I love my avocado tree.
Don’t get me wrong.
I love all trees,
A genetic thing I think
That goes back to Wotan
And I suspect before,
When woods warmed my ancient forebears
As the ice inched slowly north.
But avocado trees and I
Have a special bond that
Ties back to the summer of forty-four
When I as a boy of eleven came
To California and delighted to find
One in my new back yard,
Of not much value, neighbors soon let me know,
Just a seedling with next to no fruit flesh to eat.
But for me it was the best climbing tree
I would ever know, mature with
Thick lateral limbs spread to the
Four corners of our small town compass,
Amply shading the grassless half of our backyard
And the Whittier patio where
Our family of six ate dinner often.
Sure, there was the downside chore
Of raking up the always shedding giant’s leaves
And the ugly round purple fruit with its huge
Seed wrapped in green-to-brown slime.
But Eureka! This was California!
That big seed with its creamy lumpy hide
Was prized by growers as hardy stock
On which to graft more commercial kinds for their groves.
My uncle happened to own an orchard and paid
Me 50 cents an intact pit that hadn’t split for my ugly harvest,
A princely sum of walking-around money
In those pinched times of fin de guerre.
#
Did I say he was my uncle by marriage not by blood?
This owner of three car-part shops and wealthy as we were not,
Confident Calavo gentleman rancher of citrus groves as well
Who lured my machinist father and his family west with promises never kept...
In fact, held Dad in a state of soft suspended penury until his drive dried up.
This entrepreneurial uncle not my blood
Also held FDR in florid-faced contempt
That surpassed even the scorn he saved for his field hands,
“Lazy Mexicans” he’d mutter to a baffled me,
A sheepish noontime dropout
When picking navels at their side.
And yet this lordly man who bossed about everyone
In my world and won my fear and lost my trust
Strangely and unwittingly sealed my love of avocado trees.
Lacking a son of his own,
He gave me gleaning rights to his La Habra grove,
Gave me first comb after the pickers went through
To use my baseball player eyes to spot the slight round
Curves hidden in a leafy roof of twenty shades of green
They had missed…and they missed plenty.
A Fuerte bonanza! Prized produce
Taken home to ripen on my roof
And sell when ready door-to-door
At the dear price of 40 cents per,
Not chump change for the late Forties.
For four boyhood years
I walked beneath that frog-green canopy
Rent here and there by a thin shaft of sun,
Easy in a dusty silence save
For the rare rustle of a rat in the dry leaves,
Serene in my sacred grove of innocence,
Alone with my green thoughts in my own green shade.
Then I had to exit Eden for the wider world.
My uncle sold his groves and I went off to war.
He died before I came back to find an altered place,
All the groves gone, the old orchard towns spreading
Their stucco crates to house the hordes of pilgrims
Crowding into the Promised Land
That never more would hold such promise.
Dear dead days as some poet said.
Yes, sure, some trees still remain,
Backyard relics of that vanished time
Gracing a family’s table with Persea Americana
In scattered tracts here and there.
But trees in numbers moved south to Fallbrook
Or up north Santa Barbara way,
And when I settled in LA to busy
Myself with doing nothing worth recalling
I went without and sensed the loss.
In later life, on the downside slide off my midlife hump,
I got another tree to love,
One of the backyard kind that gave shade and fruit alike
To me and my second family
In a seaside town not known as kind to Aztec nuts.
This ahuacatl is no premium market fare,
Not your noble buttery Fuerte,
Nor the choice round knobby Hass
(That dark mutant freak first grafted not far
In miles and time from my uncle’s old spread)
That ships so well to distant markets.
No, mine is an elongated lesser breed, pebbled green in its youth,
Then purpling slowly under the summer sun
To reach table grade in its fall-winter ripening,
Nearly as tasty as its betters if you eat it precisely right
In its two-day prime when the lemon flesh softens to near perfect,
Before going into a quick and stringy brown of fast decay.
Yes, the fruit is fine but the shade is better,
The thirty-foot giant is sheltering sky to our small backyard patio
Where my wife’s many-colored thumb has left its floral ring of pleasures
Around a half dozen fan-back chairs from which to watch
The dusk dance of late light through jostled leaves
Hard by the sundown sea.
We’ve tracked 27 years together now
On our separate animal and vegetable ways,
And shared our ups as well as downs,
The gift to me of two girls and a son,
And for it bumper crops in El Niño years
Where from one trimmed branch I could feed an office,
Sorrows brought us close as well
In what might be fancifully called the Tragedy of Three Trees.
A truly mighty stone pine stood a mere fifty feet north
In my neighbor’s yard and thrust its soaring needled crown
Into high tension lines where a local lad reached up
One day and touched his instant death in the company of my son
Who fell to earth shocked but mercifully alive.
Death brought an ambulance and a coroner’s team
Soon followed by many lawyers set on fixing blame.
“Boys will climb trees,” I tried to tell them,
But they argued for a year before the blood money
Was counted out and my insurance was cancelled.
Only then did Edison’s agents come and grind down
The great pine into heaps of sawdust
That left a gaping hole for the sky.
Not five years later came the burn again
Forty feet south in my other neighbor’s yard,
In a shaggy tree that put out small but sweet peaches,
When a trimmer touched his steel blade to the same killer wire.
I heard the noontime zap and went out back to find
A dark young man spread like Christ thrown backward
On a cross of boughs, stiff and dead enough to bring
The close-by fire crew to confirm that sorry fact.
The husk of the poor man from Michoacán
Was removed from our view for who knows where,
To be mourned afar, later on, by strangers to us.
No lawyers showed to find blame for a fee,
The fried peach smoldered for days and lacking
Muster to mount more leaves, slowly died.
That left my tree the survivor of the three.
All the more towering now with its flankers gone,
Rough-barked tough for my kids to climb…
But not too high I made sure.
Then came the blindside blow from
My not neighborly Westside neighbor
Who passed on the gift of proffered fruit and morning shade
By taking a chainsaw to its west-reaching arms,
(Perhaps to save him the months’ long sweep-up
Of messy leaves and buds that marred
His otherwise clean and stark backyard)
But my tree buckled, steadied, suffered,
Almost died from a quarter’s loss from whole.
It barely bore for a year or two,
Then came slowly back but not as before,
Dropping thumps on my bedroom roof at night,
The luckless embryos of alligator pears,
In a long summer rite of mass abortion.
The tree is old like me
And its finished fruits are likewise few,
Mostly reduced to one clinging
To the very end of a burdened branch
Which I still like to spot in the late-day’s onshore breeze,
Dancing doggedly in its jungle cover.
So who will go first?
Probably me.
All life stats considered.
So how do you say goodbye to a tree?
This lover does with some contrived cuteness
And homage to the poet in
This fond farewell:
Glory be to thee for dappling things!
—Larry L. Meyer
8/30/09
Photo by Molly Margaret Meyer.