The Poppy Trail
"The Poppy Trail" is my newest piece. I want to try it out some by posting excerpts here. The story follows a fanciful adventurer and his way of collecting poppy pods from neighborhood gardens, hijinks and hilarity follow (maybe not always).
Excerpts from the Poppy Trail
I don’t think anyone attends to the poppies, there are not as many as I first saw. The pods I picked on the first visit filled the bottom half of a large leaf sized trash bag. I didn’t get them all, but most. They grew among the tall grass-like vegetation as they do still. Thrilled, the first time I parked half on the road, put my “four ways” on, there wasn’t enough space because of a ditch to park entirely on the roadside. This time I do the same after spying a number of pods, but traffic proves a nuisance. Vehicles pull up behind my small pickup with its four-ways flashing and look to me to see “what’s the matter.” Just go around I say in my head. I wave them on. Wearing an old curved up Lowes baseball style cap, dressed in dirty dusty clothes, I think some of the motorists figure me for a country guy with car trouble. Nice they act so neighborly, but I just want them to move on and let me get to the business of cutting and snapping off pods...
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Most don’t know about the pods. The pods wouldn’t be here if they did. Last year I picked a few of the pods and came back later for more. I waited too long, the poppies had been mowed down and collected, along with much of the grass and weeds growing on the narrow strips along the roadside. Oddly parts of the roadside didn’t get a mowing. I couldn’t determine if the poppies had been cut for being poppies or for fire prevention or other non-poppy reasons. This year suggests the latter. Poppies have returned, but in less number and no one has yet mowed them down. I theorize someone planted them years ago and now the plants are self-seeding. It shows poppies don’t thrive as well on their own. It helps if someone looks after them.
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Once the seed takes hold it doesn’t need much but sunlight and a comparatively small amount of water. I tried to grow some poppies on Sally’s property (without her knowing it). I found spots with sunlight, which were arid (high and dry rather than low and wet), but no luck. One day, however, in late spring plants bloom in her gravel/rock driveway. It seems I dropped a couple seeds in the driveway and the sun reached through the stones to help germinate them. I am amazed and delighted, easy pickings. Sally likes the flowers, but doesn’t want any trouble for having the plants on her property. I assure her I will get rid of them (after I harvest the pods). I take the plants out, making sure plenty of seeds fall back into the driveway, but the poppies never grow back, which bolsters my diminishing return theory and is why I usually am on the trail in neighborhoods where people like to plant and grow flowers – they look after their poppies.
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With cars stopping and one woman even rolling down her window and asking if I need help I cut things short (as I like to do with poppies). Would be nice if I could say, “oh just grabbing some of these poppies here I will be gone in a few, but thanks, appreciate it.” And they would answer, “cool have a nice time.” That isn’t going to happen. One reason, they don’t say “cool.” Why – it’s city talk and something a hippy type might say. Can’t have that. The second reason, I would never mention poppies. Someone would call the cops, eliminate a spot on the trail. People generally find drugs to be bad, even though most of them are taking some kind of drug every day, go figure. ..............
What started me off on the trail? an article I read on the internet, the place where many get their start.
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I prefer an upfront guy or woman as my boss. They might be ambitious. Lots of human being trying to get ahead in this world, can’t blame someone for that. I want people who play fair even if being unfair is part of the game, just so we all understand. For a menial job, get the truck loaded and shipment on its way, the work is about the tasks. I agree to take the job, I do the tasks. A good boss knows I know that and wants that from me, to do what needs being done. He or she doesn’t want me to stand in some sort of attention when they are near or fulfill his or her ideal image of how I should look and talk.
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I make a mistake with one boss, the first time he calls me in the office for a talk I talk with him. Maybe he should have said, “just listen”. He takes it as rudeness. I consider it “going with the flo”.
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I have bicycled the city streets for years, commuting by bike to work most days. Pedaling thru a neighborhood allows you a view of homes, vegetation, streets, cats, dogs, personal monuments erected – the story of a place. On routes I used over and over, I witnessed change in the seasons, new construction, and the need for some permanence, what people will do to make home home. Even in a neighborhood where all the houses look similar, constructed with the same basic design, people often have one thing, a decoration, a plant, a something on the home or in the yard that distinguishes it.
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My bike brought me to the Poppy Trail.
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Fruit trees abound in my old neighborhood. It says something about the area. In the past, people counted on those fruit trees, fruit for deserts, pies, cobblers, cider, etc. as well as for some home remedies. That so many stand today says they still supply the neighborhood, as do gardens and garden plots. A three foot square piece of land on the side of a tool hut and someone has something planted there, maybe broccoli, or summer squash, winter squash, tomatoes, basil, etc. The smallest plot between sidewalk and the street, planted. Not every house, but enough to make a significant dent in the local markets’ possible vegetable profits. Not only vegetables, flowers color the neighborhood especially in spring and summer, and if it flowers in winter someone here grows it. Except for me (when I lived there) and few other low wage earners middle class residents (families) populate the area. They put gardening high on the list of activities outside work.
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I spotted my first spot on the trail at the start of one my favorite side street routes. Whenever I could I opted for this route. It paralleled a busy narrow thoroughfare in the neighborhood, one where I constantly needed to check on the traffic behind me (see if I could spot the vehicle who would be responsible for crushing me up against a parked car). This side street carried mostly the residents who lived near it, meaning not a lot of traffic. Only two blocks from the thoroughfare and gone - all the noise and traffic. Nice two story family homes and bungalows line the treed streets in the area. Year after year prices for homes go up in the area and year after year people fix up their places, put on additions, and in the few empty lots put up new homes, nice ones.
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The poppy plants like the work on the house and the rest of the plants and trees in and about the yard, the ones I can see, look well cared for, the dark dirt about them weedless. Could be a labor of love. They stand six feet or so from the sidewalk on the top edge of a rise of soil in front of a small fence and the green yard. I can ride by on the sidewalk (riding on the sidewalk is not uncommon for a city biker – usually because of traffic) stop in front of the poppies, scramble up the dirt, rip off the pods, with the likelihood no one will notice, especially if I wait for a time when the street are empty of neighborly eyes. Making off with pods from a plant already bloomed doesn’t strike me as the most serious of crimes – I will be down the road before someone can register my crime.
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I pass the plants several more times during the week after my poppy discovery. On the last pass I stop on the sidewalk before the plants, get off the bike, and pretend to examine the gears on my bike, thinking about making a grab as I do. During this camouflage I spy in the street just off the curb a dried pod, crushed but whole connected to a piece of stem. What? I pick it up, put it in my bag, and ride off. At home I soak the pod after shredding it my coffee grinder, put it in a cup, and pour hot water from my tea kettle over it. The water cools and I pour it and the hay (shredded pod) thru a sieve into another cup. Then, bottom’s up, hoping I am not consuming street toxins.
Fifteen minutes later, “holy cow”, I feel a buzz coming on. Calm and a touch of elation visit for the next four hours. Amazing. That makes my mind up.
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In case, I zig zag, turning up and down different streets and parking lots on my way back to my apartment. Doesn’t hurt to be hard to catch. I arrive home, look at the clock, “why not”, I put one of the dried pods in the coffee grinder, gather the hay in a glass, and pour hot tea water over it. My drink cools while I change clothes for work. I gulp my drink down and head to work.
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I started commuting by bike after getting a job at a thrift store. A donation attendant lets it be known, after I show a keen interest in a just donated mountain bike, it is no concern of his if one of a bunch of bikes waiting to be “checked in” disappear, in fact he wouldn’t even know if one did (and he was going to the “can” and goodbye, since I am headed home). He leaves the donation dock for the bathroom and I leave for home on a cheap used mountain bike. It’s a solution to my commuting needs and have been thinking about buying one, though I can’t afford one, which is why I am taking the job at the thrift store.
I would have chosen car, if I had the choice. I considered walking and would have if the distance wasn’t prohibitive (it would take an hour and a half to get there by foot). Before the bike, public transit, meaning the bus, supplied my ride. On some days and routes, the bus makes for a great ride. Get in, find a nice seat, sit back and watch the traffic and city pass, resting your bones after a hard day’s work. But often my overcrowded bus offered no place to sit, or sometimes a place near a disturbed individual, I remember one who needed to gesticulate while listening to monotonous rap music, which bled from his ear phones, and ones who found me distasteful (I do look a little rough at times) and occasionally a mean individual looking to hurt someone. Not the kind of company that invites a nice rest.
I preferred my own company to the annoying sometime dangerous bus society. A bike seemed a good solution. Perhaps coming from a family that never owned a car made a difference. Friends of mine could not fathom life without a personal motor vehicle. They would beg, borrow, and consider stealing for one. For some, it not only provided needed transportation, it included you in the human part of the human race, without one you were not quite “right”. My younger me got around without one, to the same places as my friends and peers with vehicles, most times. Although plenty of times I wished I had a ride.
The bike proved a “godsend” (mysterious are the ways of the lord?). How else would I see a group of Asian men tumbling out a door throwing punches in a residential neighborhood at five in the morning. Better yet the sun’s early arrival, cats returning to their doorsteps after their evening roam, the crows’ boisterous warnings, the rhythm of the pedals, thoughts and poetry in the early morning and still early evening. Bikes do have advantages, and interesting aspects, did I tell you I fell asleep several times while riding my bike on hot day returning from a hard day at work, got to be careful of that incessant pedaling rhythm when you are tired ( woke up just in time to steer away from the back of a car).
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“Practice makes perfect” - true, but familiarity breeds mistakes. No matter how practiced or familiar with a process, one day you will forget to double check your work, make a mistake, you will leave a valve open, you will search for an hour for a reason why an internet site is not accepting your identity, eventually to discover an unneeded type space in front of your password. Knowing this, I schedule a “sit down” with me. I told myself we would not make mistakes when on the Poppy trail.
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I do not cherish taking things not mine (odd thing to say when this piece of writing is all about me taking things not mine). I do possess a moral compass (it just doesn’t point the same way everyone else’s does). I give an example – a pal, one who lives in the same apartment building and I are out taking advantage of a warehouse sale by one of the city’s largest retailers. On one long table a row of coffee mugs priced at 3.99 a piece stand, next to it another row of mugs priced at 1.99. I want one of the 3.99 mugs and am able to misrepresent the mug as a 1.99 one. I get the mug for 1.99. One the way back from the sale my pal comments it is cool that I bought the mug (it is a nice one), but he could never do what I did – he is too honest. I feel him a bit much and say something about the people who own the sale aren’t going hungry tonight and leave it at that. Soon after, an opportunity for my buddy to move to better “digs” comes up. For him to do it he needs to quit his apartment without notice and move. When a tenant gives notice and moves the landlady who takes care of the building receives the non-refundable cleaning fee the tenant paid when he or she moved in. If a tenant moves out without notice, the owners keep the fee to make up for the lost rent. My friend moves without proper notice, the landlady loses out. She, a sixtiesh widow, cleans the apartment and gets it ready for a new tenant despite not getting paid specifically for it. I like the landlady, she has been nothing but nice to me, and my buddy for that matter, giving us breaks on late payments and doesn’t enforce some company policies. I also know from talking with her she needs every cent she can scrape up. I think her puppies provide the only family she can rely on (wouldn’t be surprised if they eat better than she). I couldn’t under normal circumstances do what my friend eventually does to her, and if I had to, I would find a way of paying her back later, something he “blows off” when I suggest it. In Catholic parlance (nuns for teachers), I see taking poppies in the venial “white lie” category as I do the 3.99/1.99 price switch, cheating my landlady out of her due approaches mortal sin territory.
As a rule, I select plants I can see from the street. Nothing better than a home with poppies growing just off a front sidewalk. While walking or riding by at an opportune time I turn and collect pods. Often, especially with a large group of plants, I leave pods, not wanting to spend too much time exposed and vulnerable. I keep the bike as close as sensible, it is such a good “get away” vehicle (less identifiable and trackable than a car).
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The store’s furniture area with its endless collection of donated chairs and couches for sale provides a place for socializing and a place for customers to sort thru shopping carts full of used goods snatched from the tables - most of it grabbed just in case it is worth something. Besides it being a place where some customers hang out and sort, furniture buyers find practical and vintage pieces at great prices (steals) in the furniture, though most the furniture like the goods on the tables isn’t worth much. For some the couches and chairs provides a place to “crash”, catch some “winks”. One middle aged man comes in the morning at opening and goes to all the couches, sit on the far sides of each to create a space where he can slip his hand between the seat and arm rest, hoping to find money or valuables that has fallen in the furniture (he never buys a thing).
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I see “who the hell is this guy” on Candy’s face when I chase the customers she is ‘kibitzing” with off the chairs and couches they are inhabiting to exchange that furniture for different crappy chairs and couches, which they then proceed to inhabit. My first encounter with Candy ends with me noting she is cute, petite, and a bit younger than I. I see her again several times talking with a group who sorts their things on the furniture and see her smile as she watches and listens as I go about the noisy business of dragging furniture across the floor (usually easier to drag than to lift).
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Curiosity might bring them in, prices bring them back. Some learned to call shopping at our store “junking”, entertainment for the better off, as a lord might stop in “ye olde tavern” to have a laugh or two on or with the commoners. Tell your friends and acquaintances when you and a friend go off to enhance your wardrobes or kitchens, “we are going junking,” adventurous, fun, mostly inconsequential, bring plenty of disinfectant (if you need that much hand sanitizer you have an immunity problem I think to myself watching a customer go thru a public display of using enough sanitizer for a waterless shower). At our per pound price a woman can buy (and often does) a blouse which originally cost over thirty dollars for less than a dollar. We provide the somewhat adventurous “American dream” candidate a way to hedge his or her style, to still wear nice clothes and have bucks left.
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I think picking fascinates her. Most don’t realize, at least at first, the skill and dedication it takes to be a picker, the kind who makes their living by it. Successful non-profit thrift stores make money because of the crazy volume of goods they receive. We, at the store I work at, bale and send out 100 thousand pounds of clothing a day at times to be used overseas (brokers pay so many cents per pound), donated clothes, most put out to be sold in several stores before not being sold at our store and eventually baled. We pay garbage services thousands a day to haul away our trash, which is the stuff we didn’t sell and can’t recycle.
People get rid of things for different reasons, some give us nice clothes, usable household goods, electrical items, furniture etc., but not near as many as those who give us crap. Donation attendants I talk with tell me about incidents where customers become irate when attendants refuse to take what they offer, and attendants generally take clothes and household goods without giving them much of a look over. They refuse such things as used roofing (newly ripped off the roof), broken down couches, mattresses resembling a Polack creation, etc. Several customers have gotten so mad they threw a punch at the attendant who refused to take their donation (how dare they refuse my crap. A donation attendant is often an older man, older woman, or a physically or mentally challenged individual). People most often donate items of no substantial value. For the most part only when people need to move and are faced with a large bill, a trash or transportation outlay, do they give up things of value to them, when it costs more to keep than give away. Our profit depends on volume, because in the volume, which is mostly not wanted, there is enough wanted to make bucks on, enough bucks to run a multimillion-dollar profit yearly (for our non-profit), that’s how much people give away.
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She says she wants someone to bike with, she doesn’t want to do it alone. I understand, women, even weaponized ones, need to keep an eye out more than a man does. I discover Candy’s smile. It gets me smiling. I say, “yeah, sure.” But I know from conversation, the kind of conversation in which the information of married or not married is exchanged, she is married. Given married I tread lightly. Yeah, a married woman can meet a guy at a store she goes to and ask if he wants to go bike riding with her and only have bike riding in mind, but I would say that something more than riding and friendly chaste social interaction is involved more than it is not in most cases. I will go out with a married woman, depending. I say, “yeah, sure” but, I don’t say when or where. Nor does she.
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(more to come)
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