I look but sometimes can’t see.

Everest, from NASA’s Image of the Day Gallery. No matter how I squint, my eye doesn’t make this into a mountain.

Two weeks from today, NYC Swim hosts the Manhattan Island Marathon Swim. My cousins are coming from Guatemala to participate. It’s very exciting: the woman who’s my age fought a tough battle with breast cancer a few years back and decided to get revenge on her body by becoming a triathlete. This is worth mentioning because so few of us get up off our deathbeds to run marathons, let alone take a dip in the East River, which has to be at least as toxic as chemotherapy. I don’t know how she’s finding the strength to do this swim but it’s made me examine seriously what I think is possible and of what I might be capable. I mean, seriously. This morning I took a container gardening class, which caused me a major attack of stage fright.

“Waaah!” I waaahed, “What if I’m stupid?” Pete burst out laughing.
“You’re not stupid. Your brain is clogged with smart.”
“What if someone asks me a simple question and I answer with things I learned before my brain short-circuited?”*
“Like times tables?”
“Just like the times tables!”
“If you studied in third grade you’ll actually be right.”

I was so frazzled I left the house without my usual IV drip of coffee, but it turned out I had nothing to worry about because my friends Siobhan and Mary, plus the Fabulous Ex-Husband’s current wife Karen all met me there, and the teacher was fully crazy. The class focused on aesthetics and decorative plants, which don’t interest me. As Siobhan said, “Turns out that unless I’m going to eat it I can’t demonstrate the commitment to watering.” After about 45 minutes of basics, the whole class got up to get squishy with dirt. I’d brought gloves and plant pots but developed a shocking case of ennui when it became apparent that only a person with an in-depth knowledge of what plants need what conditions could set up one of these planters, and I’m already growing mesclun mix in window boxes.

“I accidentally took a class on fertilizer once,” Siobhan said.
“For your minor in art history?”
“I forgot the K stood for potash, not potassium.”
“I’ve lost a lot of shirts to potash,” Mary lamented.
“Where did they go?” I asked innocently.

Karen was having a grand old time, but the rest of us thanked the teacher and went on ways merrier than we imagined. The trick to doing it is – apparently – just doing it. I’m back at square one, where I belong.

*Yep. To this day, I blame it on a tragic feather boa accident.

“That’s a nice looking rain barrel ya got there,” he says from his side of the fence. Our neighbor, laying out a garden and looking befuddled, is the local Green Living Poobah here at the unnamed university. He’s also really young and somehow looks different each time I see him. If he weren’t wandering around the property adjacent to Pete’s wearing t-shirts I’d seen before, I couldn’t pick him out of a lineup. Let’s call him Davey because I wouldn’t be surprised to see him ignoring the advice of a Claymation talking dog.

Tata: Yeah yeah yeah. Remember you told Pete you bought your rain barrels at Lowe’s? The one in East Brunswick said Lowe’s didn’t sell them. I threw a giant hissyfit.
Davey: You what?
Tata: All I have to hear is the word no –

Seriously, last weekend, I stood at the customer service counter the Lowe’s on Route 18 in East Brunswick, NJ and explained to five different employees, with various titles on their Hi, I’m ____ name tags, that I would like to be able to walk into their embarrassingly huge garden section and walk out with rain barrels. I need at least four of them, I explained, and to have them shipped to my house would cost as much as a fifth rain barrel. I would prefer, I repeated and repeated, to pay Lowe’s for rain barrels and leave. Not one of them saw there might be some profit to Lowe’s to carry the very specific thing a customer was asking to buy four of. No, really.

Manager: At corporate, they don’t think it’s a good idea to carry something we might sell only once a year.
Tata: Water is expensive. This is a good guard against drought, and you have a lot of small farms around here.
Manager: Maybe you could try our website.
Tata: Did you not hear me explain about the shipping charges? I want to be able to come here, pick out the kind I want, pay you and leave. I want to be able to look at them and see them before they are at my house.
Manager: Some things are just decided at corporate.
Tata: Well, they decided wrongly.

Pete: Lowe’s said they didn’t sell rain barrels. Today, we were in the Piscataway store.
Tata: I got all frustrated. They had a whole aisle full of decorative lawn shit nobody needs but we couldn’t find rain barrels. I gave up and stuck to the swearing because I’m really good at it but Pete’s patient. He found them stuck in a dusty corner of shame.
Pete: We couldn’t get it into the car but I could tell by the look on her face that thing was coming home with us if she had to hold it out the window.
Tata: If I had to run alongside the car, that was coming to our house.
Davey: How’d you get it home?
Pete: A bungee cord and string. The trunk wide open. We violated local traffic ordinances in two towns. How do you like yours?
Davey: I have to raise it up. Gravity’s all wrong for watering the garden.
Pete: Want some cinder blocks? There’re some behind your garage from a wall that fell down.
Tata: You “found” cinder blocks?
Pete: No, I found cinder blocks.

The space between Pete’s garage and Davey’s may be about four feet deep and ten feet long. From this space, I have seen Pete produce glass building blocks, 36″ planters, fencing material, whole logs and used tires. I’m fully expecting the DIY version of rabbits and a lovely assistant, but cinder blocks are funny, too. It’s kind of a miracle Davey speaks to us. His wife always takes one horrified look and crabwalks back to her kitchen, perhaps because in a stiff wind like yesterday’s my coif resembles Grandmama Addams’. Pete produces two cinder blocks, Davey’s rain barrel gets a gravity-assist from blocks that could have come from – for all I know – the Planet of Lost Socks and Bic Pens.

It was a very good day for recycling.