It was a horrible thing, Lou said, he was a friend of my daughters. I was walking the dog when he came out of his house with Domino and his men were showing up for work and were gathering around the trucks in the empty lot across the street. Lou had seen me passing while he was dragging the empty garbage cans off the street. The truck had emptied them and dropped them in the middle of Carolyn Drive an hour earlier. The day after a holiday they are always in a big rush to get the pick-ups done. They have two-days-work-in-one to do and they don’t pay a lot of attention to leaving the cans neatly.
Lou told me about his daughter’s friend who had been driving with his buddy in his dad's new muscle car. The car flipped over last night on Sprout Brook and he was killed. Thrown through the window were Lou’s words. No seat belt? I asked. No. The driver was ok, he said, he was wearing his seat belt. I’m sorry, I said. My mind flashed on a man who was killed a couple of days ago when he lost control of his motorcycle and he had no helmet on. The doctors said he would have been alive if he’d been wearing a helmet. He was participating, at the time, in a rally of motorcyclists protesting the ‘helmet laws’. Irony. I knew there were no logical parallels between the two stories. One was a tragedy of youthful inexperience, the other of a fool who should have known better. I knew how Lou felt, needing to share his thoughts with someone even if it was just a casual acquaintance like me. I listened and then kept walking. He started over to his men to get them started on their work day.
Back at home after breakfast I went out to the garden with thoughts of a dead biker and a dead teenager in the back of my mind. My mission this day was to decide how to deal with what I thought was an incurable blight on my pepper plants. Dark spots leading to yellowing leaves that, eventually, drop off and circle the plant with a wreath of withered foliage. My biggest fear was that in doing nothing my other plants-tomatoes and eggplant-might be infected. I was prepared with my shovel and some plastic pots to try to transplant a couple of the plants and grow them outside the garden. But when I looked closely at the plants and thought as clearly as I could about possible solutions I knew that I would have to pull them all up.
I carefully pulled each plant from the soil and dropped it into a small pile outside the garden fence. Then I raked the topsoil and all the offending leaves into a pile and shoveled them up into the lid of a garbage can. I tried to imagine being a doctor and having to decide whether or not to remove an infected leg from a patient. Or whether or not to shut down the equipment that maintains a coma patient on this side of death. I could do it. I am sure. But it would never be easy. Lives are lost or terminated everywhere, all the time. These were only pepper plants. But they were alive and it wasn’t easy tugging them out of the ground. Now there is a space in the garden where I don’t think anything should be planted for a while…perhaps something will grow there now but I think I will wait until next year. In the mean time, I thought as I dumped the plants and dead leaves into a heap far from the compost and the garden, there will be a space that will make me remember about how fragile life is.
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