WELL THEN, WHAT ARE MANNERS FOR?

Some folks think that manners are archaic, no longer applicable in a modern world.  Perhaps they do not understand the essential purpose of manners.  Every culture has a set of manners.  Although manners may differ from culture to culture, surely they are for communicating good will toward people we do not know.

And if you want to find a perfect illustration of the lack of manners in modern society, drive on the road.  Any road will do, a local road or a freeway or an interstate highway.  Every time we go out and about, we never fail to gasp at least once, because of the bad manners exhibited by way too many drivers.

Or watch a political debate or just an interview with a politician, while they accuse their opponents rather than stating their own positions. 

In far too many instances, rudeness and arrogance have become admired and encouraged and labeled as competency rather than what they are.  And this is true whether the individual is a driver of a vehicle who ignores the safety of all others on the road, or whether it is a candidate for higher office whose ambition is greater than their honesty and their sense of courtesy.

If an individual holds a door open for someone behind them, if a driver signals their intent to turn or change lanes or exit, if any kindness is shown to a perfect stranger just because …, these acts do not show weakness, they show good manners, they show an understanding of the basic glue that holds any society together. 

And manners can be extended even further:  to negotiations with other nations that will help those nations prosper as well as our own, and build toward peace rather than war. 

 

Because if we cannot indeed use mannerly behavior to make our travels safer, to show courtesy toward those with whom we disagree, to work toward peace and a better world, well, then, my original question stands:  “What are manners for?”

WHY WOULD ANYONE GARDEN?

The last two summers past, and now this summer, leave me wondering seriously why would anyone go to the trouble of gardening?  It isn’t that we have an elegant or extensive garden.  It is fairly small, and problems with the soil make it easier to grow some plants in pots.  Other plants are grown in pots because they are too vigorous for a small garden and can literally be contained by being pot-grown (did I mention crinums?).

And that’s another thing I’ve found:  either plants grow almost too well and too vigorously, or they don’t grow at all.  Or if plants do grow a bit, then they are not happy and stop growing and eventually just give up, about the same time I do.

But all of that is part and parcel for gardening, just the experiences of what plants will and will not do.  No, the concerns we are finding now have to do with the total environment in which we garden:  now, in the summers, for so many days it is 100 degrees or close enough; plants are supposed to need at least an inch of water a week and we haven’t had any rain in over three weeks and no rain is expected; we have to put sunscreen on, even on cloudy days because the earth’s ozone sun filter is thinning; for the past few years, the West Nile virus, carried by mosquitoes, has prevented us from sitting outside in the evenings and if we do venture out, we must use a bug repellent to ‘save our lives’.  Because it is so hot, we must rise before sunrise to get tasks done outside, and the rest of the day we are exhausted.

 

So I look out the window at flowers blooming.  I stand in the garden room with the screen doors closed against bugs and smell the scents of summer phlox and crape myrtles.  And, like every other gardener, I think about what needs to be done next in the garden, and I dream that next year will be better.  Without that dream, why would we, or anyone, garden?

BABYSITTING ON THE ROAD

Babysitting is probably an odd term to apply to experiences with drivers one encounters on freeways and interstates, and indeed sometimes local streets.  But ‘babysitting’ is the word I learned to apply to driving experiences many years ago when my job sent me to work in the downtown area.  At first, for a year, I drove the slow way with many traffic lights, because it had been many years since my work had taken me that far away from home.  After awhile, my courage increased and I began driving into town on the freeway, which is an inaccurate term if I ever heard one.  Free, maybe because there is no toll, but definitely not free of movement.

Anyway, at first I was truly shocked at the behavior of so many of the drivers on the freeway.  Carelessness with speed limits and changing lanes and signaling had certainly multiplied in the previous decades.  Ah, but eventually I developed the philosophy of ‘babysitting’ many of my fellow drivers:  trying to figure out if they were going to change lanes even if they did not signal; trying to move out of their way if they insisted on ‘tailgating’ (following me way too closely); in effect, being ‘motherly’ toward them, because goodness knows they needed it.  Foolish behavior was not limited to the very young; it included all ages and all sexes.

But developing the ‘babysitting’ philosophy somehow makes the two of us more observant, more polite and patient, more resigned to sometimes ridiculous or aggressive behavior.  And it works, whether we deal with those driving local roads on the phone or running red lights, or on the freeway, driving too fast or not signaling lane changes.  “Poor things,” we say to ourselves, “they don’t know how to use their turn signal.”   Of course they do, but we pretend, in order to explain their idiocy.  In fact, pretending is a good way to get through a lot of concerns and problems, and not just on the road.

DAISIES AND DAHLIAS

So when we married, many years ago, we had very little money, so little money that after paying for a small bakery cake and assembling the ingredients for a wine punch, we had to save what money was left for a brief wedding trip, and could not buy fresh flowers for the cake table.  So the mother of my husband’s best friend picked all the flowers in her flower beds, which were Shasta daisies, and that was what the wife of the best friend used to decorate.  Ever since then, I have been particularly fond of daisies.  Daisies are so cheerful, so sturdy, so encouraging and generous with themselves.  We have always tried to have some daisy plants wherever we have lived; some years they have bloomed profusely, other times not, but this year they are exuberant. 

 

And then there are dahlias.  Dahlias were plants I only heard of once in a funny, silly TV series where one of the characters grew them, but no one I knew grew them, and I never really saw a dahlia in person until the orange dahlia I planted as an experiment bloomed.  I had had a weak and/or wild moment while reading a bulb catalog and spotted this particular dahlia’s photo, and it looked much like a zinnia, and I love zinnias, so I ordered the dahlia.  Since then I have also tried dwarf dahlias and, this year, a miniature heirloom dahlia. 

 

 

Yesterday I was strolling around the garden with some brand new small pruners I recently acquired, deadheading here, pulling a weed there, and there were the daisies and dahlias all abloom.  So I cut some and brought them in for the dining table, just a few in a small budvase.    Looking at them in the vase, it occurred to me that they more or less represented both the real beginning of my life as an adult and the life I’m grateful to have had since the beginning of our marriage.   The daisies represent the innocence and ignorance of my youth; the dahlias could represent a lot about the years since then, the expectations and errors, and ultimately the willingness to accept life as it is and see what beauty I can find.  And there is always so much beauty we can find, if we look.

CHICKADEES AND TITMICE AND FINCHES OH MY

We have been very fortunate to have a bird feeder for the last several years.  Where we live now, we have a back garden and a birdfeeder that is squirrel-proof.  That means that one of the many squirrels who live around us, all of whom we call ‘Sid’ because one squirrel looks pretty much like another to our uneducated eyes, anyway, ‘Sid’ cannot get birdseed from the feeder.  It is cleverly designed so that Sid can climb all around it in a very funny (to us) way, but if he tries to perch on the little bar in the front of the feeder, it drops down and the feeder area is closed.  The squirrel will try sometimes to climb up the pole from the ground, but there’s a baffle there.  The best a squirrel can hope for is to glean seed fragments that the birds drop.

So the little chickadees, which look like little bandits, the titmice which are proudly crested, and the finches which are very cheeky little birds, all enjoy their meals , except of course for not wanting to share with each other.  And when the cardinals and jays come along, they reign supreme and the smaller birds simply move to a nearby tree or bush and wait.

What is such a wonderful luxury is, on mild mornings and mild evenings, and even the occasional mild mid-day, to be able to sit and watch the antic behavior of all the birds, including the doves who come to glean what falls from the feeder, and even, yes, the squirrels, who can defy gravity and fly from the crape myrtle tree to the feeder but who cannot find a meal there.  The feeder is for the birds!

BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR

There was a time in my life when I knew, just knew, that if and when I had a lemon tree, I would be happier than happy.  As a gardener, I would have arrived.  Because I am a curious gardener, I have grown, or tried to grow, a vast range of plants from ‘A’ (alstroemeria) to ‘Z’ (zephyranthes), with results varying from fabulous to ‘oh, well’.  But a lemon tree – that was the supreme goal.  Of course lemon trees can be expensive, so I waited and waited until I could finally find a lemon tree locally, from a reliable source, and that I could almost afford. 

We brought the lemon tree home, and then I did a massive amount of research, and, yes, only then.  We potted the tree up.  I visited it daily, observing, learning.  Its first year it produced a few lemons; my husband didn’t like the taste.  Rats.  Last year it produced even more lemons.  During the past two winters, we have rolled it in its pot and on a caster thingy into our garden room to protect it from very low and freezing temps.  The first year I even pruned it to make it more balanced, and it responded well, a huge gamble on my part.  This last winter it somehow really liked how we placed it in the unheated garden room, and bloomed all winter, even without bees to pollinate; have no idea how.  Because we had an erratic winter, it was rolled out, back in, and out again from the garden room; because it is thorny, my husband and son were less than thrilled with the efforts. 

Now it is back in its place on the patio, simply covered with tiny lemons and blooms that perfume the whole backyard garden.  It has produced small crops, great fragrance and beauty, frustration on the part of those who move it around, and great delight for the bees, which makes us feel better about the whole experience.

 
Did the lemon tree completely fulfill my gardening dreams and make me a supreme gardener?  Of course not.  Is the lemon tree wonderful?  Of course it is.

WHAT DO SQUIRRELS KNOW

No one would say that squirrels are intellectual  or wise.  But they must know something because they have altered what we recall as previous behavior.  We have had several years where acorn production was amazing, where there were areas where we simply walked on a carpet of acorns but this last fall was not that outstanding in acorn production.  Nevertheless, for the first time in our recent memories, the squirrels seem to have planted every acorn they could get their little paws on, because we have so far found hundreds of new little oak trees sprouting up everywhere. 

We have pulled up little oaks in flower beds, mowed them in the lawn, and found them sprouting up even in the potted plants that summer outside but which winter inside our garden room.  We laugh that if we stopped pulling up the little sprouts, we would very quickly be living in an entire oak grove.

 

Aside from all that, our resident squirrel, who we have named Sid, seems to have lost all fear or inhibition when we are around.  He boldly comes to glean fallen bird seed from the bird feeder.  He cannot access the bird feeder, but there’s all those lovely bits the messy birds drop.  The other day we were sitting on the patio, looked down, and there was Sid, apparently eavesdropping on our conversation.

So what with all this unusually intensive planting of acorns and this lack of caution around us, we cannot help but ask, “What do squirrels know?”