I aged. He, eternal at the prime;
He, instantly forever, I, all time
For my atonement to confirm my crime.
Was ever grief like mine?
Sometimes Jeanne looks out the window and sees me sitting motionless in the garden, so she hurries out to check if I’m OK. And I always am, more or less: I’m weeding. It’s true that sometimes I’m bleeding, too. When my aging skin brushes against an azalea branch it seems to bleed automatically, as if to remind me of… what? But I don’t mind, and I like the rhyme. (Once in a while I’ve been able to come in and say, “I’ve been weeding, seeding, and bleeding,” a great pleasure.)
Decades ago, I got rid of our lawn and the hated noisy lawnmower by sitting with my trusty trowel and digging out the grass in front of fast-growing philodendron vines. After a couple of years, the front yard became all philodendron ground cover, along with the azalea plants.
So it’s not a romantic picture of gardening, though I occasionally replace old and dying plants with young ones, and in our backyard we have lemon, orange, and calamondin trees, plus a Wandering Jew that does indeed wander far and wide. But mostly I sit, pulling weeds and trimming the philodendron, which would cover us all if left alone. This is embarrassing because it’s pretty much how I behaved as a very young child. Slow to walk and talk, I sat for years in my playpen, as neighboring kids on our crowded Brooklyn block would come over, climb in with me, chat a while and then clamber out to go home, or shopping, whatever. “See you tomorrow,” little Florence would pipe, and I’d say “Bye-bye.” I never even learned how to crawl, but in a sitting position propelled myself backwards with moderate speed. My parents didn’t complain about this peculiar locomotion, as I covered the territory without knocking things over, and polished our wooden floors at the same time. Still, my poor mother had hoped for a more adventurous and coordinated first child. (The only thing I ever learned quickly was how to read: by the time I went to kindergarten I was far past “See Dick run.”)
But what I like about sitting quietly among the weeds is half-thinking of other things, life and nature in general, and our little piece of dirt in particular — much more relaxing than the anxiety-producing computer. Also, I’m attracted to names, when I can learn them. One common weed, Spanish Needle, I often leave alone because it’s pretty (daisy-like, with five small white petals and a yellow center). When I tracked it down I found that, like career criminals — human weeds? — it has many aliases (Beggar Tick, Butterfly Needle, Shepherd’s Needle, etc.). I pull them out when their flowers wilt.
We didn’t plant our Wandering Jew (Tradescantia zebrina pendula — “zebra-like hanging plant”). It just appeared one summer with its purple leaves and pink flowers, and keeps on the move like Ahasuerus, the poor fellow it’s named after. I wondered who would’ve named a plant that way, but only found its Latin name, in honor of John Tradescant the Elder (1570-1638) and his son, also John Tradescant (1608-1662), botanists to Charles I of England; who knew? The Wandering Jew legend — reminiscent of stories about the Flying Dutchman or the Greek tale of Tiresias, aging forever like an immortal insect — is a blend of fairy tales and anti-Semitic tracts. Each time I trim the persistent plant with its brittle stems I’m sent back to Howard Nemerov’s heart-breaking poem, “Ahasuerus,” and then on to reading Nemerov’s poems the rest of the night.
Things like this happen more often than one would think.
Seeing, agreeing, that the world did seem
A something, nothing, which He might redeem
One day—Or had he? It faded like a dream.
Was ever grief like mine?
—both quotes from “Ahasuerus” in The Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov (U. of Chicago Press, 1977). Peter Meinke’s first literary publication was Howard Nemerov, a study of Nemerov’s work published in the U. of Minnesota’s “Pamphlets on American Writers” series (#70, 1968).
This article appears in Aug 24-31, 2017.