Dad and the Bean Box

It's not about building the darn thing. It's about the time spent together.

My about-to-be 93 year-old Dad executing his design for a box to grow and trellis pole beans.

We are in the car, driving the last leg of our 1200-mile, five-day loop de loop. Farmer is in the back seat wedged between a 16-pack of Bounty paper towels and a flat of ‘phenomenal’ lavender from my dad’s favorite nursery. But I am the one currently in the dog house for suggesting we exit Delaware Route 13 to find a breakfast sandwich for me. About 6.7 miles later and two wrong turns, I got my sandwich.

Fortunately, my husband tells me he has passed quickly through the “seven stages of incredulity” about the half hour or so we lost on this side trip and has decided to focus on the humor of the situation instead. After all, as we crossed the train tracks in “downtown” historic Middletown (twice), we got to hear the street corner preacher shout “Love you guys!” when the light turned green and we pulled away.

It's all well and good unless we miss our 6:15 ferry. When you’ve been off-Island (or in America, as we call it), at a certain point all you really want is to be back on-Island. Though for me, leaving my Dad and sister is always difficult. This time, even more so.

We left the Vineyard Wednesday a.m. – a six o’clock wakeup for a 7 a.m. ferry – and drove to Delaware. (On Monday and Tuesday nights, I’d had a total of six hours of sleep.) Thursday we had time for coffee with Dad on the porch and a meander around the garden before we showered, dressed in our grown-up clothes, and got back in the car (leaving Farmer behind with Dad) to drive to Princeton, New Jersey for a memorial, a gathering in honor of one of my husband’s oldest friends. We stayed the night in the Lawrenceville Hilton Garden Inn and drove back to Delaware Friday morning.

I had the computer with me in the car and frantically finished editing and proofreading a publication for work while trying to maintain a Wi-Fi hotspot with my phone.

On the leg back from New Jersey, I also began to seriously freak out about the rest of the work – writing and editing – I have for four other publication deadlines coming up in the next seven days. I looked at my phone and saw that one of the deadlines was even moved up a couple days. What was I even doing trying to cram in a visit to my family during this busy time?

Dad instructing my husband on where to position the azalea in the hole he’d just dug.

I had promised my dad that we would help him with garden and safety projects while we were visiting this time, and I knew I had to muster everything I could to be present and available – and not at my computer or completely stressed out. But I was struggling.

When I confided this to my husband, he said, “What would Phil do?” Phil was his friend who had died of ALS at 72, the one whose life we had just traveled to New Jersey to celebrate. I never met Phil, but through a video produced by his wife and three grown sons, and from the testimonials his colleagues, friends, and brother gave, I got the distinct impression that Phil was that rare man who managed to be present for everyone in his life while working passionately on his career as an architect and planner. He was balanced, fair, engaged, and positive.

More than one person who spoke about him on Thursday said that when they were stuck they would simply ask themselves, ‘What would Phil do?’

So that’s what I did. I channeled Phil.

Farmer is an excellent garden supervisor.

We spent the next 36 hours mostly helping Dad with projects in the garden — and eating two delicious dinners at my sister’s house. And I tried not to think about work.

The thing is, while my husband limbed up three trees, raked up the branches, dug holes for and planted six large shrubs, chopped and removed the root ball of a giant azalea, and generally sweated his brains out, Dad and I did only one thing: erect a trellis for his bean box.

The Bean Box taking shape, about to be planted.

The bean box is an epic family saga – Dad began designing it almost three years ago, after he changed his mind about a landscaping box he built for a tree and decided to repurpose it to grow pole beans. For one reason or another, the project has moved along at a glacial pace. The pace on Saturday remained glacial (a test of my patience sent to me no doubt from my Higher Power) as Dad and I measured and measured (more than twice), cut deer netting into panels, wove poles through the panels, erected the X-shaped trellis, and finally planted the actual beans – seeds I had brought down to him in little envelopes the last time I visited. Fortex, Rattlesnake, and King of the Garden pole beans, plus a couple of bush varieties. Dad insisted that I be the one to plant the seeds, in no small part because he can’t crouch down any more.

Though Dad (93 in five weeks) can’t crouch and his old-age-induced balance problems are so acute that he reminds me of a Weeble, he can still yield a spade and a shovel like nobody’s business.

His doctor said the best thing he can do for his balance is to keep gardening, which puts his body through a range of motions. Though I completely agree with this – and know that Dad’s mental health depends on his focus on making something beautiful out of our yard – I worry (no surprise!) constantly about the inevitable falling. (If you recall, Weebles, that 1970s toy, wobbled but did not fall down. Not the case with Dad.)

Dad fell a few weeks ago when he violated his own rule of holding a handrail on the garage steps – he was carrying the recycling - and sliced his arm open on the license plate of his car as he tumbled down. His head (made of rubber apparently) bounced off the car and was none the worse. This is not the first time in the last few years that his head has bounced off a hard surface. But. But. Yeah. The run of luck and all that.

It's so hard not to want to be there all the time in case something happens. But even harder are the questions I get from both Dad and my sister – some of them to tease me, but many times in all seriousness: “Why can’t you be here more often? Why do you have to work so much when you’re here? Are you coming back for Dad’s birthday? Can you stay longer next time?”

Ouch. The tension I feel between having to work to earn a living – to pay the mortgage on the Delaware house and to have decent health insurance – and the desire I have to spend more time with my family, who live a full 9 hours away by car or plane, door-to-door, is painful.

Lately I’ve been eating a lot of chocolate chips (and bad things like breakfast sandwiches), and the schedule in the last couple weeks has forced my walking down from 10,000 steps six days a week to an average of more like a couple thousand a day. So my body does not feel good.   

For some reason, there is a giant Metasequoia (Dawn Redwood) in our suburban Delaware back yard. I marvel at it and think of its strength and resilience.

 

Though I’m supposed to be writing about how I find serenity in sobriety, this week I’m telling you: do as I say, not as I do. I’m one freak-out short of giving up something on my plate or quitting something, and I don’t know what it is. The only thing I do know is that I will not drink over stresses that I know will pass, one way or the other. I know I will talk to some fellow alcoholics this week. I have the most supportive husband in the whole world. I will try to get more sleep and more exercise. And most importantly I will try to let go of trying to solve everything as if it were an emergency. The best thing I can do is to try not to control things – so hard for me – because I really can’t. Easier said than done. I wish I were more like Phil!

Or Farmer.