Tag Archives: father

Harvest

Posted on by
1

I received an email from my father today. It read, “My first tomatoes in about 30 years !!! I Love Life !!!”

Attached was a photo of several smallish reddish tomatoes, with only a few scars from growth, photographed in a tangle of thick, sweet tomato leaves and vines.photo

It’s not necessary to write he is very proud of these tomatoes.

Eight months ago, I heard him make rumblings about buying some tomato plants. He mused about it for a while, thinking aloud. Then one day I came to the house and found two large decorative terra cotta pots, once neglected and cracking with hard cores of gray dirt cast inside, filled with fragrant, moist ebony soil and two optimistically leafy plants tucked inside – a tomato and a pepper.

The pots were equally spaced and set on tiles, for proper drainage, on the front patio my parents never, ever used during the 30 years they lived there together – and in the two and a half years since cancer took my mom. I was quizzical.

Soon after, he left town on another of his “if-I-am-moving-my-grief-is-more-bearable” trips and asked me if I came to the house to be sure to water his plants. I came by only once or twice and dutifully and skeptically gave them drinks. I figured the plants would be dead in a month or so, composting victims of his scattered focus, collateral damage of the other distractions of the new life he was jamming awkwardly together.

But they didn’t die.

When he came back from the trip, I mentioned to him he ought to move the pots into the sun.

I figured he would forget.

But the next time I came to the house, they were in the sunshine and had small, white blooms. He was nearly ecstatic with these latest gifts of nature — blooms on the vines!

“Do you think I’ll get tomatoes?” he asked, a kid, asking me to predict the Christmas morning take.

“Well, if you’ve got flowers you’ll probably get tomatoes. That’s what that means,” was my snap-ish, erudite response.

Then he left again, this time recruiting a neighbor to support his campaign.

When he was gone too long and the weather was too hot, she fed them and cooled them and reported back. The tomato and pepper plants hadn’t expired of heat exhaustion. They were thriving.

He asked me about them all the time. Had I been by? How had the tomato plant seemed? Was the soil wet? Were they wilting?

I. Didn’t. Get. It.

Finally, the neighbor sent my dad a text. “We have a tomato.”

The night before a Transatlantic journey home, he wrote to me excitedly, “I can’t wait to see my tomato !!!”

I was miffed. He might also mention his daughter and her family. Enough about the tomatoes!

Maybe it was another goofy stage of his grief process, which is a maze for us all, and presents particular challenges for a child who must observe a beloved parent suddenly and tragically forget themselves, go astray, come back, follow rocky paths, want to die, want to hide, want to go back, pine for happiness, try to disappear, then reappear and need you (only you) and not need anyone at all ever again and need someone who is never, ever coming back again. These are agonizing circular challenges of your loss and their loss and your loss and their loss. Ad infinitum.

But still I puzzled, not seeing anything other than tomatoes. Fruits masquerading as vegetables.

When I got the email today, I glanced at it on my phone without really reading it. I asked him about it. He serenely told me he had invited his neighbor over so they could both be there when they picked the tomatoes. “I was afraid a critter might get them,” he said, his voice bearing all the protectiveness and vulnerability of a new mother.

And something in my heart changed. Dissolved. Clarified.

My father had planted, nurtured, worried over, babied, cooed at, cajoled, fed, and then, finally, brought to life something way more significant than fruits or vegetables.

He had harvested hope. For the first time in three decades, he wrote. (But I think he meant four because my oldest brother is 40.)

After Prima and Secondo were tucked into bed, I crept to my computer and looked again.

“My first tomatoes in about 30 years !!! I Love Life !!!”

I love you, Dad.

Battles of will won and lost

Posted on by
3

Typically the occasional stubborn brat-iness of my dear Zuzus create the most baneful moments of my sometimes quite long days. Once in a blue moon, however, luckdisaster strikes and that same stubborn brat-iness has saved my keister.

The Baileys can relate. Can you?

Case in point: Last Sunday was turning out to be a day free from the recent stressors maxing out Mr. Bailey and my collective patience as parents, home-owners and partners. Roofers were putting the finishing touches on our already paid for new chocolate brown roof. We were not obligated to run any errands or provide any tangible moral support to our family or friends. But, we had no food in the house (no surprise there) so we decided to head out for breakfast.

We took some time getting ready, but the girls were volleying ideas of where to go and what to do in moments. Unfortunately for them, Mr. Bailey happened by the door to their post-apocalyptic playroom and made a snap decision.

“We’re not going anywhere until this playroom is picked up,” Mr. Bailey announced after assembling the allied forces.

Ka-boom! Their worlds shaken, there was lamentation, wailing and woe. There was finger pointing, blame-grenade hurling, procrastination and multiple tongue lashing trips before us, the tribunal, sitting peacefully on the couch, listening as the soldiers pled their cases. We did not budge. Minutes amounted. An hour neared. Prima was particularly upset. Secondo was blatantly defiant. Still we did not cave. The room must be cleaned. Mr. Bailey and I, still calm, felt as if we held the high ground.

All the while we heard the click-pound-smash of the roofers installing the last shingles our house would need for another 15 years.

Then a somewhat smug Prima paraded in to tell us, that, did we know water was pouring down the side of the wall into the playroom and the floor was all wet?

Crap.

Controlled chaos ensued. Water was indeed rushing down the side of the wall the playroom shares with the master bath. Water mains were switched off, frantic phone calls to contractors, on-call plumbers were made. It turned out a roofer’s nail had busted a misplaced pipe above the master bathroom.

As the water was sopped up, we regrouped. “You were lucky,” the plumber told us. “I’ve seen this where the homeowners have been gone all day long and entire parts of the ceiling have collapsed on furniture and beds and ruined everything. It’s a good thing your daughter noticed.”

Right. So I asked Miss Prima how she discovered the leak waterfall in the playroom.

“Well, I was cleaning up and I felt something wet on the back of my head,” she began, her sincere brown eyes becoming even more round in the telling, “and at first I thought it was, you know, just my — tears.” She emphasized the word to remind us of the torture we’d inflicted.

“But then I felt the wall and it was all wet.”

Later, Mr. Bailey mused we had lucked out by choosing that moment to assert our hardcore parenting skills, and that the kids complaining and exaggerating what was a simple task had saved us a ton of pain and property.

“But,” he said, his voice growing deep and quiet as he peered around the room furtively, “we can never let them know that.”