A Message to Fellow Plotnikkies About TGP

Ducknik asked this morning "Why do you think Mother Nature made blueberries blue?"

Plotnik answered "...probably so they would go with her tablecloth (green)."

Which makes as much sense as anything. There are also red strawberries and purple boysenberries and green gooseberries, and there are black bumblebees who prefer the golden color of California poppies and yellow honeybees who prefer the purple blossoms of French lavender, so the answer seems to be there is a blossom for everybody's bee, which is exactly what GrandMummy P. always said about youngsters who were perhaps not the pick of anyone's litter: "Every pot has a cover."

Down in Stiletto City, the Little Bear is with Mummy P. for the next two days and things seem to be better. Memory, not so hot, but it wasn't all that sharp before she fell either.

So The Great Plotnik has the opportunity to stand on his deck and survey his minuscule empire of flowers and fruits. He finds himself thinking about his garden in Cat's Whiskers, Pennsylvania, c. 1975, that the neighbors all called a "truck patch," because you could pile all your produce into your truck and take it to the market, or into your kitchen to can.

It was always hot and humid during the summer in Cat's Whiskers. The two years he and Duck lived out there, Plotnik hated the humidity, he couldn't move a muscle, he never saw the point of it. But now he gets it. Moisture makes things green, like Pennsylvania in July. Dryness makes things brown, like California a month from now.

Now, looking back at his young, shaggy self, immobile on the porch swing, being eaten alive by mosquitoes and no-see-ums, he sees little of that. He remembers lazy comfort, snoozing in the grass, a truck patch full of sweet corn (raccoons), red beets (deer) and tomatoes (Japanese beetles), an old farmhouse to rebuild and a brand new world of nature presenting itself to two big city kids.

And then a new baby to amaze him, astonished at the depth of feeling that could overcome him in the middle of a dark, starless winter's night, as the cave instinct drew him close to his child, his wife, his farmhouse, his new life.

But you know how it goes. It got boring. The bees needed new nectar.

The point is, fellow Plotnikkies, that everything is beautiful for awhile and nothing is horrible forever. The way things seem to work is that you've got two choices:

1a) Allow yourself to exult in the glory, realizing you will become
1b) Completely fucked up with the misery.

... or

2) Don't allow yourself to ever get too high or too low.

The latter way makes more sense. But these days Plotnik seems to run on the first course.

So don't worry too much when he sounds down like a rock at the foot of a mountain at the bottom of a deep blue sea (he actually wrote that line in a song once). That's the price he pays for trying to burst from the superstitious, Russian dybbuk who wants to keep him from ever truly enjoying anything (it could end tomorrow, y'know). Let the boy jump out of his seat and clap from time to time, or even rate the current situation NO STARS with a BAUBLE of DESPAIR. Either way, you know he will come back to Earth all too soon.