Friday, April 15, 2005

Seeds and Stems

Big doings today.  Here’s a quick scraping of my frontal lobes.  Chew thoroughly, you don’t want this stuff coming back up again:

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What kind of seed is it that makes things seedy? 

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·Gugk.  This is hideous.  I don’t even think they should be allowed to call it “syrup.”
·Well, it is a syrup.
·It’s nothing like maple syrup.
·That’s because maple syrup is made out of maples.  And robitussin syrup is made out of robuts. 

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Here’s a little lesson I learned, so you don’t have to: guys, if you’re shaving, and you accidentally cut your ear a little, you can expect it to keep bleeding for about as long as it takes your bus to get you to your office.  And gals, if you’re shaving and you accidentally cut your ear, I think we should talk about finding you an endocrinologist. 

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Sign waved to me by mostly-toothless, grinning, filthy man at Bush and Market this morning, who was holding out a big cup for contributions with his other hand: Contribute to the United Negro Pizza Fund. 

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Clearing the Path

I don’t know who he was; I didn’t recognize him but there’s a lot of people in this neighborhood and I don’t recognize plenty of them.  I think I first saw him in the morning when I took the dog out two days ago.  He was over by the top of the path across the street, the path that cuts through the greenbelt under all those big old eukes and acacias and junipers.  Those trees are a century old now and they’re starting to lose a little of that good vibrant tree energy that helps them stay big and strong like those heroic trees you may have read about in arboreal legends.*

But anyway, a big juniper up near the end of the block had dropped a long-dead bough, a big one, desiccated and dry, that took down two other good-sized branches on its way down.  This was a lot of wood, enough to block the path completely with an impassible jumble of branches and twigs. 

For a week or more I’d had to walk through the questionable ivy bed to get around it.  It was an ugly mess, and it was in my way.  Of equal significance, the dog didn’t like it either. 

Then two days ago I saw this guy out there.  His clothes seemed a little baggy but new enough and well-maintained; his hair seemed wild and unkempt but sufficiently clean.  I figured him for a hippy do-gooder, rather than a homeless freak.  He was standing at the pile of windfall deadwood, methodically, glovelessly, stripping the largest branches he could off the main boughs.  Some snapped right off in his hand, and some he had to work for a while, twisting them, yanking on them, pushing with his feet for leverage… Once he pulled off a branch, he’d carefully remove from it every subordinate twig, and break these down to the smallest natural division of kindling.  He’d toss these scraps aside onto a good-sized pile growing in the ivy, and then he’d pick up the next branch and start in again from the beginning. 

He’d obviously been there a while when I encountered him that morning with the dog, based on how much scrap he’d already produced.  I noticed as we walked around him that he’d started, very logically, at the far end of the bough, and was working his way to the part that had originally been nearest to the tree.  He still had a long way to go; the pile remaining before him to be broken down still dwarfed all three of us as we passed him on our way to that elusive canine relief we were seeking.  He seemed full of anxious energy, mumbling to himself and squinting up into the remaining branches of the canopy overhead.  The dog, who can be suspicious, paid the man no attention at all – so I figured he was okay.

When I got home from work that evening, he was still at it. 

Then, yesterday morning, I got up and took the dog out again, to find that my singletrack path had been restored to me; beside it, a huge pile of twigs, sticks, and branches hunkered in the ivy, and three big heavy boughs, stripped of all branches, had been dragged out to the lawn near the corner.  It didn’t appear that anybody’d taken away any significant amount of the branches and twigs.  I didn’t want any of it either, but I appreciated that weird guy’s efforts to clean up the mess that had been bringing me down for so many days.  I just wonder what compelled him to do it like that.  I guess some guys can’t keep their hands off the wood.

*Like, for example, The Legend of King Arbor.