The Big City and the Farm

       The big city is difficult. Chicago. A few blocks West, underslung teenage boys lord over the summertime nighttime streets. Cops roar around with sirens and billy clubs. A few blocks East, the streets ooze with college-grads. They’re like me, looking for something real, but more self-conscious, affected, apathetic, and snootier than me. (Ha ha. Ha ha ha.) The big city is cynical.
       Some people swim down the streets, hurdling past bad glances like misplaced chairs in their own livingrooms. Others choke on air. They carry the weight of the magical sinking concrete carpet in their impotent hearts, knowing they could never save the place enough. They couldn’t even get to a decent grocery store on bike. The big city is scary. Someone’s always taking something from someone else, (in the decayed heart of the ghetto, and on the frilly bankroll edges of the Mayor’s paw print) even if they don’t mean to. You’ve got to pick your fistful of spaces and let peace be with you.
       (To be happy, same as everywhere, you got to be tough. To have a love that reaches unseen. To be a tree. A tower. A forest. A skyline. A bird. An airplane. To be real, whatever that means, to get it, real heart beating real blood up through your real throat, into your true thoughts.)

       There’s no sounds tonight on the farm. It’s forty degrees and misty. Today, I planted eight grape vines, three apple trees, and three cherry trees. I rammed a seventeen-pound rod into the Earth, repeatedly. Breaking up the soil, crushing the rocks. After Lindsey, and perhaps the spirit of the Grandmother tree on the Eastern hill, my shoulders are the biggest on the farm.
       After work, I walked the perimeter of the farm. I went through a marshy patch. Green and wet. A bluebird flew up from my knees. A tuft of purple flowers wagged along a fence-line.

       Why sweat over the Earth if its going to get eaten up by the sun, anyways? Why sweat over a lover?

       A New York city taxi-cab unionist baths in a flood of parking tickets, and obsesses over the white man in the mirror, moving in across the African street. Carrots grow plump and orange in the deep black Wisconsin soil. Flea beetles plot against the arugula, and hungry deer wet-dream over crisp rows of lettuce.

Number 1

Eaters of Grassroots Produce and other Kind People:

            Hello. My name is Teddy Marino. Some call me Ted. Some call me dirt. You can call me anything but late for dinner. I’ll be here all summer folks.

            Aside from Lindsey the Farmer (Lindsey Morris Carpenter), I am Grassroots Farm’s first official farmhand. A historic moment if ever.

            Lindsey’s mom, Gail, is the official keeper of books, and Lady of the nascent apple orchard. Sometimes she also feels like a mother-in-law. I wonder what she’s wondering: Who is this young man? Is he good enough for my daughter’s farm? Is he really committed? Is he just along for a tractor ride? Of course, only time will tell.

               Back in August ’09, I had just begun a job with an educational non-profit on the Southside of Chicago. The whole business was strange, disorganized, and chaotic. I am strange, disorganized, and chaotic. And I was hired to manage people. A match made in purgatory. Nonetheless, bread on the table, clipless pedals on my bicycle.

            My first week as Lead Learning Facilitator, during a training session, I asked one of my co-worker friends (whom I had known before coming to the job) for advice.

            “You really want the truth?” he asked.

            “Yes, of course,” I said.

            “Get out,” he said. His eyes are blue and his skin is pale. “Get out as soon as you have the chance.”

            Seven months later (right about now) I have the chance.
            My introduction to Grassroots Farm took place last September. Lindsey hired me to work a few of the Andersonville Farmer’s Markets. I worked the late afternoon shift.

            The tomatoes were beautiful. They were gigantic. Mythic. Paleolithic. Contemporary. Shee-shee. Hearty. Wild. Miraculous. Juicy. Sweet. Full. Plump. Exotic. Homey. Fantastic. Viney red like the blood in your heart. 

            Exchanging these tomatoes for dollars brought a deep thrill to me, it rung a chord with the primal capitalist inside: I give you, you want . . . you give me, I want. The beauty was the simplicity. And the beauty was the freedom from some of our world’s most common poisons – worker-exploitation, land abuse, self-abuse, animal abuse. Poison. It was a clean and sweet feeling to sell these tomatoes. And the buyers felt like they were glad to be there, at the least.  

            I forgot to mention: Potatoes! Beets! Orange flash summer squash! Basil!  Eeeerrrr looooom tomatoes!

            What would it be like to sweat for these things? To sweat for the food? Such a romantic notion! Why not move to a farm, get hitched, work the land, make babies? So far it’s good without the hitch, or the babies.

            And what about the apocalypse? If the apocalypse comes and Cermak Produce, Trader Joe’s, and the rest of our industrialized society collapses beneath our feet, yet the sun still shines and rain still falls, shouldn’t I know how to eat? This is not a smart reason to be a farmhand. But . . . I was wheel hoe-ing the garlic today (I forgot to mention garlic, oh yes: Garlic!) my shoulders were tiring and a single sweat droplet fell from my nose, and the wheel hoe and the apocalypse became tangled together like a garden hose and a wad of rusty barbed wire.

            Bombs. Earthquakes. Children bleeding out their shoulder sockets. Steel chimneys and black clouds. The amazon to pasture . . . countryside to suburbs . . . mountains to mines . . . anhydrous ammonia . . . soil of no worms, Earth of no life, hills hairried with  feedcorn, cows munching in puddle of feces, a sideshow freak ground up into a hamburger patty. Happy lunchtime. The apocalypse is always happening.

            Me and the wheel hoe, and the garlic, in the afternoon: a pair of hands in the grand chorus of fists that rise against the sun, the mammoth, behemoth, pulsing, inching old glacier of greed, and antiquated habits.

            If Lindsey Morris Carpenter, my friend/boss/role model, were in this business for the money, she’d be stupid. She’s not stupid. She’s hungry like an artist. Organically farm-fed, yet always hungry. These tomatoes are undebatedably inspired, and desirable.  The art of the hands and knees, tractor and soil; the sweat of the love. Achoo. God bless you.

             I’m working this season through and through. Makes me feel like a man. I mean, a hu-man. A hu-myn. A farmer! Damn, it feels good to be a farmhand! Sickle-slicing away the thistle. My appetite is strong! ‘Till soon, eat good!

Teddy