Trees Of Our Fathers

It's not often I get to do anything really foolish. My time is pretty much taken up with tools and books and cameras and making the ideas and images my brain churns out, into reality. Sure, I tend to travel too much. For no particular reason I'll drive to Maine or fly to Laos or piddle down the coast to the northern California redwoods. But that's still experiential and more often than not, adds to the quality of my life.

Let's not get into what really is a qualitative life. You really want to stick to the numbers anyways. Play it safe and stay between the lines. There is a system, and the system has rules. You need to learn to play by the rules. You need to learn how to get along in the system, to learn how to get ahead. Always get ahead or you are dead. I guess that pretty much sums it up?

What you don't want is any time on your hands. You don't want a chance to think and reflect. Keep your nose to the grindstone. No looking around. The military has known this for a long time. They keep you busy. They keep you looking straight ahead. The last thing you want is for your brain to click on, for it to start churning out comparisons, ideas, or just random data. Forget the birds of the field, that neither sow nor reap. That's uneconomical, maybe even bohemian. Stick to the schedule- up, coffee, work, lunch, work, home, eat, TV, and sleep. Forty years of that and you can retire and do what you want. Don't worry if you can't remember what that is, there's a system and it has rules and it will tell you what you want.

Only right now I want to plant a redwood grove for my dad. He caught a bad case of multiple myloma about three years ago. All you can do is pour on the morphine and pray that your own father dies. The week before he did, dad changed his mind about the whole Catholic way to go and opted to be cremated and his ashes dumped in the lake where he went to Y-camp as a boy.

So now I'm planting a memorial grove. For the last couple of years I have been propagating redwoods for just such an occasion. It's a big project, but so far I have been able to justify the time and physical effort. It's going to take a lot more. I'm okay with that. I just wonder how to write about it. How, is just some long winded essay on dig hole, put in tree. Why, might be a little tougher. Like the project itself I'll chip away at it whenever I have the odd free moment. Before long I might even make some sense. By fall I hope to have made some progress. My dad's not going anywhere. I get to do something off the reservation, against the odds, completely quixotic, wholly uneconomical, a freeform state of whimsy that could only happen because a man sacrificed his life to allow me that opportunity. So yeah, I have a couple of months to spend, and a mountain of dirt and rocks to move and a space to create. Hop in, let's go for a ride.