Coping
It is a foggy morning on the hilltop today. My mind is geared to my garden and I enjoy a misty or foggy morning for the benefit of the moisture it brings to the plants. I also know by now that it is just a matter of a few hours before it will burn off and it will once again be a sunny and glorious day. It is Sunday and I have the pleasure of waking up next to Kim again after having her away in the hospital for three nights. It’s funny because when she’s not here I sleep on my half of the bed and leave her half of the bed relatively untouched. I guess it is a habit, but I have no need to sprawl out across the entire bed, so, I guess I was meant to be part of a couple and my body accommodates that in my sleep patterns. Kim was up and down a bit more than normal last night with her soreness. I have my own version of soreness, but lately that is a combination of lower body leg soreness from climbing the hill and lugging around my bulk (my massage therapist tells me he rarely finds so much tightness in anyone’s legs and especially hamstrings as mine), and upper body neck and shoulder soreness mostly, I imagine, from sleeping on my sides and scrunching up my shoulders while I do so. It causes me to wake most nights after four or five hours and I have to sit and stretch in the bathroom or sometimes on the floor in the closet. It dissipates in about an hour and during that time I usually update my email inbox, especially those from my east coast and European friends and colleagues. They often ask why I am up at such an hour and I have no good response other than to say that we all cope as best we can with what we must.
Today’s agenda is very light, as it probably should be on a Sunday. I have already made one pass in the garden to move one of my new wind sculptures to a spot that catches more wind and to check on the state of some of the plantings. Generally, everything seems to be doing well. I then went off to the nursery and bought seven large plants for Joventino to put in the ground on Tuesday. I set them out along the new path on the lower hillside. I see no reason not to add plantings whenever I can so long as I remember to keep them fairly low water oriented, with a preference for succulents to add to our “Best Succulent Garden in San Diego” designation. I have decided for now not to add any more irrigation zones to the back hillside, something I have promised myself in the past and then recanted on. But this time I am serious since there are really on two areas of that hillside that are completely without any water. I feel that one solution I would like to try is to use the bucket of agave seed pods I have collected from my two blooming century plant agaves behind the garage.
Those two agaves are gigantic, perhaps ten feet across each before I had Joventino cut them back once they began to bloom. The stalk of the seed pod stem is perhaps 9-10 inches in diameter and I know from my lumberjack episode with the seed stalk on the back hillside that they will be very woody and tree-like when its time to cut them down. These agaves are not quite like Audrey from Little Shop of Horrors because I don’t think they are man-eaters, but they are large and could potentially scare someone into thinking they need to be watched carefully.
I feel like now that the summer is almost officially over (or will be with the September Equinox next week), Kim and I are settled into a routine that for me consists of teaching every Wednesday night, working on expert cases during the week and gardening in between. The only thing that we really have on the agenda until we head back to New York in early December is a family wedding here in San Diego in early October that will be accompanied by a visit from son Thomas and his fiancé Jenna. We have several friends planning to visit during the course of the Fall, several ostensibly to lecture in my class, but really to give them an excuse to visit. I’m not sure how to say this, but this is our life now and I am growing to like it just fine. I guess I have always needed less excitement (at least of the going out and partying type) than others and I find that I have developed good coping mechanisms for keeping my interest level high. Teaching is certainly one, as is the expert witness work. The rest is pretty well taken up by writing and gardening. The combination of the four things, spiced up with a bit of motorcycling now and then and heading off to planned trips and visits is plenty to drive me forward. I like my program and see no reason to either feel it lacks anything I need or want to cope and no reason to add a lot more spice or external excitement to it.
Today I spoke to Handy Brad, who I think of more like a friend at this point than an employee. He had done me a favor yesterday of picking up a pallet and crate left over from the delivery of my new live-edge table top for the patio. In chatting with him he told me that he was going today to get the Modern COVID vaccine at long last. When I asked why he said he had been forced to miss going to live concert shows, which are a primary activity for him and he no longer wanted to abstain. I guess we all have our motivations. Once when he came over before heading to a show, I thought I was seeing a different person. The scruffy pony-tail and ball capped workman was replaced by the slick-looking man about town with the long flowing hair ala Greg Allman. This was a different man than what plodded around the property doing odd jobs. I guess his motivation for many things comes from concert-going. Handy Brad seems to have learned to cope with his life by listening to live rock music and he is willing to do something (in this case get a vaccination) that he wanted not to do for some reason. From what Handy Brad said to me, he simply didn’t like being told by the government what to do. This was a man I believe voted for Biden and found Trump to be ridiculous. But still, he balked at getting a vaccination right until his coping mechanism was on the line.
These are times of great distress in the world. You can choose what worries you the most and chances are it something that seems almost if not totally impossible to overcome. I just watched the movie Marshall, about the early judicial career of Thurgood Marshall, specifically defending a black man named Spell in a Connecticut courtroom. I am sure that the plight of the black man and the cause of civil rights and equality seemed like something impossible to overcome. Maybe I’m wrong to say that these times are times of greater distress than any other times. The Spell case took place in 1940 when the world was in crisis globally with the country becoming increasingly squeezed between the Axis powers of Europe and Asia, with civil rights being largely unattainable by blacks in America, and by human kindness left by the side of the road during the first years of the Great Depression and still not returned to the scene.
I think perhaps the thought that some men never compromise, they cope, may be a more universal sentiment that is needed in every time by every man (and woman) and our times, while they seem so desperate and perhaps even hopeless, are no better and no worse than any other the world must regularly confront. When the going gets tough, the tough might get going, but the thinking man just learns to cope.