It is necessary to observe, to sit in the back seat once in a while. To let go of the need to be always ahead, building roads, dictating. Let things carry you, don't resist them. It's necessary to flow, to relax, to give yourself to the current and sail off into the unknown.
There has been for a while, this need for time, a time of silence. Tom is working with his hands, modeling, as if with clay. And Little Fart, the cat, tangles himself between my legs and the chair's legs. It's therapeutic.
It should be included in the fee: time for the plants.
Life has to pay with these common, everyday moments, these caricatures of history: I see them there, sitting with their legs crossed, wearing their striped socks, shy, waiting their turn, like well-behaved caricatures of ourselves.
And he keeps going with his plants, and I keep watching.
He waters them with a fertilizer in the water: Osmocote in the jasmine. He mixes everything inside of Homer's All Purpose Bucket, 5 gallons.
Little Fart crosses the patio. He stops to smell Homer. He is not interested. He continues his way to the worktable and lies down on its shade. Little Fart, now, watches too. This setting calms him. The sounds he hears are familiar, everyday sounds: the cars going by, the few birds, parrots in the distance.
Tom's water games: water flooding down from the pots of the high shelves, like a cascade, to the plants of the lower shelves. He speaks.
"Is there a reason for this guy being here?"
"No."
A desert succulent under the shade of the gazebo. Incompressible! Out! To the sun! The other plants have priority, they can stay.
The small, everyday happiness. These little moments of joy.
A dream under the shade of the gazebo:
The fart show, the fart man.
It's been done. Old story.
Really?
A little Chinese man yelling things at the screen?
Yes.
