A spate of lovely, warm fall days this year made it very easy for me to put off raking the leaves and cleaning out the flowerbeds. Add my three kids and two jobs to my yard work schedule and you can see how I might just let it all remain and hope for an early snowfall to cover my unkempt landscape. On a recent family stroll to the Walgreen's, inspired by the unseasonable temperature and sunshine, I ran into a local man, Arlen (*not his real name), who is known to do garden work. I asked what his fee would be for a few hours of help, it was reasonable, and he gave me his phone number.
This would be an unbelievable splurge for me, to hire help, any help, when I could try to park my baby in a swing, cook dinner, grocery shop, run loads of laundry, finish the third grader's presentation project with her, and do the yard simultaneously. The hospitals, doctors and dentists on the list of places and people that I owe money to would not be happy to hear that I took $60 earmarked for their payments and spent it on something as luxurious as a person with a rake!
I called Arlen and he promised to come by and have a look, which he did, when I wasn't home. My husband was home, and my next-door neighbor, and they both told me that Arlen "looked a little strange". He was filthy, but that was probably from working all day. I called him to confirm our plans and was surprised to hear his slurred speech. "Oh no," I thought, "What have I done? This could be very bad....."
Seven years ago, when I had only one infant daughter and one job, I was busy working on my graduate degree. It was a long road from no music degree to advanced degree in music and I spent one entire year taking courses on art songs. The same night and time, three semesters in a row, I studied Italian, English, French, German, Russian, American and everyone else in song classes where I had to both perform and give lectures. My baby was often in class, and sometimes left with a friend, every Tuesday for a year. Tuesday was a night that my husband was out teaching classes, and that meant that no one was at home cooking the evening meal.
Arlen was a waiter at the local Greek-American-owned coffee shop. It became my weekly habit to stop there for one of the Tuesday night specials, German pot roast, broiled salmon, lasagna or Salisbury steak. Arlen was always there, and he was the best waiter, always smiling beneath his trim, sandy blonde mustache. With a flair for presentation, he turned every meal into a special event. He often told you what NOT to order that day, and he would let you know which other local diners had superior hollandaise sauce. “The sauce here is not worth the calories, dear”, he said. Since I arrived so late in the evening, the restaurant would frequently run out of portions of the specials. Arlen would take my phone calls made en route to home and have the cooks hold a serving for me, brought to my table with iced-tea as soon as I arrived.
He would chat with me, sitting in the booth, telling me about how he also worked as a gardener. He maintained the eatery’s colorful display of annuals, petunias, marigolds, verbena, geraniums, mums plus a few roses and he had branched out into doing yard work for some of the seniors who frequented the establishment. As his shift ended, he packed my leftovers into doggie-bags that included extra soup, rolls, muffins and cups of ice cream so that I could have dessert with my husband and another entire meal the next day. When I protested that he was giving me too much, over what I had paid for, he would say “Take it, take it, the boss knows it’s for you and it’s the end of the day.”
It is hard to believe now, in this current economic climate that has caused many a budget to take a beating, that I ever had the money to dine out weekly. During the year of the art song, with a baby in my arms, on my lap, in and out of the car at the university or at the friend’s house, dinner at the diner was a necessity. When the courses were completed and I moved on to the next step in the program, I was no longer a Tuesday night regular, but my husband and I would still see Arlen when we stopped in for the occasional omelet.
At some point, Arlen was no longer a waiter. I saw him around town, planting or tending to flower gardens. Our paths were crossing again now and he arrived the next morning with a beaming smile. I showed him the tools, lawnmower and yard waste bags. He went right to work attacking some very overgrown hedges with a trimmer. Things were starting to look a lot better. “I do good work!” was his mantra. He knew what he was doing, telling me all about the different plants and how to best winterize them. He lectured me on the benefits of adding sulfur to change the Ph of the soil around the evergreens. “They will be a lot more green, you need some sulfur, it’s cheap, I’ll bring ya some.” He showed me how we should bury some of the flowers with a little dirt and just cut the dead parts off of the others to get more blooms next year, “Do not let the old peony leaves stay, they get mildew and they won’t bloom.” This wasn’t so bad.
Except for the very large can of spiked "energy" beverage that Arlen was drinking from, placed discreetly behind a flowerpot. A few hours later, he was starting to list from side to side, but still working away as older pop songs played from his portable radio. I had to go to my office, leaving my husband with some cash and orders not to pay Arlen in advance. He was gone for the day, pedaled away on his bicycle, before the kids came home from school.
The next day, Saturday, he arrived, closer to being sober than when he departed, but clearly on his way towards becoming sloshed, asking me if I could pay him cash before I had to leave for an event. “See, how great this is, I do good work!” “Yes,” I told him, “you are doing a fine job, and being so helpful. I don’t have cash right now, I have to go to the bank and get some.” That was OK with him, and he went on to tell me how grateful he was to be working for a few hours, that he loves being a gardener, “NOT a LANDSCAPER, no way, my sister is a landscape designer, she won lots of awards, before her son died three years ago. Now, she does nothin’. But I love to garden!” And off he went; rake in hand, to clear the debris from beneath an evergreen tree “You need SULFUR under here!”
Arlen got rained out that day, but he called to say that he would come over the next morning and finish the job. Sunday morning came and so did Arlen, cigarette dangling from his lips, pruners in hand. Grateful that my neighbors and their kids were gone for the weekend, keeping my alcoholic gardener out of their view, I was dashing to church. Once again, Arlen made the offer of taking his payment now rather than later, but I told him I would return with the money. “Oh, I know, you know how I am and I shouldn’t bother you, I do good work, thanks so much for the job.” “I’m worried about you, Arlen,” I said, “but I have to leave right now.” “I know, I’m sick, it’s bad, but I do good work, just look!”
When I returned after church to check on Arlen, with my hungry kids in the car, I brought him his payment. He had done a fantastic job of clearing several-years worth of day lily foliage, mulched up all the leaves in the backyard, and completely cleared piles of leaves and weeds that grew in the cracks of the cement by the garage. Things had not looked this good since I had personally dug up the old flower beds, and removed overgrown shrubbery, weeds and grass, on my hands and knees with a sod cutter and a shovel three years ago. Shasta daisies, bee balm, asters, purple cone flowers, lavender, yarrow, coreopsis, sweet William, peonies, hydrangeas and black-eyed Susan’s, my “new” flowers had been properly put away for the winter for the first time ever. This was not so bad.
Except that there was an empty bottle of vodka at my feet. Arlen was much worse off at noon than he had been at 9:00am.
Seeing me, he came over to the fence, “Look, look, it’sshh beautiful, s’ beautiful, you have a beautiful family and a beautiful house. Oh, pleaseshh, let me be your gardener, ha ha ha.” “Thanks, Arlen, I think you’re done and besides, I’m broke.” I pause, thinking of what to say next, “You can’t keep living like this, you know?” Tears now, in Arlen’s eyes, as he looks up and says “You go to church, right? Why did God do this to me? I do good work. Why did God do this to me?” “Well,” I’m thinking, what what WHAT should I do or say to this man who is clearly suffering so much right here in my backyard, “maybe God made you a great gardener, just look at all the work you did here and think about all the stuff you know about plants.” “Oh, I know, it’ssh me, my fault, things have been so hard since 2006, so hard.”
He cries, the strange sobs of a habitually drunk man, he doesn’t want to be this way. He says he’s going to rehab at Alexian Brothers on Wednesday, that “They have the best program”. Which means he’s tried it before. He says the “shakes for the first couple of days are the worst part, after that, it’s not so bad.” He puts his arm around my shoulder and cries. I say, “You have to go to rehab, Arlen, you have to.”
Arlen put the cash in his pocket and went back to filling bags with mulched leaves while I took the kids out to the Omelet house that he recommended. It was great, and less expensive than the diner where he used to work. He was gone when I returned, he had finished everything that he had been hired to do. The yard was immaculate, save for the plastic Skol bottle that I tossed into the recycle bin. Unable to help him, I prayed that Arlen gets where he needs to go. Wednesday seemed like a long way away.
(*Note, Arlen is the surname of Harold Arlen, the composer of the song "If I Only Had a Brain" which is sung by the Scarecrow in "THe Wizard of Oz". The Arlen in my story reminded me of the way that the Scarecrow walked.)
