AUGUST 29, 2021 – Last week my wife accompanied our going-on-six granddaughter (on roller skates), Illiana, down the alley. Soon I heard, “Our shrubs along the alley look terrible.”
I jumped to. Soon I was on our stepladder, reaching to trim this year’s growth off our 12-foot-high shrubs. For an hour I clipped until I’d accumulated a sizable pile of branches. I enlisted Illiana’s help, thinking she could learn the connection between “hard work” and “reward.”
“I’ll give you a penny,” I told her, “for each branch [they were of manageable size] you carry to the other side of the driveway.” She earned 11 cents before moving on to more interesting diversions.
I stayed on task. The more I trimmed, however, the more I recognized that our towering shrubs had become full-fledged trees, with multiple, thick, entangled trunks. To amuse myself I called them “jungle gyms.” They called for more than pruning shears. They shouted, “Chainsaw!” Unfortunately, my chainsaw’s up at the Red Cabin. The closest substitute on hand was a bowsaw.
As I cut, I recalled a conversation earlier in the week with a good friend—our first face-to-face encounter since 2019. A voracious reader and serious thinker, the friend had lots to say about the state of our democracy; that it needed a complete overhaul.
I looked at the “jungle gyms” as metaphor for our political, economic, and socio-cultural systems. Cutting more deeply under the green façades, I thought of my friend’s incisive analysis of our country’s afflictions. Whether in the context of social/economic/political reform or in trimming 40-year-old shrubs, perhaps the reformer, the trimmer needs to rip out what’s deeply ingrained and start afresh.
If I cut the shrubs down to the ground, they’d sprout anew—sparsely at first, but within a few short years, they’d look as fresh and enthusiastic as a high school soccer team . . . or maybe not. Maybe they’d look like the tired remnants of a men’s softball team called the “Beer Bellies”—in which case, the roots themselves would have to be removed, most likely by a guy with a butt-crack in contention with his beer belly and a loud, mean, old chopping machine; the very guy who’d dug out the roots of a boulevard tree in front of our house nearly 40 years ago. It was an ugly, cacophonous operation, and when my wife looked out the window, she got grossed-out by the guy’s over-exposed butt-crack. But when all was said and done, “Stump Removal” (the name of the outfit) got the . . . immediate . . . job done.
Similarly, instead of legislative reform, perhaps we need to uproot our entire governmental structure.
Ultimately, I decided it wasn’t yet time to go whole hog with the shrubs, despite a neighbor’s encouragement when he rolled down his window as he moseyed by and without even looking, said, “Looks much better.” No revolution goes according to plan. For years after our stump removal, we had problems—at ground level—and the guy with the butt-crack was neither bonded nor insured.
(Remember to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.)
© 2021 by Eric Nilsson
