Raindrops Keep Fallin' On My Head [part I]

My father lives around the corner, in country terms, from the university where I teach, where I'd been all Saturday afternoon, borrowing 100 pounds of books from the library, to read for my thesis. So I thought I'd drop in on my way home.

The sky was threatening rain, which is why I didn't find my father out back in the garden, but inside in the living room, reading The Economist.

"I was wondering if you have a beer for me, and maybe some tomato plants for my garden," I said by way of greeting. If you were expecting me to ask about his trip to Germany you can forget that, Gentle Reader.

The former request was a negative, the latter a positive, so, beerless, I followed my dad into his back yard and watched and listened as he showed me what he was growing. My father's garden is a complex system of planks (to walk on, when it's muddy), plastic juice bottles (as mini terrariums for the young pepper plants), golf balls (to cover or uncover the juice bottle tops as necessary), chicken wire (wrapped around the grape plants), poles, and upside-down plastic mesh trays, the ones that plants from the garden centre come in, to provide a degree of shade for the seedlings.

My father brought back some Gänseblumen from Oberdorf. He said he'll give me some next year. This year it's too late already, because they're blooming. You can't transplant flowers once they've started blooming.

Tomato plants occupy a world of their own in my father's garden. At the end of every season he lets the rotten ones lie, or throws them into an unoccupied quadrant, and so, in the spring, tomato plants spring up hither and thither. He watches their early progress, then decides whether and where to move them, or to thin them out.

In my family, we refer to the tomatoes you buy in the grocery store as rubber tomatoes. Which they are.

The timing of my visit was perfect, in tomato terms. My father located and carefully excavated four of the tiniest plants, only an inch or two high.

"Keep the tomatoes in the shade for the first couple of days," my father instructed me. "The sun might kill them. Plants go into shock, you know, when you dig them up. Water them every day, and in a few days if they're not dead you can move the pots into the sun."

"I'll be sure to talk nice to them when I put them in their new homes," I said. I wasn't joking. And I did, too. My father knows I have no shade on my rooftop patio. The sun is brutal up there. Kills everything except the goddamned wasps.

"Put the pots against the wall on the west side, so at least they'll be shaded for part of the afternoon," he suggested.

Together we walked up and down the gangway plants, like the chief of medicine and his residents on rounds, inspecting all that was growing on this small square of suburban earth. Looking for those plants, whether flower or vegetable, that would be suitable for clay pots, and which were still in their early growth stages.

Pumpkins, no. Beans, no. Too tall. Irisis, no. Though they are the most gorgeous, deep purple colour you've ever seen, and I envy them... but they are happiest in swampy conditions, which condo rooftops don't meet. Carrots, no. I don't like them, anyway. Maybe a tiger lily. Maybe.


As my dad bent down to dig up a baby aster he sighed. It might have been the exertion, or something else.

"So my trip to Germany was a bit of a disaster," he said.

* * *
To be continued in part II.