Balcony Garden

The Lebanese are shocked if someone builds a dwelling place without a balcony. In warm weather, most of the year, people live on their balcony, and all year round they leave their plants out. Many buildings in Beirut have deep dirt-filled planters built into the balconies. The result is thick vines of purple bougainvillea, jasmine and verbena grown all over the city.
Our daughter Sonya’s apartment in Beirut, where we camped out on her life for two weeks, has two balconies. The “big one,” with its wide, dense, busy viewspace offering close perspectives on several construction projects and lots of smaller, older Mediterranean style buildings, is also home to a dozen or so flowering plants. Planted in large pots from which vines emerge, climb walls on homemade lattices and twist around one another, bougainvillea and jasmine offer the biggest shows. Since it was February when we were there, the bougainvillea was beginning to offer a few cheerful blossoms. Herbs, annuals and other perennials were still awaiting their hour.
The neighbors in the lower house across a narrow street but more or less in front and center from the balcony where we sat and watched the world were already preparing for the new growing season. Their garden occupied much of a broad, flat rooftop, consisting of maybe thirty large pots and a few small trees. Many of the pots had severely pruned rootstock with short stems of what could only be rose bushes protruding above the soil. We watch them walk among their plants, conferring.
They see us.
Both parties wave.
A day later a huge conical pile of yellowish dirt appears on an unoccupied piece of the fourth-story roof. Since we were not out of bed early enough to be in good balcony-spying position whenever this dirt arrived, we can only speculate on its source and means of arrival. Helicopter? Considerable huffing and puffing up the stairs by poorly paid sherpas? Family members from “the village” (all Beruitis have a village, where growing is practiced) arriving with a truckful of this precious ultimate source of new life? Magic?
Howsoever it got there, the appearance of the yellow dirt ushered in a new era of re-potting, the shaking of old dirt off old roots, the summary disposal of unwanted plant material and other stuff over the side of the building, and the reinstallation of the fortunate neighbors’ balcony garden in its new soil.
Inspired, some days later we took action on our own front.
Owning to an unfortunate water shortage last summer (when you leave home in August you are relying on a substitute plant attendant, who in this instance did not attend well or faithfully), one of Sonya’s large, many-branched plants had died. So it was that Anne and I were pressed into service as visiting workers. We tracked down the dead branches, disentangled them from the living neighbors, and cut off about two garbage bags worth of dead vines.
The neighboring climbing plants shed a lot of deadwood also. The jasmine lost most of its upper stories, and I put in some time tying up and styling the low, new-growth green shoots, borrowing twine from the lattice work to wrap up these young branches and encourage them upward. Onward and upward with the art of balcony gardening!
Many other potted plants – from old ferns to new sweet alyssum – need repotting. Later that day, then, we tackled the challenge of finding garden soil in a densely built city. The obstacles: we didn’t have a car. Friends having a car were too far away, or had valid excuses: jobs, babies, lives of their own. We wanted to sight-see around the city on foot, but not carry bags of dirt while we did it. Nobody in the neighborhood sold dirt. In fact even by Lebanese standards, it was too early to sell plants.
Nevertheless, at the end of the day, we took a cab ride to a “department store,” an usual establishment in a distant neighborhood, whose Dubai owners had recently taken over from local owners, meaning that the store’s fabulous French food service had been replaced by an American fast-food franchise (people in Dubai apparently not knowing any better). Just as in a Wal-Mart there was a gardening section, where we bought a couple of manageable bags of potting soil, a bottle of water soluble fertilizer, and a metal fork for poking at compacted soil in the pots of balcony gardens. We took them home in a taxi. Taxi fare in Beirut is sixty-seven cents per person. Bags of soil ride free.
We held our own little happy, messy re-potting party a few days later. Sonya’s housecleaner cleaned up. Anne and I await news updates on the success of our efforts.

Walking Shoes

Bring your walking shoes to Beirut. The city is better than a movie. All of the natives walk the Corniche, the seaside promenade that runs from commercial port downtown all along the harbor, past cafes, yacht clubs, military posts, an amusement park, beach clubs built into rocks, and the gigantic weather-carved boulders known as the Pigeon Rocks. Locals climb out on the rocks to fish or swim. Visitors are wise to stay on the broad pavement of the Corniche and watch the action. Cyclists, couples, women in loose headscarfs, girls who wear the more fully covering “conservative” head-and-neck scarf over form-fitting sheath dresses and jeans. Men exulting over fast-played backgammon contests. One evening’s two-minute Hezbollah vehicle caravan demonstration – people drive slowly, wave flags and yell out of car windows. (This in response to the recent memorial for Rafik Harriri.) Pushcart food sellers, including some selling roasted ears of corn on sticks – an outdoor treat here the way pretzels are in America.
Beirut is bustling with a building boom, but below the yellow construction cranes people still live the Mediterranean lifestyle on the sidewalks, the cafes and the restaurants. A personal, highly interactive, down-to-earth city with busy streets, steady pedestrian traffic, and an endless variety of little stores, fashion boutiques, and upscale galleries. In Lebanon, the owners of the mom and pop groceries want to meet your mother, and your daughter’s Palestinian refugee friend brings you a “welcome” gift. In Lebanon, your boss invites your parents to her home for dinner, and in this country there is no such thing as a quick, easy (or early) dinner. In Lebanon, the bus always waits for you. In fact drivers stop on the odd chance that pedestrians might want to hop on and go back to Beirut. You don’t have to look for a taxi, taxis look for you, prowling the busy streets and beeping at people who look like foreigners. Somehow they can tell.
Attractions that might be hard to get close to, too crowded or expensive in other countries are cheap and accessible – probably too accessible – in Lebanon. Spectacular Roman and Byzantine ruins can be visited in the coastal cities of Tyre and Byblos. Touch the columns, sit on the stones, climb through the weathered remains of amphitheatres and extensive Roman baths. No fences keep you from climbing down into the burial caverns. When you walk the battlements and towers of the Crusader fortresses in Sidon and Tripoli no railings tell you how far to go. Nothing keeps you from climbing out to stare at the spectacular rooftop views of the hillsides of Tripoli where every inch has been built on. In Lebanon, they’ve never heard of liability.
In Beirut, neighborhood store owners without much English go out of their way to serve you. People stop you in the street if you’re looking at a map: “Do you want Hamra?” Gathering point for the city’s intellectuals in the years before the civil war, Hamra has become newly fashionably – the hot district for clubs, bars and late night life. The bars serve freshly squeezed blood orange juice and vodka cocktails.
There are no morality police in Lebanon.
The high standards of food preparation in restaurants and shops – even the fast food is good – is based on fresh produce picked that morning in the country’s fertile regions and trucked to the cities. An array of citrus varieties (six kinds of oranges) were ripe in February; also bananas grown along the coastal road south to Tyre; avocadoes, mangoes, snap beans, egg plant, zucchinis with their blossoms still one them, potatoes, tomatoes.
In Lebanon there are lots of cars, everyone drives as fast as they can, honks frequently, pulls into traffic without a second thought, and yet somehow watches out for all the other drivers, knowing they operate by the same rules, which are no rules by American standards.
I have vowed never to get behind the wheel of a car in Lebanon. Besides, walking is too much fun.

Wall garden

The snow had grown stale. Most of it was gone, and only the places where the snow had been piled up after shoveling or plowing had more than a granulated plastic-looking skin. And even those bigger piles of snow were dirty. It was human-generated dirt. It came from car exhaust and dirt in the air, pollution; the scatter-shot, spot-pocked, melt-mottled surfaces of the re-frozen snow piles glazed by road salt or sand.
The garbage that had been there when the snow fell, or was added by the road crews after it had begun, was still around. Dog messes, litter, cigarette butts.
It was all the winter days I had ever known in one. Not the special, or magical, or “beautiful” ones that come with fresh snow. No sleigh bells. Sleigh bells only happened in commercials. There were cars, but not a steady stream.
Mostly there was nothing. Some moisture in the air, the temperature hovering a degree or two over freezing. Skies gray. The smell, if you could call it that – it wasn’t the smells you get at other times of years, the smell of things growing, or earth unfreezing in the spring, or dried leaves covering the ground in the fall – was more like the wet asphalt smell you get when a rain first starts, or after it ends. But there was something else to it – a bitter, acrid smell.
It was the odor of last days, holding on and digging in – embittered, abandoned, let down by the way things had turned out. The peculiar odor of old snow on urban streets, making a kind of grim last stand.
I’ve had days like that. I recognized the feeling. A lot of days that were gray, a little too cold, nothing exceptional either way, and nothing happening. Something would happen eventually. But not today; and not tomorrow either…
I take my garden fantasies indoors. I make a garden on my walls.
I had some photos up already. Not our photos. (Though we did make a calendar this year. That one’s hanging in the kitchen.) I worked with other calendars, old ones, which offered beautiful landscape shots for each month. Not necessarily New England seasonal landscapes. Japanese gardens; Mediterranean gardens.
I cut the photos out and pinned them to my color-starved walls. So now my color-starved eyes have something new to look at. I have grown pink-flowering cherry trees and orange-leafed maples on the walls of the study.
Just a few, I tell myself. Don’t overdo it. To help the mind bloom in winter.

Their ears should be burning

Robert J. Lurtsema must be spinning in his grave.
Somehow the angry howl of classical music lovers who found all their favorite programming dumped by the radio station they supported with years of tax-deductible donations hasn’t reached the tin ears of the WGBH’s corporate managers. Maybe they need an HD outrage receiver to hear what the station’s loyal, dues-members have been saying about their format change.
Over four hundred people attended a forum last month on the question “What Can We do for Classical Music Radio in Boston?” The answer almost everyone who packed the pews of the Old South Church would offer is "put it back on GBH!" Boston’s oldest public radio station dumped its music programming last month in favor of a news and talk format that mimics but falls short of WBUR’s. If you want non-stop news and talk, there are plenty of places to go. If you want classical music you must now – by fiat of GBH’s management – go to WCRB.
Only you probably can’t, because CRB’s signal (beamed from Lowell) is too weak to be heard in much of Boston, the entire South Shore, and all points beyond – wiping out classical radio for thousands of households where GBH’s famously strong signal is a New England treasure. Holy Fathers in Taunton found themselves excommunicated by GBH. Disabled seniors in Auburndale were deprived of the daily companionship of the music which speaks to their souls.
Classical music lovers, many of whom have listened to the station’s first-rate programming since Lurtsema began Morning Pro Musica in 1971 (or longer) discovered that their so-called “membership” in GBH meant nothing. As “members” we made annual contributions to the station’s upkeep. But management failed to consider our interests or consult our opinions when it decided to banish classical to CRB’s radio signal Siberia.
Many such listeners – or former listeners – packed the Old South Church forum, and about three-quarters of the house raised our hands when asked how many of us could not receive CRB’s signal. Listeners told GBH’s radio general manager John Voci (a forum panelist) that his station has forgotten both its mission and its identity. GBH’s management, they pointed out, was now using Arbitron ratings to justify its program decisions just like any commercial station. A woman from Roslindale who told Voci she felt “abandoned” by GBH drew little comfort from his advice that she could listen to the station’s stream on computer. She didn’t have a computer.
Even those who can tune in CRB aren’t happy with what they’re hearing. The new non-commercial CRB is too much like the old commercial CRB, playing single movements of symphonies, relying on a narrow playlist of classical’s top 50, and dropping the live in-studio performances by talented, young, otherwise seldom heard performers that GBH’s new, expensive, completely unnecessary studio was supposed to be for.
GBH’s seven-hours-a-day classical programming was educational, listeners said, it was a service, it furthered Boston’s vibrant musical culture, it was a daily presence in thousands of households. The station’s news and information mission was more than adequately carried out by its morning news show, its drive-time All Things Considered and The World shows. Why, GBH members wanted to know, did the station have to cut out its heart?
Adding insult to injury, the spin GBH puts on this cruelest cut drives listeners like myself positively over the edge. The station’s happy talk promos keep bragging that GBH has “saved” Boston’s only all-classical station by purchasing CRB. To classical music lovers that’s like firebombing Boston to save Nut Island. Then they ask us for money.
Voci let drop the real reason for the change when he dismissed an appeal for just a little bitty taste of classical on GBH. “It’s a business,” he responded. Well, no, it’s a nonprofit educational organization. Businesses don’t ask people to donate their money. A station determined to operate like a commercial, for-profit radio station has no right to its non-profit status and no reason to be considered a “public” station at all.
I’m afraid that what Mr. Vocci is really saying is that classical music fans are old and will only get older and that as soon as they’re out of the picture altogether in GBH’s business plan the better things will be for the bottom line. But I wonder if management has calculated on a rapid withdrawal of support by a core membership.
My wife tore up her membership card and mailed it back to GBH with a suitably scathing letter of resignation. Maybe if other listeners withhold all contributions until classical music comes back to GBH, management will figure out how to tune us in.

A Dream Garden

Winter Places

All very open and secret
A place people come to only with dogs
I feed on the aura
The dim, hidden, melancholy, root-tugging silence
I walk the dog in myself


There were snowless January afternoons like this on Long Island, too, in which one imagined a story. The theme of the day’s story is every day’s story, that the days are gone. Those bare January hours back then are just like this one, then, because this one goes as well. The one fact of living is ever-passing, all other facts in abeyance.
I walk along the edge of a long green field, the mayor’s park, the city’s pride because it is an open, grassy space with a view of the water. It would be welcome, even spectacular perhaps, by the standards of a flat Long Island housing development where there are no perspectives, no looking down on water, but this place does little for the hunger for wild, secret moments, once that hunger has been wakened, fed, and acknowledged. I avoid people, three loud teen boys (though only one is talking, two are standing), pursuing their own liberation by the empty boat rack. You have to stand just so, grouped; someone must talk. The one who talks is short and as wide as a billboard advertising the secrets of adolescence. They have earned their separation…. I walk up the green slope of the favored park and circle around the other side of the grassy horseshoe lip, knowing there’s another path along a marsh this side if I can get to it. I find a gully that cuts downhill, find it clogged with dead snow-crunch, bushwhack around it.
On the flat path beside the salt marsh, I discover (as suspected) I have been here too. Old places, neglected places, at the edges of things. Not beautiful, not far enough away, just stocked with stored-up people-less space and time. I look for birds, seeing one, tall and white eventually. But it’s a watery reflection that elongates and confuses his shape: only a gull.
The kind of places, I think, where I would go if I were homeless. So I suppose the homeless come here, but I see no signs of them. No real litter either, though the snow has only recently passed. Larger groups of birds, duck mostly, scatter their calls from further out into the creek, as it is called here, which flows toward the open water of the harbor. I hear crows overhead as I walk a cutback up through the woods, just a thin screen of trees, unfortunately, and find myself back in the “park,” the grass field with occasional human structures. A place for winter separations.

Day Dream

Nature is dreaming
It is an old feeling
always lived, always known
speaking of old days lived young
with black holes, leaking time

Snow-free January afternoons
cocking an ear for Long Island winters
old times: then or now?

On the edge of a long, green field,
the mayor’s park,
I long for wild, secret places,
barbarians bursting from the tree line
Only crows, however, signifying nothing

In the winter-dim marsh water
a single white-winged gull
stands tall in the stream’s reflection
It grows in the mind,
where all things are seen
Everything passes in the corner of an eye
The gull does not sing or fly
We come here for magnification

A garden of reflections

The snow blinds me. I cannot look at it when the sun shines. As it does, very brightly, in a cold January sky.
So I am now like one of Plato’s cave dwellers who cannot look at the sun (truth, reality, the idea behind the shadow) because their eyes are accustomed only to shadows, to darkness. The cave dwellers in Plato’s allegory of the unexamined life can’t see the truth of their existence; they see only shadowy approximations.
It’s a painful subject. I crave the light, the sun. It is necessary, good for me, provides the vitamins we miss in the winter, does something to the body chemistry, kicks in the endorphins or stirs up the enzymes. But I can’t look at it when the snow is this pervasive and the sun is high and unclouded.
I can’t have what I need.
Is this a parable? Does truth hurt? I need the truth, but I cannot take it?
Snow blindness aside, frigid temperatures or not, we need to live in nature, as much as possible. It is good for us, because our own nature grew from, developed out of, and remains part of Nature. We are natural beings. People say “mortal,” but that’s what mortal means. All living things in the natural world – and, folks, there isn’t any other for creatures with bodies – die. Perhaps our words or deeds or creations, a building, say, or a book, live on; and our memories live on in the lives of those who know us; but only for a short time, until nature takes them back as well. Nature is death, as much as birth. We conquer the world and the history books remember us for a comparatively long time; but in the end, obviously, clearly, unquestionably, all memory of our existence passes away. Everything passes, a nice calming sort of way to putting our condition. All is vanity, sayeth the preacher – not so nice. But it really amounts to the same thing.
Consider the lilies – not simply of the field – but of the garden, where we call them ‘ornamental’ or, tellingly, ‘day lilies’ (or 'toad lilies,' which bloom in October and win a place in our calendar). Consider how beautiful they are – or were. Do they endure? Do we remember them? I’m afraid I don’t see any lilies out there now and have not for some months. Granted they did not toil or spin (or weep), and I must say they seemed pretty cheerful about the state of things and uncomplaining about their inevitable decline, loss of their beautiful, youthful parts, and eventual – passing? Their natural decay back into the soil. I keep some of their petals in a bowl. They have a second life as dried versions of their former vitality. It’s a nice reminder, though a mere shadow of the real thing, not that much like the living flower. In reality, indisputably, the flowers are gone. Forever.
But, wait! They’re coming back! With any luck. I hope.
I can’t speak for the lily’s point of view, but I don’t worry about a flower’s mortality though poets from time immemorial have offered them as symbols of the inevitable passing of all beauty and all life.
January is the death of the year, the apparent death of nature in New England and most places in the northern hemisphere. Those dark pink buds on my rose bushes are not in fact going to bloom any time this season. “This season” is so over. We contemplate a graveyard in winter snow. And we inevitably think of our own endings. We go; new people come.
For as the song says, the graveyards go to flowers, every one.
We need nature, as much nature in our lives as we can get, to remember who we are. But then we have to make peace with that knowledge.

Things as they are

Scatters of snow fluff fall nonchalantly through the hours. I look away. By late afternoon the soft stuff falls again through the second by second intensification of cast iron slow-darkening sky, looking as if ocean deeps were turned upward to the clouds.
Atmosphere both heavy and light, filled with meaning and meaning nothing. A seeming saying-something moment, a pregnant pause in a story.
But the story is merely the ineffable suchness of real time, present, real, existing: things as they are. Poets die in this moment (or seek a new dispensation). Hope dies; or rises anew. But the sky goes on composing in the gray, gloomily triumphant shades of its own abnegation, its self-emptying of all memory of light like a vacuum that swallows an upside falling earth; the snow falls ever more soundlessly; the gossamer gray gloom speaks ever more clearly of nothing but itself; nothing goes on happening, hearts continue to beat, voices sing as they always do heard or unheard, the cat sleeps in my lap. It is still now.
Words cannot say.
Time passes.
In California, or is it Florida, farmers coat vulnerable fruit plants with water to create a protective coating of ice around them. The theory, I believe, is the ice keeps the temperature from going below thirty-two degrees on the fruits and their stems, sheltering them from some deeper intensity of cold than ice itself.
But it is well below thirty-two in our part of the world and has been for days. Should we not aim our hoses in the air and cover the sky with freezing water? Should we not live beneath domes of ice?