Friday, March 14, 2008

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Have you known someone that will never be written about in a history book, but made a profound difference in your life, or the lives of others?  A nobody that was a real somebody?  This is the place to tell their story.  Your submission will be reviewed and appear within a day or two.
 

Can you identify the blue flower on this magnet?
Bet Mr. Clark would know.

Mr. Clark

I am a gardener. That's what I do, it's how I define myself and it's because of one man. I hide out as an accountant during the day, but gardening is my life and I have Mr. Clark to thank for it. When I was just a kid, my brother and I would stay up late until our parents went to bed. Once they were solidly asleep, Jim and I would creep out our bedroom window and once free, dash down the street to the dark house on the corner.

 

The house was always dark. Probably because the man who lived there spent every possible moment in his walled garden behind the house. The first time we scaled that wall, my brother and I were amazed. Behind that raggedy stone wall was a wonderland of emerald grass as fine as any carpet, surrounded by towering flowers and fragrant flowering shrubs.

 

We were amazed and had to see more. Slipping down the inside of the wall in the moonlight, we spent hours that first night, exploring every corner of this beautiful place.  We crept down the paths and around corners, beneath shrubs and trees. We sat on every bench in sight and lingered in the three arbors.


 

The scent, the light, the shapes and textures of the plants did something to me that I've never forgotten. I was through college, with my kids almost through grade school with a very settled successful American life when I realized something was missing. I had an urge every spring, a longing, some crazy kind of need.

I found myself reading books about plants, about gardening and within a year I was digging in my own garden, trying to recreate that paradise.  I'll never come close to what the Clarks had, but it doesn't stop me from trying. As I walk my own garden paths at night, I'm back in that childhood garden, enchanted by scent, by texture, by the moonlight.

Mr. Clark wasn't an important man. He seemed ancient to us, and he was retired, quiet. I don't know what he did in his life before, but what he did in his garden affects me to this day. I wish I could thank him.

--Randall R.