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February 23, 2009
Groceries and green ash
From Ron Paci
Craftsman at large
We ran out of milk today. That means a grocery store run. I’ve been going to the same store since 1986 and have watched the core crew there put on the years.
Today’s run was going to be minor, just the milk and a few other things, probably $45. I closed our white pine front door, featuring twelve small panes of pebbled glass and three clear, gently behind me and walked down our front staircase of seven steps that I re-built with a man-made no-maintenance material called Fiberon; got into my black 1979 Chevy van to make the one-mile trip at 13 miles-to-the-gallon.
I have never walked to the store. My inseam is 29-inches; it takes me 4 steps to cover 8 feet. At that rate it would take a year and a day to get to the store and back. So I drive.
Our street was improved last year with a new surface, small stretches of sidewalk where there was none, and new curbs. It should be one way. Parking is permitted on both sides, and in several places the street is like a narrow bridge over a country stream. We are all very polite, and often it is one of those “go ahead” “no, you go” “no, really, you go ahead” situations. Before the new paving, dirt and stones at the edge of the pavement hit the sheet metal in the wheel wells like hail on a tin roof, when two cars squeezed past each other.
The improvements did not widen the street, but did create official pausing areas. And, it’s very smooth; the sound of the stones is no more.
Left out my driveway, 50 yards, stop at the intersection, and then fresh black surface to the next stop sign just about a quarter mile away. I have driven in anger down my street in my Alfa Romeo; and sped to the end in second gear in an act of defiance on the big Ducati, setting off car alarms with the vibration of its booming exhaust; but not lately.
A block from the end of the street is a towering green ash. The whole of our neighborhood is on a plateau just over 400 feet above the Potomac River. It used to be a dense eastern hardwood forest of massive oaks, ash, walnut, cedar, and beech. Now, of course, it is covered with towering formations of concrete and glass.
The green ash is on a list of ‘notable trees of Arlington’. There are about thirty species of ash. Baseball bats, handles of hammers and shovels are the things that come to most peoples’ minds when ash is mentioned. White ash is the donor for those products.
The green is often sold as white, but there are subtle differences in the grain structure.
Guitar makers like the green, which is slightly paler than the more common white ash and seems to make a better tone.
Trees, as all things in nature, don’t always act the way they are supposed to. The green ash is not known for being particularly large or tall. But the Fraxinus pennsylvanica on my street is a monster.
The European botanists who went about naming the trees they discovered here in the new world named the ash from the Latin word fractus because of the way it breaks or fractures along its annual rings.
When you grip a Louisville slugger baseball bat, the classics made of white ash, and hold it out across the plate, you are to align its logo up or down relative to the ground. It will then hit the ball with the edge of the grain instead of flat on.
If you hit the ball, a wooden bat held correctly will make a beautiful and satisfying sound.
If you hit the ball with the logo side the bat may fracture. Either way, at least it won't make the hit with a loud aluminum pole 'ping.'
The early botanists also used the place of discovery in the naming of some plants.
From the ground up to four feet the trunk of this wooden neighbor is about 30-inches thick. At that point it splits into two long trunks about 24-inches in diameter.
Shooting skyward, the tops blossom into one great round fourth-of-July crown.
I try to stop and gaze at it every season, and pat it on its trunk. It’s the first to announce the arrival of fall when its leaves turn yellow.
I don’t know how old it is.
Scientists estimate the average life span of a green ash is one to two hundred years, but since mine has broken out of the mold with its height, I like to think it is ageless as well, the shade from its young crown protecting an Algonquian brave sitting, back against the trunk, on a hot August day, whittling a bow of green ash, and contemplating the death of the three sisters of his tribe.
The three sisters, Native American legend has it, drowned in the Potomac on a mission of revenge against the Susquehannocks the annoying tribe who controlled the northern side of the river and had killed the boys who were to be the girl's husbands. Captain John Smith wrote the Susquehannocks he met in the first years of the 1600’s ‘seemed as giants…..great and well proportioned,” and warlike.
The river separated the two tribes.
A storm hit as the three young girls crossed from the south on a raft. Unable to fight the raging river, they were swept downstream. And, being daughters of an Algonquian shaman, when they saw their fate was sealed, they uttered a curse: if they couldn’t cross the river here, then no one else would, ever.
They drowned, the storm passed, and three boulders appeared above the surface where before there had been none. The boulders have been known ever since as Three Sisters Island. All future attempts to build a bridge over the islands have been foiled. The river here is forty feet deep. The last failed attempt at a bridge here was in 1972.
I also think about the fear of nature when I pass this green ash.
Suburban types are fearful of tall trees. The big guys get cut down on the pretense of too many leaves to clean up, or it’s going to fall on me (the sky is falling, the sky is falling); though sometimes it is going to fall on you.
Or, they attract too many insects, like the box elder next to our house that attracts hoards of box elder bugs. They walk about safely inside our residence.
Or, the roots are going to damage our precious property. Nearby, an original oak, with a 40-inch trunk was criminally sacrificed for the construction of a tasteless McMansion, the builder, hopefully, going totally bankrupt. I counted 158 rings on its butchered stump.
When they get around to cutting down the green ash that will be my signal to leave.
At the end of my street, the route to the grocery store requires a left hand turn across a four-lane suburban street; a maneuver of increasing difficulty caused by increasing traffic here in Arlington where there are more than 8,000 people per-square-mile.
Feeding into the lane I have to cross is a pair of two-lane streets controlled by dueling traffic signals. At rush hour even I can’t get across unless I pull my death-defying trick of pitching one of my irreplaceable machines into an iffy gap in the flow and forcing more reasonable and level-headed drivers to stop and let me through; once I have them stopped, I crawl into the next lane and let them pass by, rolling their eyes and honking their horns. I try to wait for drivers with a lot to lose. Like a Mercedes driver. No one has actually gotten out of their car and come at me. Though, it could happen.
I only do that when I’m in the proper frame of mind. Otherwise, I use alternate routes.
Today, that intersection provided little resistance. I turned left, and continued two blocks to another traffic signal. Straight ahead is the unmarked office building containing DARPA, The Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration.
They invented the internet, regardless of what Al Gore claims.
The building is guarded 24-hours a day by one manned county patrol car, one manned unmarked car, and a guard on the street with a sidearm.
And, in the lobby, a corporal with a flame-thrower in case Anthony Quinn, dressed as a Howeitat Bedouin, rides his camel off the screen of Lawrence of Arabia and into the lobby to inflict punishment onto the infidels.
But I’m not going past DARPA, I’m turning right here at this light where the FDIC building dominates the landscape. My buddy Jonas works here. Jonas got a junk mailing once addressed to Joe Nas.
Another block and right turn into the grocery store parking lot designed for the maximum number of cars and the minimum amount of space for getting into and out of the parking slots.
A traffic-clogged highway imposes a restriction on your speed, this tight parking lot imposes a degree of extra caution on all who enter. I have never seen an accident in the lot. Everybody tiptoes.
The grocery store chain is owned by a Dutch company, a fact that I considered curious and unusual, until recently when it occurred to me that maybe the Dutch are plotting to expand their empire once again like they did in the 1600’s when the Dutch East India Company was chartered to buy up the American coast.
Dutch ship, National Gallery, clandestine phone shot
They just remodeled this store, which sits on land owned by the FDIC, i.e. The United States Government. There is a conflict there somewhere with the Dutch owning a franchise on U.S. government property, but I don’t know what it is.
Another thing I don’t know is where any thing is inside. They relocated almost everything. Being a closet codger, I’m careful not to complain. Same thinking when I keep my mouth shut when the conversation turns to television programs like Howdy Doody, The Lone Ranger, The Cisco Kid, and Sea Hunt.
‘Nope, never heard of Buffalo Bob Smith, Clayton Moore, Duncan Renaldo, or Lloyd Bridges. Don’t know what you’re talking about. Before my time.”
I have watched the years accumulate on several people here over the past quarter century of visiting this store, yet they seem to be fresh out of high school, self-absorbed, self-conscious, eager to do right; salt of the earth, hard-working folks. I’m afraid to ask them where they’re from for fear they will say the small town where I grew up 200 miles to the north.
'The riverboat gambler,' just under six-feet, stocky build, in his fifties, with a two-inch band of hair right around the middle of his orb, finishing in a three-inch long braided pony tail in the back, about as big as four shoe laces woven together. His impish character shows through, despite his efforts.
At Christmas he wears a Santa hat, at Halloween a mask. He advertises his family with photos on his cash register. Parked next to it is a Christian icon. Outwardly, he is always nice, polite, and always has a good word, anxious to engage the endless stream with some small superficial human contact. But, to me, he projects “Si’down gents, what’ll it be? Five-card stud?”
'The merry prom queen' was probably a beauty on her high school class picture, probably the same year as mine. Now in her declining years, she works the register or does chores around the store with a smile on the outside. But, her eyes say, “I’m so weary.” She too is eager to engage any who would say a word. She must have back pain, because often I see her walking around dramatically with her hand on the back of her waist, and eyes that challenge and invite any and all to ask “How you doin’ today?” She projects a would-be friend-in-pain to all.
'The comb-over guy' is bald on top, but he has let the hair above his left ear grow to about ten inches long, which he then carries up and over. He seems to be very self-conscious. He's tall, and lanky; in his fifties; his arms seem extra long, and an uncooperative shirttail often troubles him. He often seems to be looking into the distance for something, perhaps approval; he too is dutiful, eager to help.
'The tired old gal' is probably the oldest of the bunch; always forlorn, the weight of the world on her hunched back. Her hair has been gray for ages and it’s probably only the love of her family that gets her out of bed. I see her in the morning sometimes proudly pushing a trolley of cartons down the aisles saying with her stride “You can’t get rid of me yet. Look at me push this cart.” Though when I see her doing things like that I worry that she is going to collapse into a worrisome heap. I resist my urge to say 'Here, let me drive that thing for you."
They all seem to have a strength of character, that I lack, which allows them to cheerfully face the endless parade day after day. Though, I have noticed, they are more chipper early in the morning than later in the day.
I’m supposed to wear a hat to protect my pate from the sun. I do that. Today I wore my black L.L. Bean pull-over fleece with the collar turned up, and my Canyonlands hat purchased for me by my loving wife. In the store I always try to be invisible; a pair of eyes searching for English muffins.
That’s a trick I practice with only partial success. I passed a pretty mother and her thirtyish daughter near the lettuce. The mother, gray hair and fair of face, smiled at me, as I was slow to look away. The younger fair of face saw only lettuce.
The Dutchmen introduced four self-scanning checkout stations, which I welcomed with open arms and used today. The scanners will allow me to avoid any human contact whatsoever, as I do at Home Depot. But the design isn’t quite right. The platform for scanned items is the same size as the Depot, but seems too small for the tumbling collection of groceries. It’s always something. I will adjust. These first generation checkout machines are no threat, yet, to my characters.
$46.37 into the back of the van, left out of the parking lot, past the FDIC, to the light.
Decision time.
Straight? Five blocks through the neighborhood, turn right, then after four blocks, left.
Left? Two blocks, turn right, then straight five blocks to the starting point.
Or, right? 49 hours rolling time to the Pacific Ocean.
Right, or left?
I got the milk.
Posted by ronpaci at February 23, 2009 10:07 PM