Wes, a seasonal gardener employed by a city in southern Ontario, has written to us with a biographical note. We feel that it has merit and so we have printed it here in its entirety:
Don’t even talk to me you can’t
roll up a fifty foot half inch EPDM rubber hose into a tight coil no more than
eighteen inches in diameter. I know secateurs is French for pruners. You call a
pair of secateurs pruners I will take you for an amateur. You don’t know the
best secateurs ever made are the Felco #2 you are probably a phony. You’re shy
of the line trimmer and back pack blower that tells me you learned it out of a
book as in you know the Latin but you don’t know the lingo.
Mrs. Caruso has a chocolate lab
named Crosby who is fit unlike many of the dogs I see. Mrs. Caruso said to me Wes,
you’re all on your own in this big park. I said to her, you know Mrs. Caruso I am a seasonal gardener but just the same this ain’t a big park if you got thirty weeks. This would be a small park if you
got thirty six weeks which is the number any self respectin gardener in this
part of the world would want. You got twenty-six weeks, well then it was big
park. Mrs. Caruso had no idea what I was talkin about. In my dreams I am
dazzlin her with my steely good looks.
I came in here five years ago there
were weeds growin out of the weeds. There were rampant day lilies as in
somebody had a two-fer-one on sale. There were overgrown shrubs, badly pruned
and choked with old and dead wood. There were dead and half dead Austrians and
Red Maple. There was weeds and grass in the cobble and the limestone scree path
down to the embankment was a field of dandelions.
The year they gave it to me you
could see the dead patches all across the turf from the dog poop. I talked to
the dog owners. I explained to them a good solid dog turd may mean your pet is
in good health but that little puppy will still retain enough of its potency to
burn a lawn after the big melt. At that time I didn’t know I was comin back in
the spring. Well I did come back and you know there was maybe a fifty to sixty
percent decline in turf burn from dog poop.
Now Mrs Frumpy, as I call her, came
to me and said Mr. Gardener, I have found some mushrooms and I want you to
identify them for me. I am concerned they are poisonous and may pose a danger
to Chico. Well, Chico is a noisy irritatin little rat dog Chihuahua. I know
Mrs. Frumpy don’t pick up after it.
So I said, Mrs. Frumpy is Chico
partial to mushrooms? She said, I beg your pardon. I said ma’am because if he
is, that is Mushroominous Canadiansis Queen of Transylvania or some dumb thing
like that. I said, it is impossible to kill and it will sure as shootin kill
your beautiful dog he even takes a whiff of it.
Well don’t Mrs. Frumpy look
shocked. I pressed my advantage. Mrs. Frumpy, I said, best advice maybe take
Chico to another park until I can get the poisonous plant people over here and
get rid of this menace of a mushroom. Of course, I said, but you know how City
Hall works. It could take years.
She looked at me out of the corner of her eye.
Yes then, Mr. Gardener, thank you. Well, no further comment on Mrs. Frumpy, as
I don’t believe in speaking ill of people whatever I might think, although I
should say there was an old couch put out for pick up on my street and I had to
take a second look as I thought I was bein stalked.
I got five years to go to full
retirement. My old knee cartilage is
tellin me I should be shmoozin Mrs. Frumpy who I’m guessin is a sad and lonely
old thing. This year and the next. That’s it. I mean probably what I’ve got
left in me. I lay awake at night listenin to them knees burn. That way I
pretend they don’t hurt. I pretend they are a song from an opera I once heard
with Patti Scram. Ibuprofen works a little. I got a prescription for these
anti-inflammatories. Some days I have to gobble the stuff. I ain’t complainin.
They started callin me Wes the
Dope. I had finally got the park headed in the right direction. Maybe twelve
things that had to be done. I wrote up a list. This was the middle of year two
in a heat wave that had been goin on for some time. A garbage troll gave me
that moniker one day it was near forty with the humidex. He gave it to me from
the inside of an air conditioned cab while I was workin the perennial beds down
by the channel. I wear it with pride.
I came out of the north. I came
down here with Patti Scram as my common law wife. We had two children. Donny
wasn’t quite right and maybe we should have had him in a different school. When
he was sixteen he tried buttin heads with a subway train. A witness said he must
have been down the tunnel. The witness Donny came out of the dark at the train
like he was chargin the scrimmage line, one shoulder down, a wild grin on his
face. They say he was bullied at school. I never learned the truth of it. I
lost track of Elaine and her mother. I think they might be out on the west
coast.
We came down here I did hard landscapin,
interlock mostly, in the private sector until my body broke down. They kicked
me out and then I got on with the City as a Parks Handyworker. I liked it. I
liked workin in a park. I woke up one mornin and realized I had found my callin
in life.
I wanted a park of my own and so
I studied for one year and wrote the gardenin test. Darn if I didn’t pass it. I
know there is a God because He persuaded Parks and Rec to give me this place
and to let me stay. I know there is a Satan because he sent Mrs. Frumpy and
Chico to torment me. By the way she ignored my advice on the mushrooms and I am
still pickin up after that rat dog. God also gave me Mrs. Caruso who gave me a
Harris Tweed jacket with the patches on the elbows that smelt of mothballs. She
said her husband had outgrown it. I would marry Mrs. Caruso in a heartbeat.
I play it by the numbers. I’ve
got twelve numbers in my head. Second or third day on the job back in year one
I sat down on one of the park tables and made a list of the things I had to do
to bring the park back, resurrect it you might say. There were twelve things. I
forget what they were now. They were basic gardening things; dividin
perennials, weedin and pruning, de-thatchin, aeratin and overseedin the grass,
gettin to know the locals. Things I needed to do to put the park right,
challenges then, and you know what I got them done.
I think about the death of my
son all the time. I think about my wife and daughter runnin off. I think about
my body breakin down. I don’t know that I ever did anythin to deserve that, but
the boy killed himself and the girls are gone and my knees are made of glass.
Some how I think it is down to me. Maybe I was a little harsh with them. Maybe
I didn’t take care of myself they way I should have.
I do my best with the park. I
love this place. I think to myself I keep a good park, I keep it so that it’s
right, I’ll be forgiven. It’s what gets me out of bed in the mornin, thirty
weeks a year. The other twenty two are a little on the rough side.
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