Carrots
I want to grow carrots like a row of exclamation marks deep in some rugged, borrowed soil. I want to cultivate something and try to look a worm in the face. I’m tired of everything I own. I want to give away half of my clothes, and set my favorite books up on shelves where I can see them. When’s the last time you fanned the pages of a book and felt that fiber-air whisk across your face? I don’t need ten pairs of jeans, I need one for days I want to lay low and one with holes for the days I feel like showing off my kneecaps. And I want all the turquoise rings I can find and to start remembering to thank God about it when I pray.
I think I want to find a job. This is how I’m going to do it: I’m going to rewrite my resume. Nobody cares about GPAs, they want buzzwords. I’m going to erase everything on my resume and send in a blank page with a Billy Collins quote:
This was enough, this fraction of the whole,
just as the leafy scene in the windows was enough
now that the light was growing dim,
as was she enough, perfectly by herself
somewhere in the enormous mural of the world. (1)
And then I’m going to submit a cover letter that states I could care less about career goals, and that I have no idea where I’ll be in five years but it might be Montana. And that I’m trying to learn about carrots.
I’ve been looking around taking notes about people. I’m not trying to decide who I want to be, but how I want to be. There’s a cookie jar of people I admire, and most of them know how to garden. I’ve always wanted a rose garden. People always tell me roses are hard to grow. Ok, maybe I could start with potatoes. I like that they do everything out of sight, and they’re simple, and odd, and damn if they aren’t just the most versatile vegetable. Right? Maybe I should put that in my cover letter too. In 10 years I hope to have learned as much from the potato as I did in college.
Billy Collins also says, Poetry is a bird, and prose is a potato. I’ve always thought of myself as a poet, but maybe I don’t always want to be a bird. Maybe I don’t always want to sing, and have a game-board view of the world. Sometimes I just want to sit on the dirt and be an organism. The other day, my co-worker showed me a children’s video about the Creation story, and the song asked all these questions in rapid fire, and one just reached through the screen and grabbed me by the collar, asking, can you make a man from a dust pan? Gosh. I cannot. But I’m going to figure out these carrots.
And I’d like to be a person who hangs out on boats. My grandfather had a boat, but I only have one flashing memory of being on it. All I get is me standing in a life jacket, and the whole picture is sort of algae green. I wanted to go to Washington College and make friends with preppy, rich kids who went boating on the weekends. I wanted to wear a grey sweatshirt and boat shoes and tell all those kids with their large, white, rectangle teeth about how a boat was named after me. It was a blue and yellow life raft. The boy was eight and he loved me even though I was nine, and to this day it’s still the best thing any man has ever done for me. They’d have either laughed at me or called me Helen of Troy. I’ll never know—I wasn’t a Waterfowl, I was a Terrapin. I wasn’t sailing around the air and water, I was doing that earth-dweller thing. Earth, earth, earth.
When I was a child, my mother grew vegetables, and I loved the cucumbers, their spiny skins and yellow blooms, and unorganized vines. We were overrun, it seems, by tomatoes. My neighbors also had a miraculous garden, and I would wander over and just be in it. They had a fish pond and a line of enormous pine trees that the eagles favored. There was just the two of them and their dog. Two out of three are dead.
Carrots.
(1) From Detail by Billy Collins