The Soil Connects

Jeanette, Diego and Jackson, showing off a recent crop of beets in our back yard

Jeanette and I recently began attending something called a "Citizen Gardener" class.  Sponsored by the Sustainable Food Center of Austin, the class is designed not only to help novice gardeners understand what they're doing -- or trying to do -- in their back yards, but also to train a corps of volunteers who presumably will go out and share their skills in community gardens around the Austin metro area.  It's one of those great ideas I wish had been my own, because it manages to incorporate both the fun of gardening with the larger idea of service, and connecting with the community around you.

I'm all for the idea of connecting, though I'll be honest:  this class is more about connecting with my wife and children than it is about any grander sense of the word.  Yes, I do like the idealistic notion of breaking down the barriers between myself and my Fellow Man, but I'm even more excited about doing something special with Jeanette.  My wife and I don't see each other enough.  It's a simple statement, but it's also one that resonates.  It's the kind of sentence you read and then nod your head and think, "You know what?  My spouse an d I don't see each other enough either..."  It's the nature of the world we live in.

So to have an activity, a hobby, or a passion we can share is something I think we've always looked for.  Lately, we've tried yoga, which has been great.   In the past, we've played a little tennis together, worked out at the gym on occasion, and even went roller blading, albeit briefly, which we joke about, because it was supposed to be what we did on our first date, and it only took me about fifteen years to make good on that promise.

Gardening is something that I think will work better than these other activities, only because it ihas always been a connector for me.  When I think of home gardening, I immediately think of my father, out in our yard at 18 Hartford Lane.  (Once again, as my friend Gayle Saks-Rodriguez points out, all roads lead back to Hanno.)  He enjoyed waking up early and getting out into the yard.  He planted many trees, including a row of poplar saplings he ordered through the mail -- forty-inch twigs that became, eventually, a sixty-foot fence of dappled sunlight.  (I noticed last time I passed by the house at 18 Hartford Lane that they'd cut down the trees.  It's their right, I suppose, to prune and start anew.)

In addition, my father grew a beautiful rock garden that flanked the front entrance to our home, filling it with what I remember to be a wide variety of multicolored flowers.  He planted rose bushes and an apple tree.  He had a back patio built, around a lovely mimosa tree, whose leaves I recall being silk-smooth to the touch.

And he did try has hand at vegetables.  The way time distorts memory, I couldn't tell you how many varieties of vegetables there were, or for how many seasons he grew them.  This would have been in the early 1970's, some 40 years ago now.  Of course, when I close my eyes and think back, there were tomatoes, carrots, cucumbers and lettuce, all of it shiny and bright as the produce rack at the supermarket, just after the piped-in recording of distant thunder rises up and the sprayers have spritzed the merchandise.

I do know he tried his hand at corn one summer.  I specifically remember it climbed the posts of our back porch, along with some grape vines.  Where it gets spotty is when I try to recollect whether or not a crop was ever produced.  Things get further confused by a story my father used to tell about his own childhood.  He told it every time we ate corn on the cob, and though my brother and I groaned each time ("God, Dad, not that story again."), it's a good one, and I tell it myself, as I've no doubt my younger brother does at his own dinner table, to his own family, some 1,700 miles away from mine.

When my dad and his family arrived from Europe in 1940 or so, they came together for a dinner at a cousin's house in Larchmont, New York.  It was a big meal -- maybe a holiday (Thanksgiving, if you like) -- and one of the dishes on the table was corn on the cob.  This was exotic to the Fuchs family.  They'd never had it before.  When he and his older brother (probably 12 and 15 respectively) bit into the strange vegetable, they looked at each other, eyebrows raised at the amazing sweetness and flavor.  It was so good, my father told, that they began to laugh, and the two of them continued to laugh, eating ear after ear of delicious sweet corn as they went.  It was for this reason that my father always classified corn on the cob, for the remainder of his life, as either "Laughing Corn" (worthy of his stamp of approval) or not.

I don't know whether the Citizen Gardener course will ever fulfill its promise to connect me and my family with the members of our larger Austin community.  I will say this, however:  Getting out into my garden has connected me to my wife, to my children, and to the memories that keep my ancestors alive within me.  I am creating memories for my own children, just as my father did for his.    And in this way, the class has paid itself back already.  Tenfold.

The author, getting ready to build his first palette composter. 

I Know, I Know: Everybody's Irish on St. Patrick's Day

My maternal grandmother's maiden name was Hazel Ferell, and try as I might, I cannot locate any photographic evidence of the Ferells in my mother's scrapbook, although she does mention her grandmother, "Momma Ferell," in a couple of her letters. (I did, however, find proof in our family geneology Tracking Barefoot Runyan: Descendants of Isaac Barefoot Runyan, compiled by Marie Runyan Wright.) Anyway, I mention it because it means I have some Irish in me. I believe my mother was a quarter Irish, so I guess that makes me an eighth. And my kids would be one-sixteenth, right?


Saint Patrick's Day is actually a holiday I've never really gotten into on any level. I'm sure I've worn green most years, (I'm wearing muted olives and camo as I write this)but I don't believe, for example, that I've ever drunk -- or vomited up -- green beer.


In fact, for the past eleven years (wow) since my father's passing, I've had my own, personal reason for having a negative reaction to this holiday. In March of 2000 my father was dying of cancer and was an in-patient at Greenwich Hospital. I was living in Brooklyn at the time and did not have a car. In order to visit my father, I had to take a Metro North commuter train about one hour each way -- not a pleasant experience under normal circumstances. But when you're going to visit a dried out and yellowing version of your once vital parent while surrounded by people euphemistically referred to as "revellers," the reality becomes nearly unbearable.

The memory of visiting my father on St. Patrick's Day gives me no ill will toward the Farrell sliver of my genetic make-up, nor to the Irish as a people. (This is where I'm supposed to say "some of my best friends are Irish" or "my favorite band is Irish," or "I just love Conan O'Brien!")

I will say that when I think back to my time in Europe in the late 1980's, Ireland was one of the most welcoming places we visited. I don't know whether Sue Barney will remember it this way or not, but as I recall our arrival in Dublin, I picture us with our tourist map open, riding the DART (Dublin Area Rapid Transit). We are immediately surrounded by a group of kindly older men, poking at our map with their pinkies and pointing in various directions. They were literally elbowing each other out of the way in order to help us, and none of them had their hand held out for payment. I don't know whether we offered; I'm sure they would have refused it, and strongly.

I realized some time later that the reason they may have reacted to our presence that way could have been -- aside from their generally generous nature -- our age. We were in our early 20's, and in the Dublin of the late 1980's you just see people our age. They all left for England, America and elsewhere, hoping for better prospects. It's changed since the tech boom of the 1990's, but back then it was like a reverse Peter Pan or Logan's Run situation.

Well now, this rumination on Saint Patrick's Day has brought me halfway round the world and back! I suppose one of the things that makes us human is our ability to hold a plurality of meanings for a variety of things at one time. This holiday may very well be one of those complex things in my heart for years to come.

Remembering "Opa"

My memories of Dr. Bill Fuchs are vague and fading fast. My father's father was a dapper man in the old style. When I remember him, he's nearly always wearing a suit. Sometimes, he's relaxing at home in a cardigan sweater over a button down shirt, slacks and loafers.



I do recall that he smoked cigars and to this day, as objectionable as I find them, there's a comforting aspect to their odor, as well, thanks to Opa. That's what my siblings, cousins and I called him. German for "Grandpa." Our grandmother, his wife Maryanne, was Oma.



Opa played tennis, and there are good stories from his playing days, like the one my father wrote up and had published in "Tennis" Magazine, called "Portugal Against the World." The story is both comical and sad, and tells of my grandfather's entry into a European tennis tournament during World War II. He was a resident of Lisbon at the time, and wished to play representing Portugal, instead of Germany, where he was born, raised, and from which he ultimately fled. As the tale goes, the only flag they could find at the request of the aging tennis player was enormous, two times the size of any of the other flags of the other countries being represented during the tournament. Thus the title.



I found the above photo of Opa quite by accident. I actually did a Google Images search of my father's name, and this popped up. It's from a genealogy site. ("The Family History of the Calzaretta, Krieger, Michaels and Rafael Families") I love it, and am considering using it as my profile picture for a while, just to get him back into the world, even briefly.



There may be a few of you out there who will remember this: (I sort of downplayed it at the time) but I did get to honor Dr. Fuchs in a rather striking way, when I wore his formal tuxedo to my senior prom, in May of 1981. (You get a glimpse of it above -- note the felt top hat I'm holding against my left leg. It had his name, "Dr. B. Fuchs," embroidered inside.) Unfortunately, I was hot and uncomfortable in the wool tails, and a little stressed about having to drive my girlfriend's father's Buick Electra, 225 -- a BOAT of an automobile that I almost wrecked on our first turn out of her neighborhood -- but I did look good. And it was an honor to have my grandfather "with me." (He had died less than two years before this picture was taken, so that loss was still fresh for me.)



Our culture doesn't honor our ancestors the way others do. I've always been the keeper of memories in my family, like my uncle Geoffrey Fuchs before me, and I'll admit to slipping a bit as of late. My hope is that these blogs will re-kindle that flame for me.

I'd say they already have.