Forty-five years and I still have this idea that inspiration will strike at any second, so I drive around town quite a bit waiting for it.  It could happen anytime and I want to be ready.  You never know about these things, so it’s good if you’re ready.

I do a lot of driving these days, which of course, gives me a lot of time to wait around for inspiration.  Turns out, everyone wants to see the gardener once the sun comes out, and that’s one of the things I do to pass the time, if you didn’t know - be a gardener.  The phone rings off the hook and everyone wants me there to solve their gardening woes, which is nothing like those dark winter months that we just came out of that seem like they’ll never pass, the sun never coming out, the rain falling almost every single day, and the gardener about as sought out as a case of herpes.  The phone doesn’t ring much in the winter.  No one calls for herpes.

Not that I’m saying gardeners are like herpes, because that would be stupid of me, although I do wish that all gardeners could be as dependable as herpes.  Or do I mean as hard to get rid of?  I’m not sure.  Anyway, you wouldn’t believe how many customers I talk to who tell me that their gardener just doesn’t show up sometimes.  The grass gets long and the weeds grow and there they sit, waiting around for the gardener to show up, which like I said, they sometimes don’t.

“Gardeners should be like herpes,” I say.  “You can always count on herpes to show up.”

“You’re right there, my friend,” the customer will say, and then the two of us will kick around and look at the long grass or maybe start talking about the peonies or something.  Anything to change the subject because no one really wants to talk about herpes, even metaphorically, not if they can help it, anyway.  Okay, maybe they don’t change the subject if they’re talking with their doctor, and come to think of it, a lot of doctors have gardeners, which suddenly seems a little curious to me.  I always thought it had something to do with having gobs of money, but maybe it’s something else.  I’ll have to give that some thinking over later today.  Maybe while I’m out driving around.

You know, I haven’t written here for so long that I just realized how foolish it’d be for me to start back in with some great big lie, like me saying I talk about herpes with my customers.  I really hope you didn’t fall for that one, but if you did, that’s okay.  It probably says something good about you as a person, like you’re a trusting soul or something good like that.

The truth is, I’m not sure what gardeners are like, but I can tell you what inspiration is like.  Inspiration shows up just like gardeners.  Some times it is pure genius and the rest of the time, well, the rest of the time you just hope it doesn’t cut its toe off with the mower.

If it shows up, that is.  It’s got to show up first.

I’m not much of a shopper, so other than the nonstop squinting I’ve been forced to do for the last year to keep the sun off of my baby blues, not replacing my lost sunglasses wasn’t all that hard.  I’m good at squinting, which I suppose accounts for all those cracks and crevasses along the corners of my eyes, and besides, finding sunglasses is never fun.  Over-priced plastic, a tag always placed to either dig into your nose when you try them on or make it impossible to actually tell what they look like, a little, narrow, warped mirror to look at yourself in, and then the worst part, my big wide head.  Unlike blue jeans, sunglasses aren’t something you want to squeeze yourself into.  There’s nothing sexy about tight sunglasses.

But I broke down and bought a pair the other day, and not only did they fit, but they came with several pairs of interchangeable lenses and a lifetime warranty, both of which sound great when the words first come out of the clerk’s mouth, but after a bit of thought, prove worthless.  A lifetime warranty?  I can’t ever remember owning a pair of sunglasses longer than two years before I left them sitting someplace I could never remember.  The warranty, unfortunately, doesn’t cover poor memory.  Oh well.  What about the interchangeable lenses, I ask the clerk.  That sounds pretty good.

Call me old-fashioned, but I kind of like my sunglasses dark and black, you know, to keep the sun out, and I was imagining several pair of dark lenses waiting there in the case on standby, ready to jump in at a moment’s notice to replace one of their lost or scratched comrades.  The interchangeable lenses, it turns out, came in yellow, orange, and one that I still haven’t figured out, clear.  Clear sunglasses?  The only thing I’ve come up with is that they’re for pulling pranks on all your blind friends.

But the boy sure likes those colored lenses, and takes every opportunity to sneak behind my back and change out the dark lenses for the colored ones.  He seems to prefer the orange, which I have to say, certainly does brighten up the world, almost to the point of being surreal.  Driving around in them kind of gives me the feeling I’ve taken a wrong turn and ended up on Mars.  As for the rest of the world, I’m not sure what they see when they look over and see me drive by in those things.  For all I know, they probably think they’ve just spotted an overweight Bono driving around town in an old mini-van.  I think of it as a low-grade Elvis sighting.  Too bad Bono isn’t famous for jumpsuits.  If he was, I think I’d buy a couple, just to complete the illusion.

Six o’clock on a Sunday morning is about the only time anymore that a guy can wander around on the road out front of his house without being run down.  I’m not sure why everyone’s in such a hurry, or even why there are so many of them for that matter, but they’re out there these days, there’s no doubt about it.  Oregon’s lazy little capital city has grown since I came here in ‘86.

So I wandered around and snapped some pictures.  A beautiful morning - sun coming up, chirping birds, dew on the grass, the smell of fresh cut hay coming from somewhere off in the distance, the azaleas in bloom along the front of the house - the whole pastoral nine yards, you might say.  The cars going by will begin to ruin the effect in an hour or two, but for the moment, I have the road to myself. 

I snap some pictures.  The azalea is called Everest, a nice specimen, easy to grow, with large, pure white flowers.  I love white in the garden and use it freely when designing for others.  Nothing brings a garden together with as much ease as the soothing tones of white as it threads its way from bed to bed.  I try out the panarama feature on the camera that helps you line things up, which I later will fool around with in Photoshop.  Turns out you still need to do some work to make it look right, blending the contrasts and brightness, hiding the transitions, etc.  The picture above is of the farm, and is comprised of five separate shots.  Something to do while I watch the birds at the feeders and listen to roosters crowing over at the neighbors. 

Before going inside, I take a picture of our new screen door - bought by the boy for a buck while hitting some garage sales yesterday with his mom.  As we hung it last night, he says to me, “Finally you’re cooperating, Dad,” which is in reference to my refusing to go into the free couch business with him.  The boy is a junk collector at heart, and wants us to stop and pick up every broken down couch and recliner we see along the road, no matter what condition.

“We’ll put tarps out in the yard and sell them,” he tells me.  “We’ll make tons of money.”

As is the case with old, uncooperative dads like me, I’ve failed to recognize the beauty of his business plan.

And yes, that’s Scrine out there, sunning himself on this fine morning.  The only bird around who doesn’t feel the need to poop on the back porch.  That alone makes him dear to my heart.

This man walks into a bar on Mother’s Day and finds himself perched on a barstool between an alligator who’s obviously had too much to drink and a born again Christian woman.  Not having had much experience with born again Christian women sitting at a bar at eleven o’clock in the morning, on Mother’s Day, no less, the man turns to the alligator and says, “Hey, how’s it goin’?”

The man has had experience with alligators in bars (although never on Mother’s Day, he thinks to himself), and knows enough to know that you better say something when sitting down next to an alligator, because if there’s one thing alligators hate, it’s being ignored.

The alligator swivels on his barstool, and it’s quiet enough in the bar that you can hear his tail scraping along the floor as he turns, which might alarm some people, particularly those who’ve never heard the sound of an alligator tail dragging across a dirty, barroom floor, but like I’ve already said, this man has had some experience with alligators in bars, and barely pays it any mind at all.  He watches as the alligator slowly raises his beer to his lips, peering at him over the top of his glass with unblinking eyes, then watches as the alligator takes a deep drink that leaves foam sticking to his upper lip and several glistening and pointy teeth that don’t quite tuck in.

“Don’t worry about me, friend, “the alligator says to the man, “I’m on the wagon,” then swivels back on his stool and says to the barkeep, “Barkeep, how about some nuts.”

“Right there in front of you, alligator,” the barkeep says from the far end of the bar as he wipes out ashtrays with a dirty towel, stacking them one by one into three, neat piles.

It’s about this time that the born again Christian woman slides a big, black Bible across the bar towards the man.  “Don’t you go worrying about him, honey,” she says, patting the Bible with one hand and his forearm with her other. “God’s got your back.”

She flashes him a big, toothy smile, which somehow seems ironic, the man thinks, sitting there as he is between an alligator and a born again Christian woman, but then again, he reminds himself, he doesn’t really have any experience with born again Christian women in bars, and maybe it’s not ironic at all, so instead of wasting any more time thinking about something he doesn’t know anything about, he tries to catch the barkeep’s eye to get himself a beer, wishing that he could raise up his arm to flag him over, but can’t because the woman is still busy patting it.  This all happens just about the time that the man is caught off guard for the first time since walking into the bar, when the woman stops patting momentarily, looks him straight in the eye, and asks, “Buy me a drink, honey?”

Now, apparently mostly fools find themselves sitting at bars on Mother’s Day, because as the man sat there thinking about the woman’s question, it began to occur to him (much too slowly, I might add) that he had had his back turned to the alligator for quite some time now, which the alligator was sure to interpret as being ignored, and which, as has already been pointed out, something that alligators tend to dislike.

And this, I guess I’ll also point out, was just about the time that the man, for the second time since walking into the bar on Mother’s Day, was taken off guard.

“If you’ll excuse me for just a moment,” the man says to the woman, “I just need to --”, which was as far as the man got with his sentence when the alligator leaned over on his barstool and chomped off the man’s head with a single bite.  The woman’s hand, I’ve been told, did stop patting the man’s arm as she watched his head disappear in mid-sentence, but her other hand, I’ve also been told, never missed a beat on that Bible, but of course, this may or may not be an exaggeration, considering the natural tendency barroom stories have for changing as the years pass, and this story, if what I’m told is true, happened many, many years ago.

“Ugghh,” the alligator says as he spits the man’s head out onto the floor.  “These aren’t nuts!”

“Not that one, you idiot,” the barkeep says, continuing to stack the ashtrays neatly from the far end of the bar.  “The other one.”

The Pot Roast with Steve Dinner Series has just left Boston. If you’re interested in coming along, now would be the time to come aboard and find a seat.  There should be enough pot roast for everyone.