That’ll Do, Pig
My old college fraternity pal, Doug, stayed with us with his wife, Liz, for the past few days. They came for a western trip to spend time in Phoenix, Sedona and San Diego. We had been inviting them to come out and stay with us for several years and they finally had the time on their dance cards to come out and make that happen. They timed it to join us for Kim’s Saturday night Encore performance extravaganza. Kim’s singing career has been one of the better ways for us to integrate our various friends and family groups. At this particular Encore performance at the La Jolla Country Day School, what seems from an outsiders view as a bastion of liberal elitist privilege (that should keep my red friends reading!), we got Doug & Liz, six neighbors, two West Hollywood pals and six family members, together for a faux-Chinese dinner at PF Chang’s and a Broadway show tune sing-along. If you are going to get introduced to the Rich & Kim Program, that is the proper way to do it…total immersion. It’s like social water-boarding, where you enjoy yourself simply because when you finally get a chance to breathe, it feels so good.
This was the end of a long week for Kim and an even longer week for me. It was long for Kim because she had rehearsals every night of the week from 6pm to 10pm, followed by Friday and Saturday night performances, for which she began preparing at 2pm each day and didn’t get home until 11pm, including having to strike the set on the last night, as performers in bootstrapped operations generally have to do. On top of that, she had to accommodate six house guests during the week and orchestrate the various guest services ranging from clean sheets and towels to breakfasts every day, lunches several days and even a dinner or two to cook in between. It was an even longer week for me because I had to do things like order from Grubhub one night, share my Revolution toaster with people who really don’t understand how special that device is, explain to all those guests that I do not drink coffee so I cannot help them with that hot beverage, and especially, share my favorite living room sofa spot with whomever chooses to plop down there. But good news, I survived…and Kim’s OK too.
Another thing I had to do repeatedly over the week was not a burden on me at all, but rather more of a joy. Everyone showed enough of a spark of interest in the property and the back hillside in particular, that I had to give multiple tours. Kim tells me that the interest they were showing is not unlike the interest in the carnival sideshows that are often referred to as freak shows. Apparently, she thinks my thirty foot Bison Boulder, my 8-foot high Mexican rooster, my fully equipped (anatomically speaking) bounding Ram, my Fairy Village populated with 50 gnomes, my Northwest/Polynesian Totem Pole, my MoonstruckShire Hobbit House, my gumdrop-painted children’s rocks, my nine wind sculpture whilrygigs, my assorted metal sculptures, my many abstract-painted boulders (Agave, Hawks, Zebra Plant, California Bear, Coyote, Cacti, Kokopelis, and Anasazi sunbursts) are all a bit too garish. Go figure. I like to think everyone wants a tour because they can’t believe their eyes and want a closer look to be sure just exactly how insane I have become out here on this hilltop.
I ended up giving both Doug and Liz separate tours, making sure to point out that the large Palo Verde tree at the bottom of the hill had just come loose of its moorings during a wind storm in the past week. The delicate-looking Pala Verde trees I have planted over the past year (there are three smaller ones and one larger one) are all propped up by some form of planting stake. These trees are surprisingly robust when it comes to surviving on minimal water, and they grow quickly into large willow-like trees with green trunks and branches that regularly blossom with delicate yellow blooms. They are a very pretty tree that are meant to prosper in arid climates, so I love them. But, being willow-like means that they have relatively narrow trunks until they manage to bulk up. That means that every new Palo Verde has several support stakes keeping it going vertical rather than sideways.
The big tree down in the gully below the Boulder Bison and Bounding Ram is big, but also particularly wispy. The main trunk, that rises about 5-6 feet is only about 2 inches in diameter. It is a green trunk that seems more succulent than woody, which I suspect makes it quite durable against the elements. But to give it a good healthy vertical start, I put in two large eight-foot stakes that are 2×2’s with a pointed end that I have driven into the ground with a sledgehammer on either side of the tree, using special rubber landscape straps to flexibly suspend it between the two stakes. It all worked great up until the wind storm this past week. It seems that one of those stakes had a big knot in the middle and that caused it to snap in half, rendering the whole staking operation useless as the tree began to sag towards the uphill side.
As I was giving Doug his hillside tour, it occurred to me that having a helping hand to check out the Palo Verde damage might prove useful…and I was right. There is probably a joke out there somewhere that starts, “a physicist and a lazy man walk down a hill…”. Yes, Doug is a physicist, actually a Cornell physicist, the son of a Cornell physics professor and a guy who made his career at that bastion of technological innovation, Bell Labs. His roommate at Cornell (rest his soul), was a guy who’s parents would come to the Frat House with their toolkits and fix everything that needed fixing. This was the perfect guy to take down my hill, don’t you think? That would leave me to be the lazy man in this joke.
Doug proved his value immediately by saying that it appeared that the one stake had broken. Hmmm. What to do? Suddenly, he stopped rubbing his chin and said we should pull out the unbroken stake and the broken stake and put the unbroken stake in the broken stake hole since that was the side away from which the tree was leaning. Good analysis. We did that, but the stake was wiggling since the sledge hammer was nowhere in sight. It was up the hill and going up the hill to fetch tools was not going to happen (that was the lazy man contribution). I took the broken stake and jammed it in next to the unbroken stake (naturally on the tree side to stiffen the stake’s gravitas). After trying and failing to hammer it in with the other half of the wooden stake, I picked up a rock and had that Stanley Kubrick moment where ape (aka Lazy Man) picks up his first tool implement and rejoices that it actually works to drive in the half stake. The best part was that no one had to go up the hill to fetch this tool. The physicist looks at the lazy man and also picks up a rock (a smaller one) and starts doing the same, smiling gleefully while he does. Nothing in the labs at Rockefeller Hall was as satisfying as hefting that rock overhead, I imagine, because it worked and the stake drove home.
I then undid the rubber straps and started to lash the tree and stake together. The physicist pointed out to me that I was using the complicated rubber straps incorrectly and that I was trying to insert tab A into slot C instead of slot B. Ah, the benefits of a classical education. Problem solved. I then picked up the other half of the broken stake and wondered how in the world I would get this up the hill. It must have weighed 6 or 7 ounces. In the midst of that quandary, the ideation process between physicist and lazy man sparked and we decided it would be the perfect diagonal brace at the base of the stake. We quickly resolved which direction would actually provide the bracing action and then asked ourselves how we would attach it to the good stake. A nail would work, but that was, once again, up the hill, so out of the question. I had two rubber straps left so we invoked the spirit of Ron Howard from Apollo 13 and decided to make it work with what we had. Rube Goldberg to the rescue.
We then set down our rocks (you never know when you will need another tool handy at the bottom of the hill), looked at each other and then at our Palo Verde support contraption and just said to one another with that Farmer Hoggett from Babe look about us, “That’ll do, pig, that’ll do,”