Fifty-two years ago I became an apprentice gardener, although perhaps lackey is more accurate.
It was an odd job in a year of odd events. Quick backstory: In June, 1972, after 11th grade was completed at Huntington High School on Long Island, I moved to Lawrence, New Jersey, where my dad had purchased a car wash the year before. (He’d owned two similar operations in Suffolk County in the 1950s and 60s; hard work, seven days a week, but it provided for a family of seven.) Two weeks after I arrived, dad, 55, was felled by a fatal heart attack. My two oldest brothers were assigned the task of selling the business; the next two had to run it until a sale; and I was left to meander around the new neighborhood, and keep my grieving mother company.
My brother Doug, pictured in the photo, was completing his third year in pre-war Afghanistan for the Peace Corps, teaching locals the intricate art of silk-screening, and he’d planned to stay on for the indefinite future. But then the phone call came (far more difficult to connect in 1972) and several days later he arrived at our house on Pine Knoll Dr. Time passed, and as I endured the rigors of a redneck public school for 12th grade—no smoking section, gym class every day, other kids taunting me for my long hair and support of George McGovern—the older boys unloaded the car wash in February of 1973. Nothing was easy, and I’ve no idea how Doug and Gary, with no business experience, managed to keep the joint afloat; but they pulled it off.
In April of ’73, Doug, the family’s best cook, was on a stoned soul reverie after a lamb ragout dinner—before the “appointment viewing” of All In the Family—and suggested, given the fertile soil of central New Jersey, that he and I carve out a patch of the back yard for a large garden. I was skeptical, but his enthusiasm was contagious and at the end of the month we (meaning me) put shovel to dirt. In Afghanistan, Doug, always an eager student, learned some rudimentary farming techniques, including irrigation and precise plant-spacing (I just followed orders) and we got working for several hours a day. As it happened, I had two wonderful English teachers at that miserable high school (who became friends) and they allowed me “independent study” for the last two classes of the day, so I walked home, transistor in my pocket, at about one each afternoon. (One of the young, and hubba-hubba attractive, ladies said I was “better-read” than most of the school’s teachers, but I think she knew I was having a hard time and generously wanted to help out.)
I can’t say the gardening work—the watering of plants, mowing the lawn, zapping bugs with pesticides—was much fun, but spending time with Doug (even when he was taskmaster-mode) was delightful, as we had the radio tuned to the Watergate hearings and happily marveled at every new revelation, chatted away about music, books, my acceptance at Johns Hopkins for the fall of ’73 (he graduated from JHU in ’69) and, after the day’s toiling was done, smoked a joint.
After graduation, I found a job at Princeton University (a five-mile drive) for $1.85/hr. as a handyman in a science lab, which meant mopping, sweeping, feeding the graduate students’ test rats, and then disposing of them in a sturdy container with chloroform. But the garden, which Doug tended to, was like nothing I’d seen: filled with Rutgers beefsteak tomatoes, as well as Roma and cherry tomatoes, hot peppers, cukes, exotic spices and zucchini. The harvest later that summer was prodigious: Doug taught me how to make a tomato sauce from scratch, and he’d whip up sophisticated pasta dishes, salads, baklava, and, on occasion, an Afghan dinner, where we all sat on the floor. We gave away baskets of tomatoes to grateful neighbors.
This still cracks me up: one day Doug asked our mom if she’d be amenable to acquiring a lamb for the back yard. At first, she said, “How nice!” but when he explained that after six months we’d slaughter the animal and have a lot of meat on hand, she was horrified and just replied, “Oh honey, that’s out of the question, we can’t kill a pet!”
Today, my wife handles our garden and does a marvelous job, with containers filled with colorful flowers that spruce up the yard. Our dog Billy and I offer enthusiastic support. Not too long after our joint project, Doug moved to San Luis Obispo, CA, and upon visits, I saw that his green thumb still ruled. He passed away in 1999, a cancer victim, and though it was a miserable shock, enough time has now passed that it falls into the active memory archive, and our joint experience in 1973 is always what pops up first.
—This article was first published at https://renaissancegardenguy.com.
—Follow Russ Smith on Twitter: @MUGGER2023