On Tuesday, I filled the green yard waste tote with zoyshia
grass, tomato plants, and pumpkin vines. Our summer garden is
spent. It is time to tear it out so I can plant beets and chard.
Out with the old, in with the new.
On Tuesday, I filled the green yard waste tote with zoyshia grass, tomato plants, and pumpkin vines. Our summer garden is spent. It is time to tear it out so I can plant beets and chard. Out with the old, in with the new.
I disliked our garden this summer. Usually I plant green beans, tomatoes, yellow crook neck squash and onions: a ratatouille garden, yum. This year, Anne wanted to grow pumpkins, so I made do with a few crowded tomatoes and a thin border of onions. The rest of the garden was covered with four (count them: four) pumpkin vines.
Anne was attempting to grow a milk-fed pumpkin, as Almanzo Wilder does in “Farmer Boy.” It didn’t work. The milk in the dish did not wick up through the rag into the slit in the pumpkin stem. It just spoiled.
Still, she did harvest seven respectable pumpkins: a seven-pounder, two 10-pounders, and four 15-pounders. I did not have to buy any Halloween pumpkins. Oliver and Anne’s friend Jaime and I each carved one, and Anne carved four. Our porch was spectacular on All Hallows‚ Even.
Now their evening of glory is over. Full inches five our pumpkins lie, buried in garden loam. Anne says she will only grow two vines next year.
If she changes her mind and grows pumpkins rampant across the whole patch again, I won’t care. She’ll be leaving for college in five short years. I can grow ratatouille then.
* * *
Seasons are changing on the Gilroy political scene as well. Mayor Tom Springer is leaving office, having chosen not to run in the last election. I for one will miss him.
Whenever I had a question about any aspect of the city government, I would call Tom. Sometimes he picked up the phone; sometimes I left a message. He always returned my call within a day.
He would explain the matter to me. Oh, how he would explain. He would explain what I wanted to know, then go on to explain aspects that had never occurred to me, more than I ever wanted to know, then give me references: paper, Internet, phone numbers of people to whom I could talk.
I would hang up, dazed with information overload, scribble notes furiously, check references, write. He never let me down when I had a question.
He could be irritating. I remember one city council meeting I sat through. A developer presented his plan for some affordable housing. The complex included what he called a tot lot. Tom did not like the tot lot. He thought it would encourage people to leave their small kids there unattended. He wanted the developer to take out the tot lot and give each backyard six inches more width.
Peter Arellano demurred. He thought a small park, not called a tot lot, would be great, where the kids could go and kick a soccer ball around together.
Tom and Peter argued about that stupid tot lot for an incredibly long time, while I (and possibly the developer) wished desperately that they would let the developer do what he wanted to do with his own dang property.
And Tom does tend to pontificate when he explains why he is about to vote a certain way on an issue. This does not bother me; I have learned over the years not to pay too much attention to what a seated politico says. I just watch his ayes and nays. Tom’s votes were perfect, almost all the time. He would have my vote again in a heartbeat, if he decided to run again.
But I don’t blame him for stepping down. He has given Gilroy hours, evenings, years of his life: sitting in meetings, studying issues, supporting candidates, answering columnists’ questions.
He has gotten a lot of flak, especially over his stand on the adult forum. From the neighbors of that most infamous business venture, Tom has received private heartfelt gratitude. From pundits, he has been called names.
And that’s the worst thing anyone can say about Tom Springer: he took a stand for decency and morality in a political climate hostile to both. That’s a legacy. Thank you, Mr. Mayor.
