnt my pancakes!” (DISBELIEF, LOSS, ANGST, HUNGER and especially, SOUL CRUSHING HORROR!”)

            And then, adding insult to my previous injuries, I remember the original purpose of my morning's journey:

            Marching over to the 'Red Ruffles' azalea, I choose a flower, wipe off some pollen from its anther, then rub that pollen on the pistil to make seeds for planting next year. (You've been waiting so long for: SEX!)

Best

Best

      Many years ago, when my collection of plants was small, I tried to get the best azaleas. I knew that large, red flowers, completely covering a bush, would be the best. I've chronicled elsewhere my search for such. I thought I knew what was best. Maybe I shouldn't have been so dogmatic. The concept of “best” isn't simple.

The BEST landscape view, in my opinion. Tunnel View, Yosemite, May 2009

 For example:

      We're obsessed with celebrating the best. Who, or what, is the best of maybe thousands. Second best is largely forgotten. Consider the non-gardening examples in the odd collection below:

           a) Pro Football fans will remember many Super Bowl winners, but struggle when recalling the loser, a team ranking second that year of 32.

           b) How would you compare baseball players Mickey Mantle and Ken Griffey, Jr.? Mantle had several seasons better than any one of Griffey's, but personal failings limited his number of years. Griffey performed at a high level for many years. Performance is measured by “Wins Above Replacement” (WAR). From 1952 to 1962 Mantle was the best or one of the best. Eleven years. This was followed by a rapid decline. Ken Griffey, Jr. was a star from about 1990 to 2007, 27 years, never reaching as high as Mantle, but close. 

 

           c) Bobby Fischer was the best chess player of his time, not only based on rating, but also a World Championship. The man he beat for that title, Boris Spassky, never attained the height of Fischer's rating, but was still a World Champion and a feared Grandmaster for many more years than Fischer's brief dominance.

            Who's the best writer? Do you think that Leo Tolstoy or George Orwell had #1 best sellers?

             The best singer? In both categories, we can list people who have been one-hit-wonders but had no staying power. Are they better than artists who have never attained the top standing, despite being “one-of-the-best” for decades? Bruce Springsteen and “Martha and the Vandellas” reached “only” #2 on Billboard.

            There are no metrics for comparing the best artists, philosophers, politicians, or eccentrics (sorry, didn't mean to repeat myself). Every period of history has examples of those unrankable categories, even with a NY Times bestseller list available, or a Christie's Auction measuring value in dollars.

            A transitive relation says: if A is greater than B, and B is greater than C, then A is greater than C. Unfortunately, real life has many non-transitive relationships. Suppose Oklahoma beats Texas in football. Then Texas beats Ohio State. Logically, Oklahoma is better than Ohio State. When Ohio State beats Oklahoma, we see that sports, and much of life, is non-transitive. It happens all the time.

      Another example: voting. With candidate A getting 40% of the vote, B getting 35%, and C winning 25%, voters have chosen A as the winner. But if voters only chose between A and C, then C would win. How is that possible? Well, one way would be that voters for B, no longer able to vote for her, choose to back C, who would get 60% of the vote. Voters for C really don't like A. It happens all the time.

     The mathematical concept of an ordered lattice contains items which can be ranked, but not necessarily compared, as they're on different branches.

      Finally back to gardening and azaleas!

      Some plants massively cover themselves with flowers, and are a focal point. Approaching, you realize that each individual flower is not special in any way.

      On the flip side, there are some plants with intricate, multi-colored flowers that bear slow appreciation. But (you knew there was a “but” coming) the plant's branches are scraggly and uninteresting.

      Which of the two categories of plants is the “best?”

      In my garden, if a new bed could host hosta, ferns, and heucheras, everything would be fine. If only one type could appear, then varieties of hosta, which are larger, would be my choice. But if I could only have one plant there, heucheras would get my vote. Though small, they are much more colorful and intricate. Which do I think is best?

      Perhaps the concepts of “best,”, “We're Number One!” and “Champion” need to be retired, living out their lives on the porch, watching the world happily go by without them.

Early to Rise

Early to Rise

      I prefer flowers that bloom in early spring. Not for any emotional reasons, but for reason reasons. The convoluted explanation follows:

      You don't have to talk me out of winter. I'm way ahead of you. It wasn't in my plans to shiver in the cold, but life turned that way. Strangely, some people, somewhere, enjoy it.

      I spent some time in Wisconsin, wearing everything I owned, all at once. Before visiting that state, my guess was that everyone must be saving for a move. Strangely, they loved winter. Ice skating, hockey, skiing, snowshoeing, snowmobiling, snowball fights, igloos. OK, nobody suggested igloos, but I may not have interviewed enough people. Of course, this is the result of self-selection, as those with “thinner blood” had migrated south.

      I'm sure that everyone in Seattle loves coffee, to get through the dark, drizzly days, and beer to get through the dark, drizzly nights. A guess? No, I said I was sure. Sun lovers escaped to California (a true fact, as told to me by a Californian visiting Oregon at the same time I was. Too plausible to doubt.)

      My wife and I met in New England, but the cold, dark winters drove us south to the Mid-Atlantic states. A good idea, but we missed by a few hundred miles, as the winters here are still too long, too cold (and too dark) for us. Too late, now.

Some of my earliest azaleas

      The above explains why I've developed a preference for early blooming plants. After suffering through the grays, browns and whites of winter, any other color is in demand. Winter Jasmine's tiny yellow flowers would be ignored at greener times than late winter. Crocus' are an early treat, with yellows and purples. They overlap with the latest snows and the earliest azaleas. Hellebores, whose flowers are barely there, are still appreciated.

      Once again, any color will do, but there are more whites, pinks and orangy-reds among the early azaleas than are found later in the year. Not my favorite colors, but at that time of year I'll take them. Daffodils fill the bill as bright additions. Blue-and-white Speedwell covers the ground. Iris' add complex purple flowers to the mix.

      Early flowers have other good attributes: they grow in cool conditions, so they last longer. The ground is well saturated from the winter snow melt, so they don't dry out quickly. Fungus, such as petal blight, comes in mid-May, so early azalea flowers don't suffer from that malady.

      As the season progresses, the weather warms and dries, providing fewer blooms. Early summer daylilies will demand favoritism. Late summer milkweed will claim butterflies to grab attention, but in autumn I'm already looking forward to the end of the next winter, and those colors impossibly popping from the cold, wet earth.

Flow

Flow

I've returned from a weekend trip to the Philly area and now I'm thinking about “flow”. There was a river behind my hotel which I would have liked to explore for birds, but time flowed too fast to allow such a river-flow digression.

However, a digression: I'm a member of a book-study group that lives on digressions and I recently mentioned the books on flow written by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (last name pronounced, I kid you not, “Chick sent me high” - if I made that up no one would believe me). I'm not going to talk about that type of “flow” which involves focusing attention, though the concept is worthwhile. But, I digress …

Just as water is made of H₂O molecules, which flow around each other, so traffic is made of vehicles which flow around each other. Except when I drive to Philadelphia. Word travels ahead of me and incantations are invoked to stem that flow, so I spend large amounts of time studying the interior of my car and unsuccessfully trying to peer around that stupid SUV in front. Traffic flow gets my attention for its absence.

Once I reach the convention, narrow hallways between the rooms constrict the human flow. Your first thought would be that you could meet a lot of interesting people in that closeup environment, but the truth is that everyone is late and pushing through. So we remain strangers.

The in-hotel restaurant handles flow well, except for those breakfast and dinner times when we all demand to be served. Then I look around and make poor jokes about getting out of line and simply having a candy bar for dinner, getting weak laughs from people within earshot. After ten minutes, however, I get out of line, buy a candy bar and continue on to a panel discussion that started ten minutes earlier.

Oh, “what about gardening?” you say. Well, I'm getting there, with a confession. After reincarnation, I plan on coming back as a ditch digger. You see, I really dig digging in the ditches which border my property. My neighbors don't really keep up with them and they fill with debris (the ditches, not the neighbors.) Flooding rains force me to dig, releasing enough water so that the azaleas and hosta aren't killed. Nature wants to put water lilies in those spots. Over the years, some beds have sunk and, by not raising them, I've allowed plants to die. This winter the Satsuki bed will have to be raised about four inches or so.

Wapama Falls, Hetch Hetchy Reservoir, Yosemite, CA May 20, 2008 I did NOT dig the dirt releasing that water.

I get a surprisingly strong satisfaction from sinking my shovel into the final load of muck, releasing stagnant water, forming a healthy stream. I really like that. Did I say that before? I don't remember.

I came back from my trip today in early afternoon. By late afternoon I was digging in the southeast ditch. After talking with my neighbor, I had the ditch on his side of the fence to myself as he did wheelies on his riding mower, denuding the lawn of leaves. Luckily he agreed to throw the leaves over the fence onto my leaf pile. In five years it will be compost for top dressing the azaleas. But I hardly noticed. After two hours of lifting muck, roots and leaves, and watching the water move slowly toward the drain by the road, it began to get dark and was time to quit. How could two hours pass so quickly? Completely the opposite of the traffic jam, I was so focused that time didn't exist. I simply enjoyed the experience. Just as Csikszentmihalyi said. But, I just said that I wasn't going to talk about his book …