Flora

I’ve always imagined myself as something of a gardener. I could see myself outside a Bavarian cottage, geraniums hanging from the windows, working on informal but well-planned landscaping. The problem is that anyone that knows me has been quite clear that I am not, despite my wildest dreams, a person who should be intimately involved with plants. The plants unfortunately usually agree. And yet I continue to persevere in my creative horticultural pursuits. Perhaps that should be “crazy” horticultural pursuits.

One of the things that attracted my mother to the house on Oakwood Avenue way back in 1970 was that the landscaping was just that – informal but well-planned. Sometime in the fifties the previous owners of this particular home laid out the garden attempting some kind of formal Japanese design with bricks. There were flowering magnolia trees, euonymus ivy, a small fountain maid of cast iron with the figure of a young girl and a frog spitting water at her. Brick walls separated the various parts of the yard helping to create level space suitable for playing croquet. Two lovely bridges spanned a burbling creek. There were two large gingko trees out front, along with several yews which served as foundation plants. Holly trees adorned the corners of the house, along with a couple of spruce. A majestic oak towered over it all along the street in the front, casting its shadow down upon the brick-lined flower beds filled with iris, peonies, and other perennials.

Sadly, the man that my parents bought the house from had been widowed for several years. While the house is not huge, especially by neighborhood standards, it was far too much for a retired gentleman to maintain. Year after year, the trees grew a little more, without any pruning. The yew bushes became bigger and bigger. The euonymus gradually extended its roots through the ground, taking over more of the formerly manicured lawns.

After five years or so of neglect leading up to the time my parents purchased this memory of paradise, things were kind of a mess. Although my parents entered into a contract on the house in August, we didn’t move in until October 27. The plants of summer were at best dwindling, the leaves thick with color falling on the ground. It was not without its own charm.

The first thing we noticed was the smell. There was this rather strong odor coming from the front yard, not unlike a dysfunctional septic tank or a dog with a digestive problem. The smell was strong. Someone ventured to go outside to investigate, and discovered that in fact, the gingkos were somewhat unusual. They were both of the female variety of that species. And all one had to do at that time of year was look a couple of hundred feet to the northeast to see another bright, golden tree, also a gingko, this one a male.

Now this bigamous male gingko across the street in the Muckerman’s yard had evidently impregnated both of the females in ours – with some abundance. They bore forth fruit. Lots and lots of fruit. Tons o’ fruit. Wheelbarrows of little purplish squishy seeds that when properly stepped upon made one instinctively reach for the Charmin. Thousands of these grape-sized stink bombs filled the front yard. Friends of mine would make their parents roll up the windows on their cars when they drove by, so they said. Why their windows were down in November is still a mystery. People would come to visit us in our new home, and they would be seen running down the street, hands over their faces, gagging.

I don’t know what year my parents finally had these trees taken down. It wasn’t soon enough. I spent too many falls shoveling – not raking, but shoveling these smelly things into a wheelbarrow and hauling them into a pile in the backyard because they were too heavy to leave for the leaf-sucking vacuum machines that would go by each week during the fall months. And of course, in the pile that I created each year, new ginkgos were born.

Meanwhile, my mother was busy with her graph paper. Remember graph paper? We used it to draw things on. My mom was using it to plan her yard. She plotted out the house and the property lines. She took the existing beds with their bricks lining them at forty-five degree angles and drew in what she wanted to plant and when. I would use the mower to try and trim the beds as best I could.

But each fall would come and go and bulbs bought would be left unplanted. Spring would arrive and small patches of dirt would be turned over with a small hand tool. Occasionally something would actually be planted. It might just have been hanging baskets bought at the store. Or perhaps some herbs. Impatiens usually adorned the flower box around the back porch. But the yard continued to get more and more out of control. Mom couldn’t really handle any of the heavy stuff. Dad was essentially working two full-time jobs and getting his Ph.D. I would mow the grass and keep the ivy at bay, but even then it was obviously a losing battle. Each year it would seem to take over a bit more.

I graduated from high school in 1978 and left to go off to school in Houston. I didn’t ever really do much about the yard after that. Neither did they. Trees grew where trees shouldn’t have been. Bushes became, well, bushier. Honeysuckles got way out of control. And always, always there was the ivy. Let us all just pause and give thanks that the gingkos were gone.

So the slightly out-of-control yard in 1970 became even more so by 1980. And the years went by. And by. And by. Bridges rotted and fell down. Chain-link fences lost their linkability. The neighbors homes gradually disappeared from view. It became more and more difficult to leave the driveway and pull into the street safely. The yard was no longer landscaped, unless someone considers Jurassic Park to be ready for the Garden Tour.

So it becomes 2009 and I’ve moved back to St. Louis. I’m not living at home yet, but I am there often enough that I see the condition of the property (hard to call it a yard or a garden) and I know something has to be done. What to do first, I ask myself. The ivy, I answer. So onto the John Deere and off we go, trimming back all that damn euonymus. A few inches on each pass. A little here, a little there. Gradually, what had turned into ground cover that extended close to twenty feet out from the house was trimmed back to a mere three feet. Of course, then there were the roots, and all that gunky dirt. Turns out that was very fertile ground for grass seed. So I continued to throw fescue as I tried to rescue that corner of the yard. Feel free to laugh at my rhyme.

It actually worked pretty damn well. A year later it is a nice lawn, thick and green. A little bumpy. Croquet would not be a good idea. But from the street it looks pretty good.

Now this is a bad thing, because it gives me confidence to keep trying to work at it. So my frustrated green thumb is trying to come out.

Back in Connecticut, we had a Wally. Everyone should have a Wally. We own a two-family house. Wally is our tenant. He loves working in the garden. I think secretly he loves paying people to work in the garden even more. But in any case, it was clear that Wally is definitely in the “Doug doesn’t know how to do squat when it comes to plants” club. He would water the plants on our deck. More than that, he transformed our grand Connecticut acreage. This magnificent New England estate had property that would have been the envy of any of the founding fathers, measuring in with a lot size of 50’ x 150’, upon which sat a house and parking for four cars. And what was left, Wally transformed. Not by himself I should say. Michael, the hot hunky landscape architect had come by years before and given us something of a master plan. And we initially followed that plan to the letter, or perhaps I should say to the plant. But Wally would claim all the credit for himself. Our work before he arrived would be “lackluster.”

So when spring came, and I’m living once again on Oakwood, I had this overwhelming fantasy about Michael. Not because he is hot and hunky. Well, not just because of that. But because he is so damn smart and talented when it comes to landscaping. I want to fly him and his posse out here from Connecticut to Missouri to give me the equivalent of a makeover. But I can’t afford that. I could afford this guy Tom, who arrived with his dad and his brother and one other guy. They spent three days doing a slash and burn, destroying much of the potential to restore the harmful greenhouse gasses to their previous levels in the process. Honeysuckle, be gone! they said. Trees growing through power lines be forever banished! they decreed. Yew bushes that are the size of eighteen-wheelers, we’ve got your number. Out you must go.

But the ivy, well. “You can’t do nothin’ ‘bout this damn ivy.”

Wait. Wait and see. John Deere, Kentucky Fescue, and me.

Discipline (or not)

I’ve never been very good at discipline. Whether it be studying, writing papers, praying, paying attention to daily chores – I’ve always seem to have been an adherent to a more procrastinating style of life. So that is why my commitment to this blog is important to me – not necessarily to you, but to me. I need to have something to help me focus and reflect on a regular, perhaps even daily basis.

I was thinking of writing a book. Not like Jonathan Franzen writes books. But more like David Sedaris or Martin Proost. A forum in which I can put my ramblings down onto some paper and pretend like people would care enough to read what wisdom I have to share. Of course, that is primarily delusional on my part. I mean, after all, it is rather pretentious to think that anyone would be interested in hearing about my life. Sorry David and Martin, but that’s how I feel. As much as I’ve enjoyed reading about your lives, in reality it has only been to escape the boredom of my own.

Now perhaps that’s unfair. Maybe I’m not soooo boring that people would run the minute I come into their visual field. But fact is, my life is my life, and like all of us I suspect, it seems rather tame. We can always find someone who has more drama than we do.

But today had its moments. I’m 49 years old. I’ve left a successful career(s), and am embarking off on new adventures. I don’t know exactly what I want to do when I grow up. But today I had some encounters which seem to begin to offer some guidance. I know this sounds crazy, but I’m seriously thinking about getting into the alternative/sustainable energy field. I’m in conversation with a company about becoming their Midwestern distributor for their products. I met with a great guy about the potentiality of turning this home into a model for taking old houses and retrofitting them to be more “green.” I’ve been doing some research into other potential markets, and I also got my new recycled soaker hose hooked up to my new rain barrel and it actually is watering new shrubs. It’s the little things that count. That’s what I was missing in my previous life. Most things in the mental health field, as well as the clergy field, tends to be about process not results. I’m tired of process, although I appreciate what it has taught me. No, I’m ready to make something happen. Now.

Hence this blog. I can write something, post something, and know that at least four people will get some kind of notification that I have done so. To the four that have lowered themselves to be “followers” of my blog, I can only say Thank You. That was a real boost.

So enough for tonight. I’m going to also post another essay I wrote last year about being back in St. Louis. Let me know if you enjoy.

Faithfully yours,

Doug

You can go home again.

HOME?

Thomas Wolfe said “You can’t go home again.” And a lot of people have quoted him through the years.

And, frankly, I have always believed them. I left home when I was seventeen and I barely looked back. College, graduate school, work, a career, obligations, responsibilities – these all helped me to redefine myself not as a Midwesterner, but as a cosmopolitan guy who worked in New York City and had a home in Connecticut. Sounds wonderful doesn’t it? Kind of like a 1940s movie with backdrops of very tall buildings and then Father Comes Home to rock walls and beautiful old farm houses. Frank Sinatra, singing “If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere….” Well, that’s exactly how it was. Okay. Not really. I did work in midtown, but my window opened up onto a sidewalk. And our home in Connecticut was a seventeen hundred square foot two family. Our apartment in that grand estate was about 850 square feet. It wasn’t exactly the image most people have of what that all looks like, but still. It was my life. I was successful. People said “Wow, I could never do everything you do.” I knew people. I went places. I did things.

And I was increasingly unhappy.

But going home to St. Louis? Not even on the holidays.

Oh sure, Mom and Dad were still in the house. Oakwood Avenue. Webster Park. Norman Rockwell. I grew up walking to elementary school, until I entered seventh grade. Then I walked to junior high, but the walk was shorter. High School was a couple of hundred feet further down the road. Had I chosen I could have continued to go to college and graduate school and never travel more than three blocks from home.

This is important stuff. My family has been very into education. Even my paternal grandmother, who didn’t make it past the eighth grade, was involved in teaching. Both my mom’s parents had their masters’ degrees, and both were teachers.

Mom taught music. Dad was an accounting professor. Not down the street at Webster College (now much more pretentiously known as Webster University) but downtown at Saint Louis University (why is it that they always spell out “St.”?). I could have had a good solid Jesuit education free of charge. But I still remember my mother telling me that I really needed to get out of town. I was barely seventeen, and she was telling me I needed to leave home. I never asked her why she did that.

I suppose that had more to do with her than it had to do with me. And truth be told, I knew that. She wasn’t trying to get rid of me as much as she wanted me to expand my horizons and explore all that I could find. At sixteen she left high school early and went off to college – not to Oberlin where she wanted to go to study music, but to Lindenwood College (now more pretentiously known as Lindenwood University), still in Missouri, which is what her father would allow her to do. More on him later.

So I got that big Barron’s book back in the seventies and I looked through the thing looking for schools that had good architecture programs. I don’t know why. If I had to I couldn’t design my way out of a strip mall. But I did find Rice University in Houston. They had an architecture school. More importantly, they had a free application. So I applied. And I got in.

It was a bumpy ride. I ended up being on the five-year plan. But in those five years I somehow decided that I should be a Man of God. I got my degree, and in another year found myself not in Austin, where I thought I might go to seminary, because I was trying my best to be a Native Texan, complete with the Texas flag bumper sticker on my car. No, I went to Manhattan, where I was dazzled by the energy and the pre-Guiliani grittiness of the Capital of the World. My friends in Texas thought I was jumping off the face of the earth.

Four years in New York City led me to three years in the not-so-romantic town of New Britain, Connecticut. I was 27 years old, gay, and in what felt like the Polish capital of the United States. I lasted three years before I was back in school again in Manhattan. Then, as a newly-minted psychotherapist, I opened an office in a relatively prestigious part of town. Never thought of myself as an East Side kind of guy, but it was Murray Hill, not the Upper East Side, and I made excuses like “It’s so close to Grand Central.” Plus my phone exchange was the same as the Ricardo’s – Murray Hill Five. Thanks to technology and number portability, I still have that number on my cell phone. 212. MUrray Hill Five.

But that was New York. Now, thirty-two years after I left, I find myself sleeping in the bedroom that I slept in as a teenager. Sharing the room now with my partner/husband/whatever. Looking at the same walls and the same furniture. Trying to imagine what had happened to my life that after over thirty years, I had become That Guy. You know. The one still living at home.

This was the room in which I first had sex. This was the room that had been my asylum. This was the room where I could lock the door and keep my sister out. My parents too for that matter. This was where I had memories of love, of lust, of fear, of accomplishment. My friend Clayton and I learned Calculus together in this room. My friend Chris and I both got naked and I was in awe of his body. My friend Kurt and I drank Seagram’s VO in that room. I painted the room in primary colors – rich red, deep blue, vibrant yellow. With curtains to match. Striped, primary-colored curtains. Thank God my mother painted the room and replaced the striped red, blue and yellow curtains with bland beige ones. They’re now gone, by the way. The carpet of course was, and still is, Seventies Shag, a mixture of synthetic blacks, oranges and yellows. It’s a palette of color which is guaranteed to make one gag.

And so I’m back. Mom is gone, her body giving way to the half-century of cigarette smoking that ruined her lungs. Dad is here, with a great sense of humor and a winning smile but all trapped in a body wrecked by Parkinson’s. The dog is happy. She has so many more options for sleeping on comfortable furniture. And Dan and I are trying to figure out how to make it all home.

When we first decided to move back to St. Louis, several people asked me beforehand and since about what it was like to move back home. I tried to explain to folk and to myself that I really wasn’t moving home. After all, I only lived in this house for eight years. I left Webster Groves as a optimistic teenager and returned as a cynical middle-aged man. Webster Groves is a suburb of St. Louis. Webster Park is a neighborhood in Webster Groves. Some might say THE neighborhood. St. Louis has changed – a lot. So have I. Webster Park, not so much. But I said to myself You can never really go home. I was returning to something new, I convinced myself. I had never really lived here as an adult. Defensively, I would repeat, no, I’m not going “home.” Home was Connecticut. St. Louis was just where I was from.

But in the few short months that I have been back, I’ve discovered something. “They” were wrong. You can go home. Oh, maybe not everyone. People from the Ninth Ward can’t go home. People whose lives are changed so dramatically through the transient norms we have as families can’t necessarily go home. Homes sometimes are destroyed. Not just houses, but homes. But as an all-encompassing maxim of truth, I’ve discovered the phrase doesn’t hold. Because I did go home. I’m there.

And frankly, it scares the crap out of me.

It’s not the memories that bother me. Being legally-married as a gay man in Connecticut and living in a state like Missouri is a little weird. I mean, after all, what is it with having to protect everyone else’s marriage by declaring mine null and void in the state constitution. Way to go, Show-Me State. Having really grown up while in college in downtown Houston and graduate school in Manhattan certainly has made me feel comfortable in the urban environment – this suburban family stuff is a little foreign now. But it is, in a word, home. I don’t remember the names of the streets, but they look familiar. I explore neighborhoods which had been long overlooked by my limited boundaries. I find myself talking to people more – strangers, shop owners, customer service representatives on the phone. For example, I know that my insurance agent likes being called Angie rather than Angela, but her company can’t incorporate her derivative name into its database, and thus her email includes the name she doesn’t like so much. Furthermore, she knows that my sister, whose name is the same, prefers being called Angela rather than Angie. My insurance agent. We had this conversation. On the phone. I’ve never met her face-to-face.

The bank manager calls me. The local grocery store has private accounts. It’s a little Mayberry RFD, but it works for me. And that perhaps is the scariest thing of all.

Then there’s that stupid “St. Louis Question” thing. I mean, when did that get a name? Oh sure, I’d experienced the moment before. Even one night years ago during the days leading up to Christmas in nineteen ninety something I was on a Metro-North train heading home to Connecticut. We had been out to dinner with a friend, and everyone in the Bar Car was in a rowdy mood. A very bejeweled woman of a certain age sitting next to me indicated in conversation that she was originally from St. Louis. I told her “I grew up there too.” She then actually posed the St. Louis Question: “What high school did you go to?” “Webster Groves,” I said. “So did I,” she replied. Class of ’46. A little bit before me.

The St. Louis Question. That need to identify oneself with one’s secondary alma mater. Affton. University City. Parkway (North, South, East or West, you decide), Kirkwood (ick – our archrivals), Webster Groves (Go Statemen. Yes, Statesmen. Get over it.) And those are only the suburban schools. Of course if you were Catholic the answer would be Chaminade or Saint Louis U if you were a boy, and Visitation or Mary I if you were a girl. If your were rich the answer would unequivocally be John Burroughs (sorry, Country Day.) The St. Louis Question immediately identifies you, defines you, forces you into a box from which there is no return. Mehlville? Well, sorry dear. Hazelwood? A very big place. Fort Zumwalt? What the hell is that? A school in the city? Well, you might as just well say “I’m from the city.”

But Webster Groves, man, we thought we were it. After all, we had that fiasco of that documentary that CBS did on us. Granted it was in 1966. But more recently, back in the nineties, Time Magazine did put us on the cover. Screw Kirkwood and their Pioneers. We had the tophat and the cane. We were the Statesmen. Strangely, we even became pretty good at football.

God knows it ain’t all Peaches and Cream (actually the name of a class I took in high school). And a lot of it, if I may presume to say, is pretty funny. More than one person has said to me “You better be writing this stuff down.” They’re usually people living on I-95 corridor, but still.

So that’s what I’m going to do here. Write some stuff down. You don’t have to like it. Hell, you don’t have to read it. But I think I need to do it.

Because I’ve discovered something which deserves – no, needs expression. I’ve found out that there are things in life which simply must be shared.

I’ve traveled a fair bit. I’ve been in 48 of the 50 states (Watch out Nebraska and Alaska!). I’ve been in most of the provinces of Canada. I don’t know how many countries I’ve been to, but they include weird places like Bermuda and Liechtenstein and Russia. Bet you’ve never seen those three mentioned together in one sentence before. I’ve stood at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin and decided to go to the Starbucks across the street, Cold War be damned. But. One thing I was never counting on.

I’ve discovered that you can, in fact, go home.

Down to business

Okay. So I started this blog a couple of months ago and have done nothing with it. But I think the time has come for me to do some writing.

It occurs to me that writing is a bit of a lost art. We seem to have given in to all other sorts of communication, but the written word, at least in its traditional published form, seems to be increasingly rare. Oh sure, we communicate. I'm wired in. I have my blackberry, and 450 channels of television on which I can occasionally find something worth watching. But I must confess it has been a while since I have picked up a book to read. Like so many of us, I even read my newspaper on line, more as a matter of economics than of preference. I mean, why pay money for the crappy St. Louis Post-Dispatch when I can get it on my laptop free of charge?

So I want to write. I thought about doing a book, but the prospect of working with a publisher seemed a bit overwhelming for me at this point in my life. I have quite a few chapters written though. The theme is roughly "You can go home again." I'll post some of those ramblings from time to time here on this blog.

So this is me. I'm 49 years old, about to become 50. I'm in the middle of a full-blown middle-age crisis that I think I am handling fairly well. I've left two careers to start something new -- what I'm not really sure. I am a full-time caregiver for a father who has A Parkinson's, having moved back into the family home, and in fact my old bedroom, with my partner of 20+ years. Weird, yes. Strange, yes. Good for us, yes.

Everyone in the house tends to crash at around 10:30 PM, including the dog. That leaves me with late night TV. Or on nights like tonight, I take the laptop out onto the patio and listen to the tree frogs and other noisemakers and contemplate life and write. Only starting tonight, I'm writing this blog.

Funny word, blog. A "web-blog." Not so long ago these kinds of musings were kept in what was known as a diary. They were private. A collection of innermost thoughts and feelings that were rarely, if ever, shared with anyone. But a blog -- no, the idea with the blog is to put it all out there and let the world know everything that is going on in your mind. I mean, how egotistical is that? To think that there would be people who would give a rat's patootie about what I have to say. And yet....we seem to all do it.

So that's enough for tonight. It's a start. We'll see if I keep it going. In the meantime, know that I am faithfully yours.

Doug.