Birthday Wishes

Happy birthday to my Father, who would have been ninety this September 4.  My Mother, in Santa Fe, will drink a martini for him—Tanqueray, straight up with an olive, very dry; and since I never inherited a taste for gin, I'll mark the day with a passage from his war novel (translated into Swedish and Italian).  He would have been happy that the Iraq conflict has officially ended, all this time later, though saddened that it started in the first place.

"Well, what I was getting at is how much gardening always amazes me. For example, you dig up glads in the fall, and you'd think that alone would ruin the poor things. But you don't stop there. You knock off all the dirt, whack off the stem, break apart twins, tear off new shoots—in other words disrupt everything the plant has done during the summer. I may be a lousy gardener, but that's the way I do it. Then I toss the bulb in a basket. They're really corms, but let's call them bulbs, the little nubbin that's left. You'd think they'd never grow again, sitting five or six months away from all moisture and light and everything conducive to life. But stick them back in the ground next spring and they actually grow. Each one becomes a beautiful plant, true to type, with fine big leaves and blossoms."
"Yessir."
"I don't want to be stuffy and labor the point, but it seems to me mankind is like that. You boys were uprooted, carted off to impossible places for long months—years in your case—with nothing conducive to growth and life. It's a wonder any of you survived, apart from death in battle itself. Yet the vital nubbin is there. Roots will go down as soon as you're stuck back in the right place."
"I suppose so, sir."
"Don't ever doubt it, Andy. I may be as poor a minister as I am a gardener, but in my opinion man is hardier than a gladiola bulb. He doesn't have to be coddled, although it's nice. He doesn't have to be preached at, although sometimes it helps. If his little nubbin of life gets good earth, sun, and fresh water—bingo, you've got roots taking hold, leaves forming, buds coming. Of course not all bulbs grow. Some rot, some are crowded out, worms get others. But a good bulb in good soil usually thrives, no matter how long its winter away from the sun."
"Yessir," Willy said. The chaplain winked at him.

Boyd Cochrell, The Barren Beaches of Hell

image: Christie B. Cochrell, Lake Como Flowers