Notes From Madoo

ROBERT DASH

Championship season is with us. Orders of the Golden Bat are struck and re-struck for the phenomenal McGwire and Sosa; William (he's just not my Bill) Jefferson Clinton is due any day now to receive the Pinocchean Award of the Black Tongue; while I, I nominate myself to the End End Order of the Snapped Trowel, having come down with Lyme disease: for the fourth time. St. Fiacre, pray for me.

It would seem that I attract diseased ticks the way lint goes for serge, the way rabbits rush to Madoo as if its two acres were the world's largest basket of mesclun. I should feel, I suppose, impressed by such reoccurrences but am not, not at all, remaining in a stew of raging self-pity, the summer and the spring having passed with only "usual" physical woes: splinters impossible to locate and hence extrude, cuts, rips, and tears in plenty (a branch snapped back as I was pruning, giving nosebleed in spate), allergic rashes, exhaustions, pulled muscles, a single wasp sting (a mercy, since I go anaphylactic with two). . . .

If it isn't a new infection, but an uncured old one, I go on drip. Irreverently, I remember a California ad for leak-proof mausoleums ("Ladies, is seepage destroying your loved ones?"). Drip, drip, drip, my very own unrepaired faucet. Will I wake me in the night, unable to sleep?

Gardener's flu.

It is a most perilous calling, gardening. If one were to take even the most basic precautions, the morning would pass before one might ever set forth. Sunblock. Deet. Hat. Tough gloves and they ought to be elbow length if one is going to hare into the roses.

And what to do about allergies? Has one had (and when) a tetanus shot? Are the epinephrine guns conveniently located? Are they still viable? Is potting shed stocked with Band-Aids and Bactine? If you use the blower: ear plugs and glasses. If peat-mossing, a mask. Ditto for bone meal, if the wind is up. Good boots, lest a heavy tool fall. Knee-pads. What a wardrobe.

I am feeling a bit better. Spasms have left. I am able to walk the rose walk without sitting down at the end. But, two hours' work is all I can get out of me the whole day. The rest, I rest, reading the complete works of Gertrude Stein, my syntax imploding, my dreams sprouting most inventive.

Last night, Manhattan had become a tiny village surrounded by farms, a forgotten cousin the keeper of a beautiful, wobbling windmill. She sat, while the sails turned, singing: "Yellow, yellow, form and greeting/Yellow, yellow, edges meeting."

"Doesn't she have a lovely voice?" said someone and then the whole village turned technicolor and all its inhabitants left their houses, doors ajar and wide, and started their annual barbecue. They brought books and recited from them. All at once.

Bulbs are piling up. Weeds, too.

St. Gertrude seems to help:

I am rose
My eyes are blue
I am rose
And who are you?
I am rose
And when I sing
I am rose
Like anything.