The Other Side

It's Fathers' Day, and it will be 3 years in a few weeks since Daddy died. I sent some money to my mother last week and asked for her to buy some flowers to take down to the cemetery and to tell him they were from me. He's buried at Hopewell in Medina, TN, in the family plot. It's an old, country cemetery that dates back to the mid-1800's.

The trees in the older part have to be at least 150 years old. As are the oldest head stones. Some are so weathered, it's hard to read the carving, and some have fallen over or broken because of the harsh winters. They get a crack, it rains, then freezes and the water expands into ice and breaks them in half. Sometimes right off where they come up out of the ground.

Daddy's been there a lot less longer than some of his neighbors. His mother died in '86 and is buried a couple a spots over. As is my little brother, Douglas, who was born dead in 1969. Daddy has more family within 100 feet of him than most people even have family.

It's a nice spot with a view down the hill. It's where he grew up. And Mama, too.

I didn't realize it until Daddy died, but my parents had one of those great love affairs that you usually only see in movies. They lived through economic hardship (the 70's weren't really that pretty), raised three children and then took on two more when they finally had the house back to themselves. But they stuck together through all the bad times and turned unexpected responsibilities into good opportunities to have a richer life.

I was lucky. I got a father that taught me how to be a man. He was slow to anger and long-suffering. Between me, my two sisters and Mama, he had plenty of reasons to get irate. But he didn't. He had a special way of making us feel overwhelmingly guilty without saying a word. Just the shake of his head could send me seeking repentance and atonement for whatever I had done wrong.

All along, he relied on my mother to take care of details. He took care of generating cash, and she took care of most everything else, but they made plans for the future together. They both seemed comfortable with the arrangement, and I’d be the last person to question it. It worked well for them, and if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

Mama's spot has been long reserved at Hopewell, next to his. We went down (about 60 miles away) when I was a kid and put out makers to delineate our family plot. According to the rules of country cemeteries, once we staked our claim, it was ours. People who have family there voluntarily contribute to its upkeep. That's the way it's been for as long as I can remember. And I've been visiting that cemetery about as long as I can remember.

I think there might have been a small church there at one time, just by the way things are laid out. There's a nice place to put one at the foot of the hill as you come in, so I guess there might have been a church years before me or Daddy or Mama was born.

It's a lovely place, one where I find peace. Church or no church, the view is lovely off the hillside. It's the one I'll end up with, one way or another. If I go before my partner, he knows where I want half of my ashes. The other half will be his to do with as he wishes. At least half of me will end up in an urn on a hillside in Tennessee at the foot of my little brother's grave.

I always wanted a little brother. Growing up in a houseful of women, me and Daddy were always outnumbered. Had he lived, he would have evened up the score. His name was Douglas, and he was born dead, but I never even saw him.

I would have been a good big brother, I think. He would have been 40 this year.

Maybe I'll get to know him on the other side.

When I left Daddy in that room in Memphis after all hope had run out, I kissed him on the forehead and told him I'd see him on the other side. Then I pulled the sheet up over his face, told him goodbye one last time and walked away.

As Good as It Gets

I always look forward to June because that's when Jim's tomato crop comes in. He grows heirloom varieties and brings what he can't use to the office to give away. He knows I appreciate a good tomato, so he always lets me know before he puts them out for general consumption. I think he wants the folks that will enjoy them most to have first dibs.

My grandparents were produce wholesalers whose business was built on tomatoes. The ones they got in the summer were the best: locally grown with a bright flavor and meaty texture that one can't find from the "shipped-in" ones they got in the winter. In the off-season, they came mostly from Florida and were in no way comparable to the "home-grown" they got in the summer.

During the summer, it was impossible to leave their house without a bag of them. The blemished ones, the ones they couldn't sell. They gave them away to anyone and everyone who stopped by. And the "damaged goods" tasted just as good as the perfect ones. They just weren't as pretty.

Canned tomatoes are generally better in the off-season than what you can buy "fresh" because they are bred and grown to be canned, not shipped. Unless harvested locally, the ones you see in the grocery were probably grown hundreds of miles away and shipped by trailer or train (or both) to your grocery store still half green. Tomatoes bruise very easily, and one bruise can cause many others around it to rot. They have to be culled daily. It's a lot of manpower.

To get around that, growers bred varieties that travel better, but at the expense of flavor. That's why the tomatoes that look so good at the store end up being a pulpy, mealy, tasteless filler. They don't bruise as bad, but they have no taste. They're a waste of time and money, as far as I'm concerned. And the ones that are worth eating that have had special handling cost a small fortune.

Canning tomatoes, on the other hand, don't have the restrictions or cost of "fresh" tomatoes. As long as they're not rotten, whether they look pretty or not is of no consequence. They generally don't have to be shipped too far from the cannery, because it's cheaper to acquire them locally than to buy them from 750 or 1,000 miles away and hope they get there in reasonable condition.

My family never had a lot of money, but I grew up with a privileged life. I had good, fresh food that tasted like the sun that had nurtured it.

In addition to tomatoes, we had fresh cantaloupes, watermelons, green beans, corn (white and yellow), purple hull peas, okra, squash and just about anything else that was in season.

Good, fresh food is to be cherished for the short time it's in season. The season will end all too soon, and then it's back to the cans and the freezer section.

A Travesty by Any Other Name

People use the word "tragedy" way too often to describe what amounts to what I would call a travesty. Katrina was a good example: the only tragic thing about it was how the relief effort was handled. And that led to what can only be called a travesty.

They also refer to the recent Ft. Hood mass killings as a tragedy. In reality, it was a catastrophe, one that points to the Army's unwillingness to discharge a doctor because of poor performance and questionable behavior. They need doctors these days, and they might have bent rules and/or ignored warning signs to keep the shooter among the ranks.

In its purest form, "tragedy" refers to ancient Greek plays. They more or less defined the genre, one that still exists today. In the Greek plays, characters were often the victims of fate and fallibility. They could not control their own future, no matter what they did. Their flaws doomed them to misery or death.

I'm not sure if Shakespeare was familiar with the Greek tragedies, but I suspect he might have been. In his tragedies, the protagonists slowly spiraled to their eventual demise, as happened in the Greek dramas. His writing shares with the Greeks the inevitability of the outcome. In some ways, it's like watching a car crash in slow motion.

People routinely refer to the oil geyser in the Gulf as a tragedy or catastrophe. Tragedy implies inevitability, and this mess doesn’t rise to that occasion, except on the flaw side. The flaws could have been easily addressed by a good risk management officer. They were not inevitable.

And while the end results will probably prove to be catastrophic, that word doesn’t describe the devastation adequately, either.

This mess amounts to nothing less than a travesty. Lax oversight by the federal government and the corporations involved led to a travesty. The spill is catastrophic, no doubt. The real tragedy is that an enormous multinational corporation put cash above safety.

11 men are dead, and the Gulf is slowly filling up with oil. That is the real tragedy: the outcome was inevitable, but didn’t have to be.

It didn’t have to happen. But because of the loosening of oversight in earlier administrations, it did. The regulators were too cozy with the companies they were charged with regulating. The conflicts of interest ran almost as deeply as the oil spewing into the ocean.

The Gulf is one my favorite places in the world. Sitting by the sea or wandering out in the surf just enough to get my toes wet makes me happy. It brings me peace. On the beach, I can see forever. Infinity and eternity become real.

I’m afraid I might lose that forever. The region may not recover in my lifetime. That’s where tragedy begins and far from where it ends.

Hundreds of thousands of people are or will be directly affected by the spill. Thousands more will suffer the indirect effects. Not only will fishermen no longer be able to fish, hotel workers will be laid off because they have no one to take care of, as will the waiters that serve tourists and the cooks who feed them. Small businesses that cater to tourists will be devastated and bankrupted, as will anyone who depends on gulf seafood for their livelihood.

This is travesty on a grand scale. It smells foul, but there’s nothing I can do about it.