"Road to Hell Paved with Unbought Stuffed Dogs"

My college friend Peter recently unearthed this long-buried memory for me. Fans of Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises will recognize the title of this post, but just in case you need the backdrop, here's the set up (www.perpenduum.com/2008/07/happy-birthday-yesterday-hemingway/) :

Jake is being encouraged by Bill to buy "just one stuffed dog" to "brighten up his flat" but Jake declines. Bill tells him "it will mean everything in the world to you after you've bought it" but Jake says he'll "get one on the way back." Few things are more clear than that he has no intention of getting one at all, and Bill drops the famous line, "All right. Have it your way. Road to hell paved with unbought stuffed dogs. Not my fault."

It's been a long time since I did any meaningful literary analysis, and I'm not going to pretend to try now, but I am so grateful to Peter for bringing this strange and haunting passage back into my consciousness.

There are a lot of strange, small things that claw at my mind every day. Things that I can't really explain why I think it would be important, or of value long-term. Things that in fact in the moment are utterly bizarre and meaningless, and that run the risk of making me seem nearly unstable. (I mean really, who just buys a taxidermied DOG for crying out loud?)

But Hemingway is on it....and yes, he was seen as a tad unstable, but maybe that is the consequence of living in the Real. He is known to have said something to the effect of I don't know why everyone says writing is so hard, all you have to do is sit down at the typewriter and bleed...........and that he did.

He bled out this idea that we don't know what is valuable all the time, but that it's the weird little chances we take that lead to our closest touch in this world with what is authentic and expressive and inexplicably imporant. Hell is when we realize we didn't exert ourselves or take chances on something being relevant or meaningful, even if at the time we can't explain it at all.

So here goes. Peter, I can't explain why you linger as an important personality in my life. We weren't particularly close friends, we didn't take a lot of classes together, we didn't have a shared social scene. But one thing I do know, my personal road to hell has been missing opportunities to tell people they mattered, they were unique, they stood out and they still enhance my life in ways large and small. That you would pop up with this quote seems about right.

Thanks for doing it, and thanks for reminding me we don't always get to know why something is important, but we do get a chance to follow through.

Storm Brewing

Sometimes in the middle of a beautiful sunny day, there is a terrible secret.

Sometimes when our eyes are full of delight and our hearts are full of love, we can be blind to the actual climate of a situation, and those clouds can come roiling up out of nowhere and, well.....you just wished you'd checked The Weather Channel.

I had a tough experience this weekend watching a dear friend verbally attack someone else that I love, and it all happened at what was supposed to be a nice event. After a little reconnaissance I figured out what happened, but that didn't really make it any better. It got me thinking about the difference between how a person feels and how they act.

I don't really want to argue about the feelings. You can't tell people their feelings are wrong. (You can, but it makes things worse.) But I might want to have a conversation about the actions. I'm debating this because I was not directly involved and it may alienate me from the person who said some inappropriate things. He's in a very stressful emotional state to begin with, and I don't want to upset him more. But I have not been able to stop thinking about how unkind the words were and how far out of kilter they were with the actual situation.

I did call the person who received the aggression, and extended my regrets that it happened. That might be enough.

It might not.

Photo credit Zevotron, http://www.flickr.com/photos/randomurl/842016056/

"We Demand a Shrubbery!"

“…….One that looks nice and is not too expensive.” If you don’t know this reference, I probably can’t do much to help! Monty Python’s Holy Grail features these enormous knights who confront King Arthur on his quest and demand a sacrifice of “shrubbery.” Makes total sense, right?

As funny as it was to me the first time I heard this sketch a million years ago, it somehow has just gotten funnier as I’ve gotten more involved with gardening over time. Ah, the shrubbery…..azaleas, boxwoods, junipers and the like; pretty much any round mound you can pick up for $9 at Lowe’s Home Improvement Center. There are some major crimes against landscaping happening in my neck of the woods, and misuse and abuse of shrubs is the number one offense.

It got out that you are supposed to plant “foundation shrubs” around your house. Occasionally this morphs into foundation trees, though I’m not sure why. Rarely is it taken into account what size these plants will become over time. It appears they are expected to stay the size they were when they were put in the ground. Too close to the house, too close to each other, lined up like soldiers with no variety behind another line of identical plants. Ack!

The whole look screams, “Whoever did this had no idea what they were really doing!” and the continued presence of these overgrown monotonous linear eyesores whispers, “And whoever lives here now has no idea what to do with it!”

Life can be this way. We do things out of ignorance, thinking we are doing something good, or at least expected. One day, the results just are……well……overgrown and out of place and kind of not what we were going for.

The beauty of the lessons of the garden for me is that, yes, it can be a ton of work to go back and undo some bad decisions. But it can be done. And better yet, undoing the wrong with a new plan in hand based on the lessons of the old effort can be incredibly satisfying.

For both you and your neighbors.